Social Giving Success: An Intro to Online Marketing for P2P Fundraisers

June 4th, 2015 by Search Influence Alumni

Which do you trust more: an ad or a friend?

The answer is pretty clear, right? At least that’s what many nonprofits think, and that’s why the face of fundraising has changed significantly over the past decade. Instead of just soliciting direct donations, we’re seeing more and more peer-to-peer, or P2P, fundraising campaigns.

Peer-to-peer fundraising enlists a nonprofit’s supporters to fundraise on their behalf, rather than or in addition to soliciting direct donations.

Having your supporters fundraise for you offers that extra level of trust and intimacy that ads can’t provide. P2P engages supporters so they feel more connected to a cause, resulting in greater long-term support. And with today’s technology, it’s easier than ever to connect with huge networks of people and resources.

So let’s talk about ways to make an online P2P fundraising campaign successful. From search engine optimization and social media to website development, here are some important tips:

Make Donating Easy

First things first: You need a way to collect and differentiate donations. According to Network for Good’s annual Digital Giving Index, 55 percent of donations come through nonprofit, online giving pages, especially branded and personalized ones.

A successful campaign has a user-friendly and effective system for making and processing donations that participants can share through social, mobile, email and every-which-way. This means also investing in either a mobile app or a responsive website. On DonorDrive’s platform, for example, donations have nearly doubled using responsive sites on mobile and tablets.

The options out there are endless. Make sure your fundraisers have a link to share and trust your platform’s security and usability enough to want to share it.

Engage your Followers

More than half of those who engage on social media with a nonprofit take further action like donating or participating, according to Waggener-Edstrom’s Digital Persuasion Report.

Fundraising as a whole is dependent on engaging and recruiting supporters. P2P requires not only engaging current followers to donate, but also inspiring them to fundraise and recruit for you. This means sharable content! Branded images, infographics and participant stories are just a few examples. Followers need to be able to see and share the effects of their donations, along with the whole experience along the way.

Follow Basic SEO Guidelines

SEO principles are universally applicable. Do some extra research on optimizing your website without stipulating that you’re a nonprofit or P2P campaign.

That said, (1) make sure you’ve got relevant and easily accessible content on your website. Search engines are all about good content that naturally bridges the gap between what your organization does and what people are searching for. It’s no longer about stuffing exact-phrase keywords into every page of your site. (2) Submit and maintain consistent information for your organization to location- and industry-specific directories (and calendars if it’s an event). This way, you’re creating more links going to your website as well as solidifying your contact information with Google Maps and other mapping services. And (3) see if you qualify for a Google Ads Grant. Google gives out varying amounts of money each month to use for nonprofit AdWords campaigns, so take advantage of it! An AdWords campaign offers the opportunity to reach those who you might not be reaching with organic rankings alone.

These are just a few tips to get you started. Even if you don’t have the budget to implement an intensive campaign, it’s important to cover your bases and make sure you’re tailoring your website and social media to work with P2P principles. The Internet is already THE social hub; use it to mobilize your followers for a successful campaign!