Don’t Leave Money on the Table with Your Peer-to-Peer Fundraising

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Running peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns and events can take a lot of work. It’s important to get as much revenue as you can from them to justify the effort.

With this in mind, here are five simple yet effective things you can begin doing right away to make sure your peer-to-peer campaigns and events don’t leave money on the table:

1. Ask Donors to Cover Transaction Fees

When someone makes a donation to your nonprofit through your peer-to-peer participants’ pages (or your other donation forms for that matter), your payment processor typically charges a transaction fee. This results in each donation effectively being reduced by a percentage (often around 3%).

Capture those potentially lost dollars by providing an option on your online donation form for donors to cover the cost of transaction fees. This one little tweak to the donation page can make a relatively big difference in your overall campaign results.

For example, Cathexis Partners helped a nonprofit client with this approach. 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

This is a tactic that encourages donors to remain donors and give more over time. Research suggests that recurring donors who give on a monthly basis donate 440% more to charity over their lifetime than one-time donors. So, when donors make an online donation to your organization, give them the option to make it a recurring (or sustaining) gift with the convenience of monthly payments charged automatically to their credit card.

Take a look at this recurring gift ask.

3. Review Recurring Gift Credit Card Expirations

Once donors sign up as sustaining donors, they sometimes forget to send you an update when their credit cards are expiring. The result: declined transactions, leaving it up to you to follow up with donors to update their information, and possibly missing out on months of sustaining gift donations in the process.

Here are some ways to review sustaining gift credit card expirations so you don’t miss out on those donations:

  • Set up an automated monthly recurring email campaign to send sustaining donors a reminder that their credit cards will expire soon. Send donors the first email as many as 60 to 90 days before their credit cards are set to expire to give them plenty of time to update their credit card information.
  • Set up a portal so that donors can log in and view/update their sustaining gift information and details.
  • Use a credit card updating service that automatically updates 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 can help your peer-to-peer fundraising participants maximize their fundraising and their impact. This, in turn, means more dollars for your mission.

Embed a matching gift tool on your peer-to-peer donation forms. These types of tools can automate the entire matching gift process on your organization’s behalf, making 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 great 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. And consider getting expert help in setting up and optimizing your Google Ad Grants.

Many tools available on the market today will support the techniques in this article. So, make sure you aren’t letting dollars slip away.

If you have questions or would like help setting up these approaches for your organization, contact Cathexis Partners.

This post was contributed by Mark Becker. Mark founded Cathexis Partners in 2008, providing technical and consultative services to nonprofits of all sizes and types. He previously served as director of IT consulting at a fundraising event production company focused on nonprofits. For more than 20 years, Mark has supported hundreds of nonprofit online fundraising efforts.

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