How Your Nonprofit Can Make the Most of Peer-to-Peer Fundraising on Facebook
There are many ways to take advantage of the variety of Facebook fundraising tools for nonprofits. The platform offers easy-to-place “Donate” buttons, a “Challenges” feature, and the ability to live-stream fundraising events.
But the most common kind of Facebook fundraiser is the platform's native peer-to-peer capability. So even if your organization doesn't want to oversee Challenges or host events online, you'll want to pay attention to these individual fundraisers.
Peer-to-Peer Fundraising on Facebook
Facebook’s fundraising tools for nonprofits include peer-to-peer (P2P) capability in the form of individual fundraisers. Facebook fundraisers are easy for users to create on their own, and they've become popular across the platform.
In fact, if you've spent any time on Facebook yourself, you're more than likely already familiar with them. These fundraisers are common ways for users to celebrate birthdays and holidays, or to honor loved ones.
Facebook makes the process of starting an individual fundraiser easy. Anyone can make their way to the "Fundraisers" page, click on "Raise Money," and select the nonprofit organization they'd like to support, along with their target fundraising goal.
A dedicated fundraising page is automatically created for the user, who can then share and promote it to their network via their personal profile. The more attention the individual fundraising campaign gets, the more Facebook's algorithm will favor it. This means the campaign will keep appearing in the news feeds of the creator’s friends and family – ideally creating more engagement and garnering even more donations.
Many CRM platforms have integrated P2P fundraising capability over the years. It's become a popular choice for nonprofits because it's an effective way to motivate supporters and grow an organization's base of individual donors.
It can be tempting to take a hands-off approach to these kinds of individual campaigns, but the host organization still has work to do – and this applies to Facebook's fundraising tools, as well.
Promoting P2P Fundraisers On Facebook
Users will be more likely to create Facebook fundraisers in your organization's honor if they know you're excited about them, too!
If they navigate to your organization's Facebook page and see nothing encouraging – or worse, a request that funds not be raised through Facebook's native tools – they might hesitate to try and raise funds for you at all.
Your job is to provide the information potential fundraisers need, as well as the energy and enthusiasm you want them to bring to their individual campaigns.
You can do this by promoting Facebook's P2P feature on your own page, as well as on your website, marketing emails, and other social media profiles. Create a guide that includes your mission and vision, other compelling language, and photos and graphics fundraisers can use. This will also help ensure that any individual campaigns created don't clash with your organization's brand or core values.
Also make sure that the "About" section of your organization's Facebook page is updated and that your cover photo is one you like. These two elements will automatically be pulled from your page into any individual fundraiser that's created. While they can make changes, many users opt to leave them as-is.
Stay on top of any Facebook fundraisers on behalf of your organization. Share your gratitude with the fundraisers themselves and provide any help or encouragement they need along the way.
Keep in mind: you spend a lot of time trying to turn non-development staff, board members, and volunteers into enthusiastic fundraisers for your nonprofit. Facebook has created a means through which those fundraisers can simply fall into your lap...
Make the most of it!
