The CrowdRaiser feature is a peer-to-peer fundraising tool that can be used to involve dozens or hundreds of your supporters to achieve large fundraising goals.
Getting started for a peer-to-peer campaign has three essential steps:
- Consider who within your organisation's network you should ask to support your campaign.
- Create a toolkit with the information your supporters will need.
- Email your supporters. Let them know how simple it is for them to help you by creating their own fundraising page.
Step 1: Who you should ask to support your CrowdRaiser campaign
There are many people in your network you can ask:
- Volunteers: It’s best to start with your existing volunteer base. They’ve already shown that they’re willing to commit time to your organisation and they’re already passionate about the work you’re doing. By giving what they do have - time - it is probable that they themselves may not be able to be donors to your organisation. But their friends and family might!
- Donors: They’ve already shown their support for your organisation, and they’re likely up to date with what is happening with your programs. It can be good to remind donors that they can amplify their financial support by 10 times or more by creating a CrowdRaiser page.
- Local groups: Small businesses or community groups in your area can be approached to put forward a team to create a CrowdRaiser page. You can think outside the box - local sporting stores might support a fun run or bike ride.
- Staff and board: Critical to the professional operation of your organisation, it is also highly possible that these people will also want to support a fundraising campaign. It gives them a chance to be proud of what they do for work, with their family and friends.
- General public: Whilst the general public are the most difficult to recruit as a supporter to your CrowdRaiser, don’t underestimate your ability to move people into participation. If you have a compelling story, or a particularly popular challenge lined up, you can appeal to the general public through social media or news media.
Step 2: Create a toolkit
Your toolkit to get your supporters started can be simple or quite sophisticated, depending on how you want to manage the fundraising process.
Essential to this toolkit is to give your supporters a specific problem to solve. Tell them what you need, not in terms of budget gap alone, but how you want to operate that solves your organisation's mission.
To get things started for a specific fundraising initiative, create the following content for a CrowdRaiser:
- Text: When a supporter creates a CrowdRaiser page and asks their networks for donations to your organisation, they will be far more effective if they can communicate where the funds are going. Write a simple and short sentence or paragraph that explains how the funds will be used.
- Images: Images are incredibly powerful at communicating with people quickly. A CrowdRaiser page with a strong cover photo, or an email with an image included will send a message before people even have a chance to read anything. Send each new supporter a series of images they can use.
- Video: Videos are brilliant tools to show potential supporters what goes on behind the scenes. We are not suggesting a TV-ready advert, a well put together short amateur video on YouTube still goes a very long way. Include the YouTube link in your email asking for their support.
Step 3: Email your supporters
Once you know who you want to ask and what content you want to give them, email them!
We suggest a basic email to your supporters goes something like this:
“Hi Jane,
We are asking for your support to help us reach our $30,000 fundraising goal to resource our new youth program next year. We know this program will improve school retention rates, which is vital for future opportunities of our young people.
As you may already know, our organisation uses the GiveNow platform for online donations. Their CrowdRaiser feature is a really simple, low fee peer-to-peer fundraising tool. It means that our wonderful supporters such as you, can easily create your own fundraising page for our youth program to help us, in minutes!
So to take advantage of this new tool, the committee has set up a new cause page on GiveNow. See [insert cause URL, for example www.givenow.com.au/youth]. Now we need people such as you to sign up by clicking on the “Fundraise for this cause” button.
In setting up your own page, it will allow you to create a personal page to raise funds for our program. You can add your own photo, reason for supporting us and whatever $ target you think you can achieve before 30 April, 2023. It can be a page you create as gifts-in-lieu for your upcoming birthday or celebration, fun run or just-because. In case it helps, I have attached to this email some images you can use and a recent video of our participants can be found here on www.youtube.com/yourvideo
Once you are all set up, we hope you will send your CrowdRaiser page link far and wide!
We are really excited to think that with your support we might be able to reach our $30,000 goal soon!
Thanks in advance
Cathy”