Are Your Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Campaigns Leaving Money on the Table?

When you’re running peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns, you’re focused on planning, recruiting and coaching participants, and tracking results. But there are a few things you might have overlooked that can boost your funds raised.

Here are five things you can do today to make sure your peer-to-peer events aren’t leaving money on the table.

1. Ask Donors to Cover Transaction Fees

When someone makes a donation to your organization through your peer-to-peer participants’ pages or your other donation forms, you’re typically charged a transaction fee by your payment processor. This effectively reduces each donation by some percentage (often around 3%). But you don’t have to settle for that.

Credit: Cathexis Partners

By providing an option on your online donation form for donors to cover the cost of transaction fees, you can capture those lost dollars.

Here’s an example: Cathexis Partners helped Arizona Humane Society add an option to their Luminate Online Marketing-powered donation form for donors to cover the transaction fee on their donations. The result: In three months, the organization received a total of $2,000 that previously would have been lost to transaction fees.

2. Add a Monthly Giving Pop-Up

When donors make an online donation for your organization, present them with the option to make it a recurring gift with the convenience of monthly payments charged automatically to their credit card. This approach encourages donors to remain donors and give more over time. In fact, research suggests that recurring donors who give on a monthly basis donate 440% more to charity over their lifetime than one-time donors.

Credit: Cathexis Partners

3. Review Sustaining Gift Credit Card Expirations.

Once donors sign up as sustaining donors, they don’t always remember to send you an update when their credit cards are expiring. This leads to declined transactions, and then you’re left to follow up with donors to update their information — possibly missing out on months of sustaining gift donations in the process.

Here are some approaches for proactively reviewing sustaining gift credit card expirations so you don’t miss out on those donations:

• Set up a monthly recurring email campaign to automatically send sustaining donors a reminder that their credit cards will expire soon.
• Remind your sustaining donors via email as soon as 60 to 90 days before their credit cards are set to expire to give them time to update their credit card information.
• Set up a portal so that sustaining donors can log in and view/update their sustaining gift information and details.
• Use a credit card updating service that automatically updates sustaining donors’ credit card renewal dates.

4. Embed a Matching-Gift Tool in Your Donation Form

Adding a corporate matching tool to your peer-to-peer fundraising donation forms helps your peer-to-peer event participants maximize their fundraising and their impact. This, in turn, means more dollars for your mission. Everyone wins.

Companies like Double the Donation and HEPdata make it simple to embed their matching-gift tool on web pages and donation forms. Working with a matching-gift service makes it much easier for your donors to seek matching gifts and for your nonprofit to track expected gift matches.

5. Use Google Ad Grants. 

Google Ad Grants offers eligible nonprofits $10,000 per month of in-kind Google Ads advertising to promote their missions on Google search result pages. This offers a tremendous opportunity for you to promote your nonprofit’s mission, programs and fundraising campaigns.

Read "The Nonprofit’s Introductory Guide to Google Ad Grants" to get started. Also, consider getting expert help in setting up and optimizing your Google Ad Grants. Many online marketing tools will support these tactics.