The Ultimate Guide to Peer-to-Peer Fundraising for Churches
Wondering how to leverage peer-to-peer fundraising for your church? This guide has you covered!
Updated
Wondering how to leverage peer-to-peer fundraising for your church? This guide has you covered!
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Peer-to-peer fundraising for churches enables you to encourage church members to raise funds for you and reach more people in the community. The right tool should help accelerate your fundraising efforts and offer fundraisers a hassle-free experience while getting set up with their fundraising campaign pages.
In this article, I’ll walk you through everything you need to know about church peer-to-peer fundraising, including how to use it, tips to help fundraisers, and how to get started with Donorbox Peer-to-Peer.
Peer-to-peer fundraising allows your top church supporters to fundraise on your behalf and elevate your church fundraising without increasing your effort or fundraising budget.
You get to connect with new donors who could turn into new church members – and the fundraiser gets to feel like they’re supporting your important mission.
Typically, peer-to-peer fundraising starts with creating a main campaign online, called a “parent” campaign. Then, you invite people to create their own fundraising pages, called “child” campaigns. Any donations received on the child campaign page will flow directly to the parent campaign account.
Donorbox Peer-to-Peer allows you to easily turn any fundraising campaign into a peer-to-peer parent campaign. Your church can invite members to fundraise right from the tool. Peer fundraising pages are created automatically, but invitees can customize it further with their inspiring stories before starting to fundraise for you. You can also include a button on your parent campaign page that allows people to opt to fundraise for your church.
See how Christ Life Church utilizes this option and allows people to fundraise for the church.
Get Started with Donorbox Peer-to-Peer
Amplify the success of your next church fundraising event through peer-to-peer fundraising to attract more donations and attendees.
Have church members raise money for you with Donorbox Peer-to-Peer fundraising pages. Donorbox automates most of the steps to streamline the process for you and your fundraisers.
In addition to peer-to-peer fundraising, leverage a robust event ticketing system like Donorbox Events to increase ticket sales online with customizable event pages and ticketing forms. Learn more here.
Pro tip: Provide fundraisers with additional resources like the campaign story, visuals, campaign updates, and templates for social media posts or emails to make fundraising more effective.
Chances are, if you want to start a church, you already have some interested members in your community. Launching your church is a great opportunity for peer-to-peer fundraising.
See how The Living Room activated peer-to-peer fundraising for their Donorbox crowdfunding campaign to raise over $18,000 toward administrative and staffing costs for their new church. They used a fundraising thermometer to show how much they’ve raised with just 48 donations.
Activate Peer-to-Peer for Your Church Campaigns
Church capital campaigns typically involve fundraising for a new church building, whether you’re just starting your church or updating existing grounds.
Give your supporters the opportunity to fundraise for your church and elevate your fundraising efforts by exposing your campaign to an entirely new network.
The end of the year is a fantastic time to use peer-to-peer fundraising for a few reasons:
If you need help preparing for the end of the year, check out this blog post. Share this with your fundraisers to help them create the perfect appeal to their networks while fundraising for your church.
This video gives you a glimpse into how Donorbox Peer-to-Peer can be the giving season game changer for your church:
Sign Up for Donorbox Peer-to-Peer
Peer-to-peer fundraising and mission trips go hand in hand, since each participant should plan on fundraising to defray as many of their own expenses as possible.
Create a main parent campaign easily with Donorbox Peer-to-Peer. Then, invite all participants of your mission trip to fundraise with their name and email. Your invitees receive the emails and can easily sign up or log in to customize their fundraising pages.
Peer-to-peer helps you raise funds for members of your church who are in need. Ask the rest of your members to fundraise to help the member in need.
Your members can get started easily with a highly effective tool like Donorbox Peer-to-Peer.
Peer-to-peer works well for raising funds to support your church’s camp because it benefits the children who attend it.
Ask parents of campers to create their own peer-to-peer campaigns to help support the costs of camp. This is a compelling ask for them because their friends and families get to directly support something that benefits the kids and your church.
Church peer-to-peer fundraising can also help you do more for your community. Raising funds for grants to support various projects makes your mission go even further – and uplifts others along the way.
Look for an all-in-one fundraising platform that allows you to create a variety of campaigns – including peer-to-peer. This ensures all fundraising will exist in one place, streamlining the process of managing your donors and funds.
Here are some of the benefits of using Donorbox Peer-to-Peer for your church:
Take a look at what Revelation Wellness, a faith-based fitness instructor training organization, has to say about Donorbox Peer-to-Peer.
People are more willing to fundraise for you if it’s as easy as possible. Ensure your chosen peer-to-peer tool offers user-friendly “child” campaigns that are easy to set up and provides fundraisers with instructions for setting up their campaign pages.
For example, Donorbox Peer-to-Peer automatically creates a basic peer fundraising page with a donation form once you invite a supporter to raise funds for you. Supporters can utilize it as is or customize it further with content and images you share with them. They’ll also receive instructions on how to get started sent via email.
A fundraising toolkit includes everything someone might need to fundraise on your behalf, such as:
Fundraising toolkits empower supporters to take control of their fundraising efforts and explain the value of your campaign to their network.
Donorbox Academy has a free course available for your church. Use this for useful videos, campaign tutorials, and bonus resources to get your fundraisers started. Our Nonprofit Blog also includes a plethora of peer-to-peer fundraising resources to help you with ideas, best practices, tools, and more.
Include YouTube videos on peer-to-peer fundraising in your fundraising toolkit to help fundraisers learn quickly. For example, this video is a great starting point for you and your church members:
Pro tip: Include your church history for new and long-time church members as a reminder of where your church came from and how you’ve grown. This is helpful material they can use during their church peer-to-peer campaign.
Maximize engagement and encourage supporters to more enthusiastically fundraise by providing an incentive. Create an incentive for things, like the most individual donations received or the highest amount raised.
For example, your incentive can be something large, like a barbecue kit or a family getaway, or something as small as a t-shirt and recognition during your church service or event.
Check out the quick step-by-step guide below or view our dedicated guide for more detailed information.
If you’re new to Donorbox, sign up here. Creating an account only takes a few minutes. If you’re an existing Donorbox user, please log in and continue.
Once you’re logged in, go to “Campaigns” on your Donorbox account and click “New Campaign.”
Choose how you’d want to create a campaign on the next page – through a donation form (a page gets created automatically that you can customize later on) or a fundraising page (including a donation form).
Once created, customize your campaign to match your church’s branding and needs. Follow this guide to learn the steps to customize your donation form and page.
From your campaign editor, enable peer-to-peer by toggling the switch. Then, click “Save Changes” on the top right-hand corner of the screen.
Customize your peer-to-peer functionality under “P2P settings.” Choose whether you’d like to allow anyone to fundraise for you (via the button on your campaign page), or only those you invite.
Navigate to the “Invite P2P Fundraisers” section and click on “Send Invite.” A pop-up form will appear, from which you can enter a fundraiser’s name and email address.
Fill out the form to send invites to your church members and volunteers.
This creates an initial fundraising page for invitees to help them get started more easily.
Your supporters will receive an email that looks like this:
Once they sign up or log in, they’ll be taken to the list of campaigns for which they have been invited to fundraise. They can preview the basic fundraising page created for them and proceed to customize it by clicking the “Edit” button.
Pro tip: Encourage them to add pictures, stories, and other compelling content that tells the story of why they’re fundraising for your church.
Note: For fundraisers who directly opt to fundraise from the button added to your campaign, they will fill out a form with their names and email addresses. Donorbox will send them a similar email invite, as shown above, to sign up and customize their fundraising pages.
That’s it. Your church members and volunteers can now launch their own peer-to-peer campaign pages and start collecting donations.
Peer-to-peer fundraising is one of the most popular options for churches as it helps maximize revenue and takes some of the stress off your church staff and volunteers.
The right tool for church peer-to-peer fundraising will streamline the process for your supporters and take the hassle out of peer-to-peer fundraising for churches.
Explore Donorbox’s powerful fundraising features and find more fundraising insights on our Nonprofit Blog. Subscribe to our monthly newsletter to receive our best resources in your inbox.
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.
Join the fundraising movement! Join the fundraising movement!
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