Source: Blackbaud The Next Generation of American Giving Report, August 2013

Are you leveraging the passion and connections of your supporters to enhance your fundraising efforts?  Your organization can hugely benefit from your sponsors’ ability to share information across multiple lines of communication.

Just imagine: your Facebook post gets shared among not only your followers, but the friends of each of those followers- so the delivery of your message is increased exponentially and with a personal endorsement. Research shows this tends to lead to supporters who stay with you for the long run. And if you handle this well they can help your outcomes and bring on board more long-time supporters.

Peer Power

In other words, Peer to Peer Fundraising (P2P) can “…DRAMATICALLY increase the reach of your cause. If you have 1000 social media followers on Twitter and Facebook and they have 1000 followers each, you could be in front of 1 million people in an hour. That’s pretty amazing and points to the power and promise of peer-to-peer (P2P) fundraising.” According to a blog post by Dale Knoop, CEO of mobile fundraising software innovator RAZ (pronounced “Raise”)Mobile.

Jake Lloyd, Communications Manager at DC SCORES, highlighted the success they had utilizing fundraising over the past two years for the benefit of their annual DC SCORES Cup.  Looking beyond the corporate sponsors, who had previously accounted for the all of the money raised, Jake’s group employed a competition tactic among employees and individual supporters and used crowd-funding software platform from Razoo to manage everything online.  The funds raised by individuals alone were $8,000 in 2012 and  $17,000 in 2013 which equals roughly 15% of the total amount raised.

Stats

Some staggering figures for your consideration:

• 1 in 4 (25%) Friends Asking Friends emails result in a donation
• Average online gift size of $60
• Social media users raise 40% more than non-users
• 70% of Millennials will raise funds for causes they support (via P2P and Crowd-funding)
• Participants who use online tools raise 6x more than non-users (source: Blackbaud)

You can follow Jake Lloyd on Twitter @jakelam2116  or DC SCORES @DCSCORES to see how they use social media.

Do you have a success story to share?  We have an audience full of your peers who would like to hear about it and learn from you. Please email me at [email protected]