CrowdRaiser™ is a social fundraising service, so you need to get your network of supporters involved.
Getting started has three basic steps:
- Consider who you should ask to support your organisation.
- Create a toolkit with the information your supporters need.
- Email your supporters! Let them know about the service and how simple it is for them to help you. It’s as simple as our email template below.
Step 1: Who you should ask to support your organisation with a CrowdRaiser
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.
- Donors: They’ve already shown their support for your organisation, and they’re likely up to date with what is happening at your organisation. It can be good to remind donors that they can amplify their financial support by 10 times or more as a CrowdRaiser.
- Local groups: Small businesses or community groups in your area can be approached to put forward a team to conduct a CrowdRaiser. You can think outside the box - local sporting stores might support a fun run or bike ride.
- General public: Whilst they’re the most difficult to recruit as a 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.
But in its simplest form, to get things started for a specific fundraising initiative, create the following content for a CrowdRaiser:
- Text: When a CrowdRaiser 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 where the funds go.
- 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 CrowdRaiser 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.
A full list of what the toolkit can include, for more sophisticated CrowdRaiser campaigns will be released later in 2018.
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.
As you may already know, our organisation uses the GiveNow platform for online donations. Recently they developed a new CrowdRaiser feature that is a really simple, low fee social 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 as a “CrowdRaiser” by clicking on the blue “Create CrowdRaiser” button.
In setting up a CrowdRaiser 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 June, 2018. 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”