Make P2P Fundraising Elementary for Your School Group

Your school group may be small, but it’s capable of big things! The funds you raise provide better outcomes to students and can have far-reaching impacts in the community. If you’re looking to grow fundraising at your school, an excellent tool to take advantage of is peer-to-peer fundraising, also referred to as P2P fundraising. 

What is P2P fundraising?

P2P fundraising is a method that encourages your supporters to fundraise on your behalf. Most often, peer-to-peer fundraising is associated with a specific event. Fundraisers often ask friends and family for donations in order to take part, but many often fundraise just to have a positive impact on a cause they care about.  

But P2P fundraising can be accomplished without hosting a fundraising event, too! Many organizations, including schools, use a peer-to-peer platform to create personal fundraising pages for school staff and board members. This way, leadership can direct donations from friends and family to their specific fundraising forms.   

Now that you’re familiar with what P2P fundraising is, let’s dive in to how school groups like yours can use this fundraising style to raise more funds and help more kids be successful. 

P2P fundraising events for school groups

The best peer-to-peer fundraisers do more than make money, they provide an entertaining experience that keeps supporters coming back for more. We’ve put together some great family friendly P2P fundraising event ideas that are sure to grow fundraising for your school group. 

Trivia Night

Our first event idea is definitely appropriate for school groups. What says “educational” more than a trivia night? Supporters can register a team and compete against other teams to answer trivia questions. To increase chances of fundraising success, offer attractive prizes to the teams that place in the top three. 

This kind of event can be profitable and provide great entertainment value to guests. The best part? You can host a trivia event both in-person or virtually via livestreaming software. 

This event format is inexpensive to host, easily repeatable, and can be incredibly profitable. 

Junior Achievement of Kansas hosted multiple virtual trivia nights to raise funds for their programs during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Readathons

In keeping with more academic peer-to-peer events, your school group could host a readathon. Send a note home to parents encouraging them to sign their kids up for the readathon and find sponsors. For each book each child reads, sponsors donate a set amount to that child’s personal fundraising page. 

Not only does this fundraising event encourage reading, depending on how many sponsors each child recruits, your school group could earn serious funds! It’s important to note that this works best for elementary school children, especially in earlier age groups so they can read multiple short children’s books to maximize fundraising potential. 

For older age groups, convert the readathon goal to be less about books read, but pages read with donations for every hundred pages for teens.

5K/10K Race

This next idea is great for encouraging healthy, family-friendly activities while fundraising. A 5K/10K race can attract a lot of participants. This event format is great for pretty much the whole family, so encourage parents to sign their kids up for youth participant categories. 

Races are versatile fundraising events. They can be held in person, virtually, or in a hybrid format that combines the best of both formats. Encourage fundraising in the days leading up to your event. Runners can fundraise to cover their registration fee or even secure sponsors for their participation. 

A 5K race is a tried and true P2P fundraising event for a reason. They can be highly profitable! For instance, Hope for Children’s virtual 5K raised more than $11,000! 

The possibilities for great P2P fundraising events for school groups are endless! It just takes some creativity. Figure out what your supporters are interested in and design fundraising events around those interests. 

Other uses for P2P fundraising tools

It’s likely that the main use you’ll have for P2P fundraising tools is event-based fundraising. But you can use peer-to-peer fundraising tools to fundraise in other ways, too! 

Personal fundraising pages for leadership and board members 

Chances are, your school group has people appointed to leadership positions. Even if they’re volunteers, it means they’re passionate about your cause. Encourage them to set up personal fundraising pages that they can send to members of their social circle.  

A designated giving page makes it easy for your organization’s leadership to raise funds all year long. You can even get teachers and school leadership set up with their own pages to maximize fundraising potential! 

DIY fundraising pages

Similar to a designated donation form for leadership and board members, DIY fundraising pages encourage your supporters to spread the word about your organization so friends and family support your school group through them.  

Giving fundraisers a designated giving page ensures their social network knows who they’re giving to and why. Plus, this builds your relationship with your supporters because you’re trusting them to raise funds to help you with your mission.  

Loganville Christian Academy used Qgiv’s fundraising pages to make it easy to give to the right people during their annual fundraiser. They created a peer-to-peer fundraising team for each class and even grouped the classes by school. To take this further, they created a team leaderboard to encourage donors to give using friendly competition to see their child’s team earn a place on the board.

Designated school store

Qgiv’s peer-to-peer platform incorporates a fundraising store. Use the fundraising store all year long to send branded school merchandise to parents, grandparents, and the kids! 

If you’ve got merchandise on hand, set up a peer-to-peer fundraising store to sell the items in your inventory. This can be a big hit around the holidays, but also encourages school spirit year-round! 

Erika’s Lighthouse, a nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness of adolescent depression, uses Qgiv’s peer-to-peer store platform to sell items all year round.

P2P fundraising pro tips

Engage your participants

We want your peer-to-peer events to be a rousing success, so use these pro tips to raise more. 

Your participants make or break your event with their fundraising. That’s why it’s important to keep them engaged and fundraising on your behalf. How can you accomplish this? Prepare resources to make fundraising easy, reach out and talk to your participants to offer encouragement, and incentivize fundraising!  

Cathexis Partners wrote a great blog post for us on the subject with seven tips for motivating your participants to give more during your peer-to-peer events.  

Host sub-events

Okay, this tip might make you think of Inception, but it works! During your main event, if you can build in a sub-event like a raffle or silent auction, you encourage additional giving. A great sub-event can easily boost your fundraising efforts.  

Saint Joseph’s Preparatory School planned an auction in support of their crew team with a wide variety of auction items on offer that participants can bid on virtually. With a day to go before the end of bidding, the event had already raised 45% of its fundraising goal! 

Personal Facebook fundraisers

Facebook now offers fundraising tools for nonprofits. Did you know that individuals can fundraise on behalf of nonprofits via Facebook as well? When your participants are fundraising on your behalf, a Facebook fundraiser can be a great tool to easily grow fundraising by sharing a fundraiser to their timeline.  

The best part? Funds raised on Facebook can be added to your P2P fundraising event thermometer via the Facebook Fundraisers integration with Qgiv. As donations come in via Facebook, your thermometer will reflect those donations too. That makes it easy to raise more without creating a reconciliation nightmare for your accountant! 

Final thoughts

Peer-to-peer fundraising tools can be incredibly helpful even for small nonprofits like school groups. You can engage your community and get them fundraising on your behalf with the right P2P fundraising tools.  

It’s not just for hosting fundraising events either! You can use those same tools for year-round fundraising. Set up personal fundraising pages for your board and school leadership to offer a way to fundraise all year long.  

Got ardent supporters willing to fundraise for you? Create a DIY fundraising page for them to share with friends and family. Want to spread school spirit all year? Sell branded school merchandise on your peer-to-peer storefront. Using Qgiv’s peer-to-peer suite of tools this way can help grow your fundraising and make managing your fundraising events easy. 

Want to learn more about peer-to-peer fundraising? Check out our peer-to-peer fundraising guide! You can also sign up for a one-on-one demo to learn more about Qgiv’s fundraising tools.