Peer-to-peer fundraising is a proven tool in helping boost your campaign donations. So whether you're raising money for Zakat, Sadaqah, Iftar meals, Qurbani, or a building fund, you can leverage the power of your supporters to fundraise more effectively while also boosting campaign outreach. Read this blog to find inspiring and successful examples, pro tips and steps, and more!
Peer-to-peer fundraising is a powerful tool to boost your masjid’s or Islamic charity’s fundraising significantly – without a lot of extra work on your end. This type of fundraising empowers your top supporters to fundraise for you and help make more of a difference in your community!
In this article, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know before launching your first peer-to-peer campaign. We’ll include the best ways masjids and Islamic charities can use peer-to-peer, as well as how to best ensure your supporters are successful.
First, let’s look at why you should consider using peer-to-peer in the first place.
Peer-to-peer fundraising allows your top supporters to fundraise on your behalf. It’s a simple, efficient way to boost your mosque fundraising without significantly increasing your fundraising efforts or budget.
This type of fundraising is incredibly valuable for both your organization and your supporters. Through peer-to-peer, your mosque or Islamic charity gets to connect with a whole new audience of people who could become new members and help your mosque grow! Meanwhile, those who fundraise on your behalf get to feel good knowing they’re supporting your important causes.
Plus, fundraising for a mosque is an act of Sadaqah – so their good deeds will be multiplied and returned to them!
Peer-to-peer fundraising usually starts with creating a main campaign online, called a “parent” campaign. Then, you invite people to create their own fundraising pages, called “child” or “peer” campaigns. Any donations received through the peer campaign page automatically flow to the parent campaign account. But having the right peer-to-peer tool is key to making this process easy!
With Donorbox Peer-to-Peer, you can turn any campaign into a peer-to-peer parent campaign. Your mosque can choose to either invite fundraisers directly from the tool or allow anyone to fundraise on your behalf with the button “I want to fundraise for this” added to the campaign page. Those who fundraise for you can fully customize their peer campaign pages, meaning they can share why they’re fundraising for your masjid.
International Aid Charity used Donorbox Peer-to-Peer to raise close to $180,000 in donations with peer-to-peer fundraising for direct aid to those affected by the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. All donations to their campaign were Zakat-eligible. They allowed anyone to sign up to fundraise on their behalf, which helped boost their overall fundraising.
Set Up a Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Campaign!
Now that you know why you should use this type of fundraising, you might be wondering how you can use it for your mosque. Here we’ll outline ways to leverage peer-to-peer for your masjid or Islamic organization, including some examples!
Bonus: Check out these 17 creative fundraising ideas for Islamic charities for more inspiration!
When it’s time to fundraise for a new mosque building or launch a capital campaign, let peer-to-peer fundraising increase your fundraising efforts.
Your supporters will love the chance to help you purchase, build, or update your mosque building because it will make them feel like part of this exciting next step.
Pro tip: Include updates throughout the life of your campaign, both to your direct donors and to those fundraising on your behalf. This way, they will get to feel like a part of the process – and they can share the updates with their network to keep the momentum going! Donorbox makes updating your campaign pages easy, and you can include pictures and videos to make them even more impactful.
Peer-to-peer is a powerful tool for emergency aid fundraising. When something bad happens and your masjid wants to raise funds quickly, peer-to-peer can help you both raise more and spread awareness about the situation. Your fundraisers can help by sharing the emergency situation with their personal connections.
Check out how International Aid Charity (IAC) launched another Donorbox peer-to-peer fundraising campaign for their relief work in Turkey. We love how they provided an important update and encouraged people to create their own fundraising page to share with their network.
27 active supporters helped them raise funds and increase the outreach of the campaign. If you want to check the peer campaigns, simply open the parent campaign page by clicking the above link and find them listed at the bottom.
Boost Donations with Donorbox Peer-to-Peer!
The holy month is a great time to boost fundraising efforts with peer-to-peer.
During Ramadan, good deeds are multiplied upon the doer as blessings – which means it’s the perfect time to donate to and fundraise on behalf of your mosque!
Plus, peer-to-peer can help your supporters collect Fidyah and Kaffarah during the holy month. These obligatory gifts for people who can’t or don’t fast are due for each day of missed fasting, so peer-to-peer fundraising makes it easy for people to stay on top of these gifts.
Pro tip: Encourage your top supporters to fundraise on your behalf as an act of Sadaqah. If you are fundraising for your Islamic charity with Donorbox, you can easily find your top supporters using Donorbox’s donor management tools. Simply sort your donors by donation amount and frequency to find a list of your most loyal donors. Then, reach out to them to understand their interests and abilities to fundraise on your behalf. Donorbox Peer-to-Peer will help you invite them right from the tool and make fundraising hassle-free!
Asking for donations at the end of the Islamic calendar year, which usually happens in the summer, is a great time to enable peer-to-peer and encourage more donations – especially if someone hasn’t paid their Zakat yet!
You can also run an appeal campaign that targets the end of the year for the Gregorian calendar, which ends on December 31st. This is especially smart if donations to your mosque are tax deductible, so your supporters will give more as a tax incentive before the end of the tax year.
Your next mosque fundraising event will be even more successful with peer-to-peer fundraising enabled. This is a great way to get more donations and more attendance for your event! As you plan your event, have your top supporters fundraise for the event and help spread the word through Donorbox Peer-to-Peer. Our tools make it simple with automated steps and easy-to-use tools.
Pro tip: In addition to leveraging peer-to-peer for your event, use Donorbox Events to sell tickets online and boost your event revenue. This powerful ticketing tool by Donorbox provides unlimited, customized ticket tiers, the ability to ask for donations on top of ticket sales, fully automated receipt and ticket distribution, and other customization options. Learn more here!
Sponsoring Iftar and Suhoor, the two daily Ramadan meals, is a great charitable act that serves those most in need in your community. Using peer-to-peer fundraising boosts these efforts, as your campaign can reach even more people and receive more donations.
Take a look at how UKeff used Donorbox to raise £5,000 in donations (surpassing their initial fundraising goal) to hand out nutritious food boxes for iftar and suhoor for the whole month of Ramadan. Their campaign was Peer-to-Peer enabled with a button at the top to help anyone choose to fundraise for it.
Accept Iftar Meal Donations with Donorbox
When someone at your masjid needs support from their community, why not use peer-to-peer to increase the help you offer them? After all, masjids are about a community coming together to make the world a better place.
Donorbox Peer-to-Peer tools make it easy for each fundraiser to personalize their peer campaign pages, meaning they can make their page as engaging as possible for donors. Your supporters can also customize their pages to add their own stories about why they’d want to help the member and their personal connection with the person. This helps reach more potential donors and create a lasting impact.
Peer-to-peer is also a handy tool for collecting these common donation types. Zakat is the obligatory, annual donation for those whose wealth meets the Nisab, while Sadaqah is a completely voluntary donation or act of charity.
Peer-to-peer helps encourage people to give more of these types of gifts. Think about it: if their peer is asking them to chip in, and they have to pay their Zakat still anyway, this is a great opportunity to give!
We love how Thaakat Foundation boosted donations to their Zakat campaign and raised over $185,000 by activating Donorbox Peer-to-Peer. They included a dropdown selection for Zakat on the donation form so donors could clarify their gift type.
Create a Customized Zakat Campaign Now!
Pro tip: To offer an easy way to collect Zakat and Sadaqah in your mosque or at your events, consider setting up a donation kiosk using the Donorbox Live™ Kiosk app. This app quickly turns your Android or iOS tablet into a giving kiosk and you can pair it with a card reader device to accept in-person, cashless donations. Your donors can dip, tap, or swipe their credit or debit cards or use their digital wallets to make a donation. Read our article on masjid donation kiosks to learn more!
Qurbani is a ritual sacrifice of a livestock animal, which happens during Eid-al-Adha. Muslims are expected to make a donation toward helping families in need receive a share of a sacrificed animal. If your organization accepts Qurbani donations, peer-to-peer fundraising can significantly boost your campaign outreach and help you receive more donations.
Use a powerful tool like Donorbox Peer-to-Peer to invite your ardent supporters to easily fundraise for this cause. Ask them to share their campaign pages with their networks – personally and on social media groups and profiles. Donorbox makes it easy with social media sharing buttons on each page. Remember to start your campaign much in advance to be able to have a bigger impact with your peer-to-peer campaign.
You’ll want a fundraising platform that allows you to create a variety of campaigns – including peer-to-peer. This means all your fundraising will exist in one place, which makes managing your donors and funds much easier.
Donorbox is your one-stop shop for mosque fundraising. Thousands of masjids and Islamic charities trust us to handle their fundraising needs, from a simple online donation form to collecting digital Zakat to peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns, and more.
Donorbox Peer-to-Peer is an easy-to-use tool that you can get started within minutes. Just toggle a switch on an existing campaign (or create a new one and do the same) to create a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign. Then, invite your supporters from the tool and you’re done! With no hassle or extra budget needs, you can boost your campaign donations and outreach. Check out this video to learn more –
Get Started with Donorbox Peer-to-Peer
We have a detailed step-by-step guide to help you get started right away.
Your top supporters are willing to fundraise on your behalf! But the easier you make it for them, the more likely they are to step forward and put that willingness into action.
Making it easy is one of the best practices for making peer-to-peer successful. With Donorbox, supporters automatically receive an email with an invitation to sign up for Donorbox and customize their own fundraising pages with helpful instructions.
What’s even better is that Donorbox automatically creates a basic peer fundraising page the moment you invite someone to fundraise from the tool. While we always suggest that every supporter should customize their fundraising page, if they don’t want to, they’re still good to go with Donorbox Peer-to-Peer.
We have a free course available on Donorbox Academy that will help you empower, mobilize, and educate your peer-to-peer fundraising team.
A fundraising toolkit provides your fundraisers with all the information they need to launch their peer campaign. This includes information about your masjid or organization like mission and location, as well as FAQs about your campaign and tips for customizing their campaign pages.
It should also include social media templates that they can post to share their campaign.
We have tons of resources you can include in your fundraising toolkit, including our free academy course on peer-to-peer fundraising (mentioned above), demo videos, campaign tutorials, articles with tips and ideas, and more to get started.
Our Nonprofit Blog has tons of peer-to-peer resources, and our YouTube channel is full of helpful content like how-to webinars and expert opinions.
Incentives are a great way to encourage your supporters to raise more money for your mosque. Your incentives can be something small, like a t-shirt, or something larger, like the volunteer trip IAC offered for their Donorbox Peer-to-Peer campaign.
Pro tip: Whatever your incentive is, be sure to make the terms very clear so there’s no confusion for your fundraisers.
Listing your top fundraisers is a great way to boost the momentum of your peer-to-peer campaign. It provides immediate gratitude to those working so hard to fundraise for your cause and it serves as an inspiring model for those who haven’t fundraised yet.
Check out how Donorbox Peer-to-Peer highlights your top campaign fundraisers at the bottom of the campaign page to encourage more fundraising. You can also check all your fundraisers from the button “View all fundraisers”. The names are clickable, so anybody can open each peer campaign to see the progress. Plus, the CTA at the bottom “I want to fundraise for this” helps interested visitors take quick action and sign up to fundraise for your organization.
Mosque peer-to-peer fundraising helps masjids and Islamic charities elevate their fundraising for specific campaigns, Zakat collection, Ramadan, and more. The simple acts of enabling peer-to-peer can help you do so much more good in your community – and beyond.
But the most efficient peer-to-peer fundraising for masjids depends on having the right tools. That’s where Donorbox comes in to help!
Donorbox Peer-to-Peer is easy for both you and your supporters. Plus, Donorbox has comprehensive fundraising tools to help you capture more donations both online and in person with attractive, mobile-friendly donation pages, Crowdfunding, Donorbox Events, Donorbox Live™ Kiosk, Text-to-Give, and more!
Get started today and launch your first campaign in minutes – sign up here!
We also have tons of online resources to help your mosque with every step so fundraising is never a struggle. For more tips, check out our Nonprofit Blog. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive a curated list of Donorbox’s best resources in your inbox every month.
Lindsey spent years wearing many hats in the nonprofit world. Whether she was helping arts nonprofits with their messaging and content, planning a fundraising gala, writing an NEA grant proposal, or running a membership program with over 400 members, she learned how to navigate – and appreciate! – the fast-paced world of fundraising. Now, she loves sharing those hard-earned lessons with the Donorbox community.
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Lindsey Baker Bower