Contributed Article by Salsa Labs
Peer-to-peer fundraising boasts incredible fundraising and outreach potential for your nonprofit, but it only works if your constituents make it work. The burden of soliciting donations falls to them in the peer-to-peer fundraising model. And while your supporters certainly have passion, they don’t have the tools or knowledge base that experienced fundraisers do.
That’s where you come in! You have to share the knowledge they need to be successful fundraisers if you want your peer-to-peer fundraising campaign to succeed.
Luckily for your organization and your newly appointed fundraisers, one of the best peer-to-peer fundraising tools is also one of the easiest to teach. We’re talking, of course, about social media.
We’ve crafted 3 social media tips for you to share with your constituents before your upcoming peer-to-peer fundraising campaign:
- Choose the right social media platforms.
- Place priority on social media organization.
- Make sure your social media content is shareable.
Ready to set your fundraisers up for success? Let’s get started!
Choose the right social media platforms.
Most of your constituents will be familiar with the most popular social media platforms, and they might have already created profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and maybe even YouTube.
But there’s a whole world of online platforms, more than just those popular three, that you can encourage your donors to use to spread the word about their peer-to-peer fundraising campaign.
Before you instruct your donors to dive headfirst into the social media world and join every platform they can, you’ll want to guide them through a few questions:
- Which platforms are most members of your social circle on?
- Which of your friends and family are you aiming to reach?
- Which platforms are best for telling your story?
- Which platforms do you have the most experience with?
- How many of your resources (time, money, effort) do you plan to spend on social media management?
Keep in mind that there’s a lot that goes into running a social media profile. Your donors will need to set aside a lot of time and energy to post quality content that keeps users engaged. Plus, they’ll need to be great listeners on social media, too, for the best communication possible with their potential donors.
Let’s discuss a few platforms, besides the well-known Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, that your fundraisers might want to use.
Instagram is an incredible platform for sharing photos and videos promoting peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns because it’s so popular. With so many users, Instagram is a great place to host messages that need to reach a wide audience, like appeals for contributing to a fundraising campaign.
Its popularity has drawbacks, though. Because there are so many active users and brands advertising on Instagram, posts can get buried quickly.
In a sea of images, you want to make sure that your fundraisers’ are the ones sticking out. They can’t attract donations from their friends and families if their posts aren’t seen!
To that end, you should supply your fundraisers with:
- Images and videos: Provide materials your fundraisers couldn’t get access to any other way, like behind-the-scenes footage of your upcoming event or a sneak peek of the merchandise included in ticket packages.
- Hashtags: Set a hashtag for your peer-to-peer fundraising campaign and encourage your fundraisers to use it. Also provide them with a list of oher hashtags related to your campaign that will help extend their reach beyond their current followers.
- Posting guidelines: Empower your fundraisers to share their own images but provide them with suggestions for photo editing apps, a recommended posting schedule, and caption-writing tips.
You should recommend Instagram to your young adult fundraisers as it’s popular with the millennial generation. Instagram has become close to standard for many organizations and older adults as well.
While your fundraisers might think of LinkedIn as nothing more than an online version of their resume, it’s more than that!
LinkedIn is a professional-grade Facebook account. It allows fundraising-focused users to establish online connections with peers, volunteers, prospective employees and donors, and with other organizations in their industry.
Encourage your fundraisers to make the most of LinkedIn by:
- Sending connection invitations to acquaintances and strangers, not just friends and business connections.
- Sharing their fundraising page on their feed and linking to it in their header.
- Joining groups and sharing their fundraising page there.
- Sending private messages to connections asking for donations.
- Adding their fundraising experience under the “Volunteer Experience” section on their profile and tagging your organization.
Your fundraisers might be shy about reaching out to their professional connections on LinkedIn. Providing them with templates for posts and messages will help them overcome their reservations! Just remind them that the worse that a contact can say is “not this time.”
The bottom line: Encourage your supporters to share the news of their peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns as widely as they can by creating profiles on the right social media platforms.
Place priority on social media organization.
Now that your fundraisers have decided on which platforms to use, you’ll need to plan out a social media strategy for them that sets them up for success. Persistence is key in an overcrowded social media environment. If your fundraisers want their solicitations to reach their social connections, they need to cut through the noise!
One of the most valuable tools you can provide them is a social media dashboard. With a dashboard, you can save time and energy by scheduling social media posts ahead of time. You could invest in a third-party system such as HootSuite or Tweetdeck, or go with nonprofit software that already offers post scheduling marketing capabilities.
The ability to schedule posts isn’t much good if there isn’t a strategy behind it. Think about the most popular times to post what content on which social media sites. Share this information with your fundraisers in the form of a calendar to make it as easy as possible for them to follow.
You should also create social media templates that your individual fundraisers can use to post and generate more revenue.
Social media dashboards can help your fundraisers stay on top of their strategy, but keep in mind that these tools are meant to make social media easier to tackle. If this tool ends up adding too much stress to their daily workload, it’s probably in your best interest to.
Check out SalsaLabs’ Planning a DIY Peer-to-Peer Campaign for extra tips on managing the social media aspect of a campaign.
The bottom line: To ensure that your supporters’ social media posts can stand out, prepare them with a strategy and the tools they need to say organized.
Make sure your social media content is shareable.
With platforms chosen and a schedule set, it’s time to optimize your fundraisers’ content for maximum shareability.
The point of your social media approach is to expand your donor base through your peer-to-peer fundraisers. The greater they cast their net to family and friends, the more people hear about your nonprofit.
To ensure that these social media posts can spread the word of your nonprofit, make sure the content is shared widely on the different platforms you tackle.
As your fundraisers share your content, your donors will see your posts at the top of their newsfeeds and can then share your updates as well, spreading your nonprofit’s presence to their networks.
This means your posts need to be appealing to your fundraisers, their donors, and also their donors’ wider social networks, which can be a challenge.
And you’ll also want counsel your fundraisers to keep their content interesting and new. Recycling old posts is the easiest way to lose followers and kiss important connections goodbye.
There are a few easy approaches to help your online strategy reach new prospective supporters. Test out a few of these popular kinds of posts on the social media sites your organization is present on:
- Controversial
- Educational
- Entertaining
- Funny
- Interactive
- Timely
- Touching
Whichever do the best are the ones you should then pass off as suggestions to your fundraisers.
Here’s a helpful hint: if your peer-to-peer fundraiser has a theme or is supporting more distinct cause, your fundraisers’ social media posts can be built to reflect that. This will help your organization build a cohesive branding scheme across all your fundraisers and simplify the greater social media editorial calendar.
Take a look at Double the Donation’s Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Guide to learn all you need to know about communication when hosting a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign.
The bottom line: Make sure the social media content your fundraisers post is widely accessible enough for your fundraisers and their social connections to share, leading to an overall increase in your donor pool.
Now that you have our top 3 social media tips for perfecting your peer-to-peer fundraising campaign, there’s nothing holding you back from creating the best fundraiser and raking in the donations.
Keep in mind that sharing these tips with your fundraisers is just one piece of your fundraisers’ online communication strategy. Don’t be afraid to respond to your donors’ comments and thank them for their support to make them feel involved in your communication!
~Dan Quirk, Salsa Labs