Every fundraiser wishes someone would do their job for them, which is why peer-to-peer fundraising has become so wildly popular: why ask people for money when you can get your supporters to ask their friends?
It’s such a simple concept. Alas, as many of us have learned the hard way, choosing the wrong peer-to-peer fundraising platform can turn this great idea into an absolute nightmare.
But how do you know if you’ve chosen the right platform?
We’ve found the top five ways your peer-to-peer fundraising platform directly impacts your fundraising success.
When you look for these 5 crucial features when you’re choosing your peer-to-peer fundraising platform, you’ll be sure to set yourself up to raise more with less wasted effort and less headaches.
You’ll end up with happy fundraisers, strong customer support, great data, and beautiful fundraising pages. Every fundraiser’s dream, right?
5 Reasons Why Your Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Success Hinges On Your Platform:
1) Your Fundraisers Want To Help You. Get Out Of Their Way
“The biggest thing is ease: ease for your fundraisers and ease for their donors. If it’s hard for their donors to make a donation, they’re just going to forget it, leave the page, and move on. CauseVox makes it so simple for donors and for fundraisers. I’ve never had a fundraiser need help setting up a page, it’s that straightforward.”
-Nancy Ramos, Annual Giving Manager, GSNI
Peer-to-peer fundraising relies on the generosity of your supporters: the people who want to fundraise for you. That generosity can disappear quickly when fundraisers have to spend hours trying to understand the platform, calling you with problems, and setting up their page. You want your peer-to-peer fundraising platform to be as simple and easy as possible.
If your fundraisers try to set up a page and find it’s too difficult, they may simply stop trying, meaning you lose out on their networks and support, as well as all of the donors that they could reach. Losing fundraisers and donors makes it that much harder to run a successful campaign.
CauseVox is so easy it only takes 2 minutes (or less, depending on how savvy you are) to set up a peer-to-peer fundraising page on any device. No more frustrated fundraisers calling you to ask how they accidentally created two team pages and not the birthday fundraiser they wanted (we know. We’ve been there).
Not only that, but if you’ve ever found yourself thinking “wow, I wish I could give my fundraisers some tips and tricks to make their lives easier,” CauseVox just introduced a new messaging feature that allows you to communicate directly to individual donors or fundraisers. You can take your fundraisers from “dang that was easy,” to “I’m a fundraising mastermind” with just a couple of clicks.
2) Make Sure You Have The Slickest Donation Process This Side of the Atlantic
You might be thinking to yourself “sure, it’s great for my fundraisers to have a clear and simple process, but isn’t the heart of fundraising the donors?” And that’s where you’d be completely right: if you’re asking people to reach out to friends and family to give, your donation process better be so simple that no one is getting negative feedback at any point in the process.
That’s where the donations page comes in: Hubspot found that when a form went from four fields to three fields conversion rates increased by 50%. Yeah, look at that number again: FIFTY percent.
To increase your donor conversion rate, make your donation form short. Don’t mess up your donation form with unnecessary fields and tons of questions, make it straightforward and to the point.
Not only that, but 65%+ of donors give on mobile. If your platform isn’t mobile-optimized, you’re missing out on most of your donors. But being mobile-friendly goes beyond having a responsive page: to make it easy for your donors to give in one click, you can optimize your platform to accept mobile payment options like Apple Pay or Google Pay.
And if you want to hit every last piece of the perfect donation page trifecta, you’re going to want to have impact-driven donation tiers.
When you connect a donation amount to an actual impact, your donors understand what their money is doing, and they’re more likely to give a larger gift. Using a platform that lets you easily add donation levels helps you to tell a more compelling story to your donors without cluttering up your page.
For example, the IIIC saw a $100 increase in average gift size when they used impact-driven donation tiers.
When your donation form is streamlined and in line with your mission, donors are way more likely to finish the donation process before they even stop to think. They don’t get distracted, open new tabs, and forget to finish that pesky little donation. With increased conversion rates, you can be sure that you’ll raise more with your campaign, no extra effort on your end required.
Need an easy want to implement these best practices? CauseVox donation forms are mobile-optimized, provide mobile giving options, let you customize your donation tiers, and help you convert more donors with a simple form.
3) No One Likes Talking To Robots
“It’s not common to be able to learn a new system without watching six hours of tutorial videos and sending 30 emails to a help-desk [and then waiting 3 days for a response]. But with CauseVox, I was able to feel confident using the system after walking through the set-up steps of my first campaign. And when I did have to send a couple of emails to their help-desk – I received prompt assistance. I can’t say how much this means to a one-person development department.”
-Amanda Mulder, 20 Liters
Picture this: it’s a beautiful morning, the sun is shining, and you realize that there’s been a problem with the personal fundraising page your supporter made yesterday.
You look at the back-end to see what may be wrong, but you’re not sure and call the customer help line. You get a recorded message.
You follow the prompts.
You get another recorded message.
You desperately press the pound key, hoping for a real person.
It’s robots all the way down. You hulk out and ruin your favorite shorts.
No one wants to ruin their day by hulking out over pre-recorded phone messages. You want a platform that has actual people who can provide actual customer services, whether you as a non-profit are calling for help with administration, or you have a donor who needs support.
“I don’t know if we would have been able to be as successful if it wasn’t for the Customer Success team. There aren’t enough words to describe how amazingly supportive they were and continue to be. With such a small fundraising team- we needed all the support we could get. At every juncture of the journey- they were there to provide us with critical feedback on how we were utilizing the platform and to provide us with insight that we may have missed. They were always available to answer any questions that we had and even after the campaign they sent us a card to congratulate us!”
-Floyd Jones, Volo City Kids Foundation
Don’t let the robots take over. If your platform is misbehaving and you can’t reach a human being, you’re losing out on donations and spending hours of your time trying to do IT (and we know that isn’t your job).
Knowing someone has your back allows you to spend your time recruiting and helping your fundraisers succeed, which means your campaign will be more successful.
4) Every Organization Is Different. Their Fundraising Pages Should Be Too.
Your organization is unique.
You’ve spent a lot of time and money building your branding and creating recognized logos, images, and fonts. No one wants to muddy their brand image and confuse their donors by covering a fundraising page in another organization’s logo.
In fact, a study found that 70% of people are more likely to give again if they gave on a branded donation page the first time. Your branding helps bring donors in, entices them to complete a donation, and brings them back in the future. A generic page is confusing and can lead donors to leave if they aren’t sure they’re giving to the right organization.
With CauseVox you’re in control of how your page looks. You can provide content for your fundraisers to use, pick colors and logos, add goal thermometers, customize your URL, and more to make sure that when donors reach the donation page they see your familiar branding. It’s like coming home.
Jake Vermillion, Director of Operations at MPPH, explained, “CauseVox is easy to use, with no IT department needed. One of the most important features for me is that it looks great, and I can go in and customize each and every campaign, creating a great donor experience.”
Check out how different each of these pages looks based on the branding and marketing of the organizations:
CauseVox takes things one step further: even within an organization, the types of peer to peer fundraising can vary drastically.
Your organization might have a walk or run with teams raising money. You might have supporters who raise money for their birthday or another special event. Maybe your board is getting on board (badum tsh) and setting up their own peer-to-peer campaigns. Each of these has its own flavor and needs to look the part.
That’s why CauseVox allows you to customize your campaigns according to your fundraising needs, helping you make pages as different as this:
5) Who Doesn’t Want To Be A Donor Data Know-it-all?
Ok, let’s say you’ve hosted an amazing campaign and you’re ready to add all of that sweet, sweet data to your CRM.
But, you find it’s difficult to pull your data, and even if you do, it can take hours (if not days) to reconcile your data with your database and email newsletter software.
When choosing a peer-to-peer fundraising platform, you want to make sure your platform is helping you save time and effort on administration, especially when it comes to data.
Having easy reporting tools and integrations with your software is the difference between an accounting nightmare, or letting your tools do the work for you.
Your time and effort are important. Don’t waste effort digging through data to do your reconciliations and manage retention.
CauseVox works with the systems you have in place and gives you all of the information you need to support your donors and build an ongoing relationship with them. It updates in real time so that you always know what’s happening. You’re always watching. Ready to make your donors feel special with an extra thank you gift or birthday card.
April Hearne from Amigos de las Américas noted, “This [integration] is great because it not only pushes donation data to Salesforce automatically and reliably, but it also cleans the data as it goes. That means we need to spend less time manually cleaning our data.
Check out a real-life example from AMIGOS to learn how they streamlined all of their data using Zapier and CauseVox. Donation data moves straight from CauseVox into Salesforce and from there into the hands of the donations staff. It’s wildly easy.
Raise More With Less Effort When You Run Your Peer-to-Peer Fundraising On CauseVox
If you want to see all of these features in action, take a look at CauseVox’s peer-to-peer fundraising and get started by setting up your own peer-to-peer fundraising campaign!
CauseVox helps you raise more with less effort, and who doesn’t want that?
Find out how much you can raise, and how much time you can get back with CauseVox.
