13 essential peer-to-peer fundraising tips

A robust community of supporters is the most valuable asset that any non-profit organization can have. By freely giving of their time, money, and talents, your donors and volunteers directly contribute to the achievement of your mission. With peer-to-peer fundraising, those community contributions take on a whole new dimension. When your supporters become peer-to-peer fundraisers, their networks become an extension of your own, magnifying your organization’s reach and revenue potential.

In this article, we explore 13 peer-to-peer fundraising tips to help you develop an effective peer-to-peer fundraising program. These tips will help you avoid common pitfalls—participant drop-off, muddled messaging, and data chaos—to position your organization for sustainable, repeatable success with peer-to-peer fundraising.

What is peer-to-peer fundraising?

Peer-to-peer (P2P) fundraising empowers your supporters to raise money on behalf of your organization by reaching out to their own networks. Often tied to events like walks or personal milestones, P2P campaigns turn donors into fundraisers, amplifying your reach and impact.

As more and more donors are looking for active ways to support causes they care about, P2P taps into this shift by turning your community into storytellers and advocates. In 2023 alone, the top 30 P2P programs raised $1.1 billion.

Peer-to-peer fundraising tips for your organization

Here are 13 tips for developing a robust, effective P2P fundraising program at your organization.

1. Learn from the success of past fundraising campaigns

Whether you’ve run P2P campaigns in the past, or you’re just getting started, past campaigns can offer a wealth of insight and information to help guide your efforts. Some of the most successful P2P fundraising campaigns include:

• Movember, which raises funds and awareness about men’s health issues each November. Participants don’t shave their mustaches or beards for the entire month.
• World Vision’s 30 Hour Famine, which turns 30 hours without food into funds for children in poverty.
• Walk a Mile in Her Shoes, during which participants (including both men and women!) put on a pair of high heels and walk a mile. The event raises funds and awareness for gender-based violence.

These campaigns have proven the vast potential of P2P campaigns when you have a compelling story, a relevant activity, and a motivated community of supporters who want to help. Studying their success—or your own past successes and challenges—can offer invaluable insight into building your own P2P campaign.

2. Set impact-driven, shareable goals

A successful P2P campaign starts with a crystal-clear target. While every organization wants to raise as much money as possible, it’s a better practice to define specific goals that tie directly to mission outcomes. Great fundraising goals are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based, with a clear end date. Great P2P fundraising goals are also shareable; your campaign goals should invite others to feel a sense of connection with and ownership over the outcomes.

It’s important for each participant in a P2P campaign to also set individual fundraising goals. These goals, usually dollar-based, add a layer of motivation and challenge to encourage active participation in the campaign.

Your overall goal should be displayed prominently on every asset produced for your campaign, from individual fundraising pages to on-site signage at in-person events. Individual goals should be easily displayed on peer-to-peer participants’ fundraising pages, showing them—and their supporters—their progress.

3. Determine your structure and timeline

P2P fundraising can be as simple as a Facebook fundraiser created to mark someone’s birthday or as complex as a multi-day marathon event. It can be held entirely online or have an in-person element. Overall, the structure and timeline you choose should reflect your goals, your mission, your community, and even the resources you have available to make it happen.

Timing is also important. Aligning with community giving days can help to build momentum and attention, while choosing the right season for an outdoor fundraiser is essential for hosting a must-attend event.

4. Define your audience and your core fundraising champions

It is critical that your P2P fundraising strategy reflects and aligns with your target audience. Using a prospect research tool can help you identify your key audience. From there, you can build a fundraising strategy to match.

Once you have identified your broad target audience, narrow down your list to personally invite a small number of insiders—board members, staff, volunteers, corporate partners—to champion your fundraising efforts. These individuals should be passionate, knowledgeable about your organization, and ready to motivate others to join the cause.

5. Promote your campaign with a cross-channel marketing campaign

Every once in a while, a P2P fundraising campaign goes viral, raising millions of dollars for an organization. In most cases, a strategic, thoughtful plan to promote your initiative is key.

A cross-channel marketing plan helps you meet your target audience where they are—on email, social media, your website, or through community partnerships. Use email to invite and update participants, social media to spotlight fundraisers and countdown milestones toward your fundraising goal, and partnerships with local businesses or influencers to amplify your reach. Consistent, mission-driven messaging across channels ensures that your campaign stays top-of-mind and keeps both fundraisers and donors engaged from start to finish.

6. Equip your volunteers and participants for success

Your volunteers may know and love your mission, but that doesn’t mean they feel confident about sharing it effectively with others. For many people, asking for a donation is an intimidating proposition. Equipping your volunteers and participants for success means ensuring that they have all of the information and tools they need to confidently fundraise on your behalf.

One way to do this is by developing a toolkit that you can distribute to your peer fundraisers. The toolkit should include:

• A setup guide, if the fundraising is online-based
• “About me” bio prompts to help them fill out their profile
• Sample email, social, and SMS scripts
• Images sized and ready for every platform
• An FAQ sheet with talking points and troubleshooting tips
• Scripts to acknowledge gifts as they come in

Generative AI tools for nonprofits can help to create these resources quickly and drastically cut down on the time it takes to do so.

7. Tell compelling stories, and help others to tell their own

Studies have shown that people give to people—and, just as importantly, to stories that make them feel something. P2P fundraising thrives in storytelling, from the story of your mission and the people or places you’re helping to the stories of your fundraisers.

One way to promote those stories effectively is to maintain a bank of personal stories. This bank could be filled with quotes from those impacted by your mission, beneficiary photos, and short “mission moments” that fundraisers can copy-paste or adapt in their own fundraising efforts.

You should also encourage volunteers to share their personal connection to the campaign, with prompts like “I’m raising $500 because…” These personal stories can help them to connect with their own networks, motivating others to support a cause that’s near to their hearts.

8. Keep energy high with encouragement and real-time feedback

Fundraising isn’t easy, and it’s all too common to start out strong and lose momentum—especially if fundraisers can’t see their progress in real time. Leaderboards, milestone badges, and instant text alerts are key to tapping into intrinsic motivation. 

Depending on your campaign, you might celebrate tiered achievements—$250, $500, $1,000—publicly. Other peer-to-peer fundraising tips include planning a mid-campaign “power hour” with a matching sponsor to promote a quick bump in donations or scheduling short “You just hit 50 % of your goal!” text messages for supporters. These small actions can reignite a fundraiser—or the whole campaign—during a slump.

9. Have a detailed fundraising event plan

Planning P2P fundraising events is no small task, but those efforts are worth it. Whether your event is digital or in-person, consider every element, from structure and timelines to parking to volunteer assignments throughout the day. Consider also how you plan to launch the campaign, while building momentum for your fundraising goals from the start.

These event logistics are not just tasks on a checklist. Fundraising data consistently indicates that returning volunteers raise far more money than first-time P2P participants. It is critical to engage your peer volunteers early and often. Make sure they’re well-informed, well-equipped, enjoying themselves, and excited about their role in your mission, ensuring a positive experience overall.

10. Celebrate, thank, and recognize to build long-term relationships

P2P typically generates 2–3× more new donors than other fundraising channels, but retention plummets without a plan. Recent industry averages show only 19.4% of new donors are retained year-over-year. Timely gratitude is the least expensive and most effective retention tool you’ll ever implement. 

Stewardship of peer-to-peer fundraisers should begin at sign-up, thanking volunteers for their time, energy, and dedication. From there, you’ll want to build a system of thank you messages across email, social media, and direct outreach. Your messages should include periodic updates, messages of gratitude, and celebrations throughout the campaign. Top fundraisers should get extra love for their efforts—it’s key not only for relationship-building, but also for building healthy competition amongst participants.

These efforts can’t stop when the campaign does. Your organization’s gratitude should extend to both your volunteers and donors. For peer fundraisers, acknowledge the total number and amount of gifts that they helped to raise—no matter how large or small that total may be. Treat them as partners in your mission, recognizing that their efforts were instrumental in expanding your organization’s reach, revenue, and impact. For individual donors, a warm thank you and an introduction to the organization can help to turn them from one-time donors into long-time supporters.

11. Leverage matching gifts and challenges

Matching gifts and time-based fundraising challenges are powerful motivators in P2P fundraising. They create urgency, excitement, and a sense of shared impact.

Whether it’s a corporate partner pledging to match every dollar raised during a certain hour, or a major donor offering to double contributions once a team hits its goal, these incentives fuel momentum and energize your peer-to-peer fundraisers. Use them strategically throughout the campaign—especially during mid-point lulls or final pushes—to inspire action and boost results.

12. Stay compliant, protect data, and integrate high-tech tools

Data is a critical part of any P2P fundraising campaign, and not just for evaluation purposes. Effective data management is critical for appropriately receipting, recognizing, and stewarding your P2P donors.

If you’re fundraising online—as most P2P campaigns are—choose a mobile-optimized platform that supports digital wallets, recurring gifts, and one-click social sharing. Keep form fields to the essentials, and integrate the platform with your CRM to eliminate duplicate data entry.

Your fundraising platform should be PCI compliant, fully encrypted, and offer GDPR-ready cookie opt-ins, even if you operate only in North America. Publish a concise, campaign-specific privacy statement on every fundraising page, limit staff data-export permissions, and map email preferences carefully: a donor giving through a friend’s page may want different communications than the friend soliciting the gift. Respecting those nuances preserves trust and reduces unsubscribe rates, keeping your donors close.

13. Evaluate, adjust, and plan for the future

Ongoing evaluation should be a cornerstone of every fundraising program, and P2P is no different—although the metrics you monitor throughout the effort may be. Some key data points to watch include:

• Fundraising goal vs. actual dollars raised
• Pages created vs. pages actively raising money
• Average dollar amount raised per page
• Donor acquisition rate
• Page-view-to-donation conversion
• Gifts per day, in numbers and dollars
  

These data points can tell you what’s working and what’s not, helping you to adjust in real time. Plus, if your fundraising efforts begin to plateau, you can quickly adjust. P2P fundraising takes time, and it’s not always linear; if you notice that things begin to drop off, you can come in with a fresh, creative infusion of energy like a live “flash-fundraiser,” new incentives, or even just a fresh storytelling angle.

A thorough evaluation at the end of your P2P fundraising campaign is also critical. Gathering qualitative and quantitative data from both your staff and peer-to-peer fundraisers can help you to better understand what went well and what didn’t, laying the groundwork for an even better event next year.

Implementing a P2P fundraising strategy at your organization

Peer-to-peer fundraising is more than a revenue stream; it’s a powerful community-building tool that transforms casual supporters into active ambassadors for your mission. By using these peer-to-peer fundraising tips, you can ground your P2P goals campaign in impact, equip fundraisers with the right tools, use effective storytelling, and safeguard data. Altogether, these steps will help your organization to unlock exponential philanthropic potential.

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Carolyn Wynnack

Carolyn is a nonprofit-focused writer with more than 10 years of experience in non-profit and higher education event management, program development and management, prospect development, training, and data analysis.