When setting up your next peer-to-peer fundraising campaign, make it easy for your fundraisers and participants to get the word out by creating ready-made content for them to share across the digital channels of their choice. Before the campaign starts, develop an online toolkit where fundraisers can go to download this content from your website to help raise money for your cause. This can be as simple as a PDF document or one sheet with ideas or post content that the users can copy/paste to their channels.
The less work it is for your fundraisers, the more apt they’ll be to put in a few extra minutes to spread the word about your good cause. Need some inspiration? Here’s a list of ideas to include in your P2P fundraising toolkit.
Newsfeed
Encourage your P2P teams and individual fundraisers to take pictures of themselves prepping for the event and engaging with your organization. Provide suggestions for hashtags to use in these newsfeed posts. Get creative – while one hashtag related to your campaign is great when posting on Instagram, the best practice is to have many hashtags (think 15-25 relevant hashtags). Remind your audience that URLs cannot be posted (read: clicked on) via Instagram newsfeeds, so a better option is to put their fundraising landing page as the link in their Instagram bio and reference that in their posts.
Stories
Provide ready-made visuals or a public Canva board where fundraisers can download images or animated content to share on their Instagram Stories about the campaign. Using the ‘search’ feature on Instagram, you can also create a ‘play list’ of suggested music to play as overlays on IG Stories. Keep this list on your digital toolkit and use the same songs in your nonprofit’s stories, too.
Reels
Make a Reels contest by encouraging fundraisers to post weekly reels (videos) about the P2P campaign. Choose winners based on the most creative, most views, best use of P2P hashtag or theme, etc.
Posts
Pre-write content that is easy to copy/paste as personal Facebook updates. Provide sample images or branded imagery that corresponds with each post.
Stories
Outline a few ways that fundraisers can use Facebook stories to gain traction and excitement. Remind them that they can share their Facebook posts as a story to get more eyeballs on their content.
Live video
Like Instagram Reels, give fundraisers ideas on weekly videos they can post or go live with to share updates about the campaign. For instance, if your campaign is 8 weeks long, create a weekly “theme” calendar with video prompts that they can use to post video content to their Facebook account each week.
Tweets
Craft a list of tweets utilizing the campaign hashtag for fundraisers to send out on Twitter. Keep in mind the 280-character count limit and the ability for others to retweet the content (our tip is to create those tweets under 220 characters which leave room for more engagement and retweets)
Direct messages
Create a series of direct messages that users can use to chat directly with key followers via Twitter. Don’t forget to include the link (or a prompt to link) to the fundraising landing page.
Twitter Spaces
Provide instructions on how to create a Twitter Space – a live audio broadcast – to chat with followers about the P2P campaign, your organization and/or the importance of raising money for the cause.
Personal accounts
Similar to the Facebook and Instagram feed posts, create content that individuals can share on their personal LinkedIn accounts. This may not be a viable channel for all fundraisers, but it’s a great option if there are matching donation options. Think of copy that can appeal to other businesses to donate.
Company pages
Similar to personal accounts create content that would be posted on company pages. This may be for companies who are already a part of the campaign, those who volunteer or give back to your cause, or those that just made a donation to this year’s P2P event.
Snapchat
Geofilters
Create a Geofilter for your P2P event and encourage users to apply it as they create snaps, stories and chats during and/or at your P2P event.
Stories
If your nonprofit has a Snapchat account, create weekly stories using a hashtag set for your P2P campaign and encourage fundraisers and teams to share each week. If you are not on Snapchat, add this weekly stories idea to your social media content download sheet to give others who are raising money for your cause the idea to apply the same concept to their personal Snapchat accounts.
Don’t underestimate the power of email
While the focus has been on social media and P2P giving, don’t discount the power of email marketing—donors part of peer giving events may see great success in reaching out to their connections via email. A few easy ways to encourage and make email a part of any P2P campaign include:
- Downloadable logos to be used to customize email communications
- Shareable imagery and visual templates (these can be used on social media sites, too)
- Ready-made templates or ‘letterhead’ via Google Docs or another shared document resource
- Formatted content that includes talking points and prompts that donors can change out to highlight goals or why they are a part of this P2P initiative
For more insights and best practices for P2P giving using digital channels, view our free webinar, Secrets to Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Success.
