Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Software Tips for Medical Nonprofits

Medical nonprofits are vital to the health and well-being of the communities they serve. Whether you’re a major medical research nonprofit or a local nonprofit community clinic, the work you do matters. That’s why it’s important for your nonprofit to make the most of your peer-to-peer fundraising events. We put together some peer-to-peer fundraising software tips that can make it easier for your supporters to raise funds on your behalf, host more profitable fundraising events, and other tips to boost your peer-to-peer efforts. 

Make it easy for donors to support you

Your donors want to support your peer-to-peer fundraising events, but if your peer-to-peer fundraising software is hard to use or they can’t easily see their progress, they may get discouraged. Avoid frustrated fundraisers by using a peer-to-peer software solution that includes the following tools to make fundraising easier. 

Give supporters PPE (Personal Philanthropy Equipment)

For supporters who want to raise funds for your nonprofit during your peer-to-peer event, a personal fundraising page is an absolute must. Without these customizable fundraising pages for your supporters, they’re often restricted to offline methods of fundraising. That means if their friends and family don’t carry cash or checks, they can’t give! Personal fundraising pages make it possible for your supporters to solicit credit card and echeck donations online. 

Just having a means for supporters to accept online donations isn’t enough. Those personal fundraising pages serve your nonprofit best if they’re customizable. This means your fundraising participants should be able to share their story and explain why they support your nonprofit. Additionally, they should be able to upload their own pictures. When you empower fundraising participants to share their story and personalize their pages, you provide important social proof to their friends and family members. That makes them more likely to give! 

Pro Tip: Provide an example of a supporter’s completed fundraising page on which they’ve shared their story and why they support your organization. Seeing a good example makes it easier for supporters to personalize their own pages. 

Thermometers are for more than fevers

Your peer-to-peer fundraising events raise more when you use fundraising thermometers. There are three reasons why this is true.  

• People are visual by nature. Thermometers help donors visualize their progress toward your goal.
• Fundraising thermometers speak to our innate desire to reach goals set for us.
• Thermometers also provide social proof to others considering supporting your nonprofit. When someone on the fence sees how much your donors have given, it compels them to join in and give too.

A digital fundraising thermometer provides your supporters with real-time updates on your fundraising efforts. When donors give and can see the impact of their donation right away on your fundraising thermometer it makes them feel great. On the other hand, seeing your nonprofit falling short of a goal can be what urges your supporters to dig deep and get you to your fundraising goal. 

Pro Tip: Use your fundraising thermometer to share fundraising progress on social media. Take screenshots at regular intervals and share your progress and the time remaining on your Facebook event page and your nonprofit social media accounts. This reinforces to your supporters that you need help and are serious about raising those funds. This method can work especially well in the last hours of your peer-to-peer fundraising campaign as you approach your goal! 

Use text fundraising for a rapid response

Like a hospital’s rapid response team, your supporters want their friends and family to jump into action any time from anywhere. Text fundraising tools for peer-to-peer fundraising participants make this possible! Give your peer-to-peer fundraisers the ability to create their own custom text fundraising keyword. This keyword should be unique to the fundraising participant. With this functionality, they can quickly share a way for their friends and family to donate directly to their personal peer-to-peer page from their smartphones. 

Text fundraising is a very fast and efficient way to fundraise because it’s easy to share keywords on social media, in emails, or even via text. Your supporters can text their friends and family and ask them to use their unique fundraising keyword to give. Additionally, those giving to those peer-to-peer campaigns can share the keyword with their social circle too. That means a peer-to-peer text fundraising campaign can be spread to a lot of people with minimal time and effort spent on it.  

Pro tip:  Not all of your supporters are going to be familiar with how to set up a keyword for text fundraising. We recommend creating a short video showing attendees how to create their own text fundraising keywords and how to share the keyword with friends and family. 

Make a Facebook fundraisers referral

Just like you’d refer a patient to an outpatient clinic, your supporters should be able to take a holistic approach to fundraising. A great way to do this is with a Facebook fundraiser. A Facebook fundraiser enables giving on social media rather than a personal peer-to-peer fundraising page. This can be more effective in some cases than using the peer-to-peer page alone.

Facebook fundraisers have already managed to raise more than $2 billion for nonprofits since they were rolled out. This shows that many social media users are comfortable donating to a friend’s fundraising campaign on Facebook and will readily support the causes that are important to those in their social circles.

In the past, though, this meant having to spend hours reconciling which donations from Facebook were a result of a peer-to-peer event’s fundraising participants. Plus, these donations were rarely included in the peer-to-peer event’s fundraising thermometer. However, with a Facebook fundraisers integration, supporters can connect Facebook fundraisers with their personal fundraising pages. This means that Facebook fundraiser donations are represented in supporters’ fundraising totals and are applicable to personal and event fundraising thermometers.

Pro tip:  Facebook fundraisers doesn’t release a lot of donor information, so ask attendees to track who gave to their Facebook fundraising campaigns, how much, and ask for contact information to make it easy to reach out and thank them for donating. 

Use these supplements for a healthier bottom line

Helping fundraisers raise money on your behalf is a great first step to making your peer-to-peer event more profitable. Check out these supplemental methods your medical nonprofit can use to raise more at your next fundraising event.

 Matching gift grants or a matching gift integration

Being able to match donations during your peer-to-peer fundraising event is a great way to quickly reach your fundraising goals.  

This can be accomplished through a private matching gift grant from major donors or a corporate partner. A matching gift grant ensures all donations up to the pledged matching donation amount are matched. Matching donations can be a big motivator for donors and fundraising participants. 

Likewise, you can use a matching gifts integration to match donations as well. While not every donation is eligible for a match this way, the integration doesn’t impose a limit on how many donations can be matched. How a matching gift integration works is donors make a gift then search for their employer to see if their donation is eligible to be matched by their employer’s corporate philanthropy program. If eligible, they’ll receive emailed instructions from your matching gift service provider after they complete their gift. That email will detail the steps they need to complete to apply for a match. Often, these steps can be done online so donors can quickly double (and sometimes even triple) the impact of their donation. 

Qgiv offers matching gift integrations with three matching gift service providers.  

Recurring gift support

Another great option to use to make your event more profitable is to support recurring gifts for your peer-to-peer event. Give your supporters the opportunity to give more than one-time donations. When donors give on a recurring basis your nonprofit gains a sustainable source of revenue that you can use to fund your crucial programs. Not only that, but recurring donors are valuable! A recurring donor gives 5x more than a one-time donor in their lifetime and have an average donor retention rate of 90%.  

If you’ve overlooked peer-to-peer events as an option for recruiting recurring donors, change it up. Give your donors the option to give on a recurring basis, especially if you have a longer fundraising period for your peer-to-peer events.  

Not sure how to get your event attendees to become recurring donors? These recurring giving email templates can help. 

Peer-to-peer store

Peer-to-peer events can definitely be profitable accepting donations alone, but you can add even more profitability to your fundraising event by incorporating a peer-to-peer store. The peer-to-peer store is where your supporters can purchase branded merchandise, refreshments, raffle tickets, and more in support of your nonprofit.  

An attendee who is unfamiliar with your mission may not be ready to donate to your event. But, that doesn’t mean they won’t be interested in an event t-shirt. Plus, your regular supporters will likely want to buy branded event merchandise from you to show their support. That’s why having a peer-to-peer store available during your event can be so effective. 

For best results, have some items available to purchase during the registration process and keep the store open and accessible until your event ends.  

Participant invite tool

Another option to ensure the success of future peer-to-peer events is to bring back your participants from previous events. If you charge a registration fee, inviting guests back to next year’s event helps ensure you collect another registration fee from them in the future. 

Additionally, inviting your fundraising participants to take part in future events shows you appreciated their efforts. This will make them more likely to sign up again and continue fundraising for you. 

You can send invitations to previous attendees by exporting a participant contact list into your email service provider. This often requires using a software integration. However, with Qgiv you can skip this step. The participant invite tool makes it easy to invite previous event attendees to upcoming events. You just select the past participants you want to invite and the system will send them an invitation email. 

Sub-events

If your medical nonprofit has the capacity, a great way to boost a peer-to-peer fundraising event is with sub-events. Hosting sub-events with your peer-to-peer fundraising software can be as easy as adding raffle tickets to your peer-to-peer store. Or you could host another event during your peer-to-peer event, like a silent auction or wine pull. Sub-events provide other ways for participants and donors to give more during the main event.  

Peer-to-peer event marketing

Marketing your peer-to-peer event can be one of the most important steps you take to ensure your event’s success. It’s hard to raise substantial funds without community involvement. That means you need to make sure that your community is aware of your event. 

Even if you plan to host an event with virtual attendees, your message is most relevant to your service area. Consider how you can get the word out to your local audience. Then, host a marketing campaign to reach them. 

Luckily, we have put together some best practices to help you successfully market your fundraising events. 

Virtual and hybrid event models

The pandemic made it clear that even if supporters can’t attend an event in person, they’ll still support it. Virtual and hybrid fundraising events dominated the event landscape in 2020. Ultimately, hybrid and virtual fundraisers raised about as much as in-person events did in 2019. While virtual events didn’t earn as many individual donations, virtual participants gave more than their in-person counterparts according to our Navigating the Unknown report. 

If you aren’t ready to host in-person events, use peer-to-peer fundraising software that works with a virtual event format. This ensures you can continue to host successful peer-to-peer fundraisers even with an ongoing pandemic.

On the other hand, your medical nonprofit might be ready to safely host in-person events. In that case, consider those who aren’t comfortable with in-person gatherings. They’ll likely still support you if you give them an option to participate virtually. Hosting hybrid events while the pandemic is ongoing is a great way to keep wary supporters giving. But you’ll need peer-to-peer fundraising software that can accommodate virtual and hybrid events.

Use Qgiv’s Hybrid Event Planner for tips to host more successful hybrid fundraising events. 

Final thoughts

Your medical nonprofit has an important job to do. A successful peer-to-peer fundraising event helps ensure you have the funds needed to do it. The tips shared above are nonprofit-tested ways to make your peer-to-fundraising software do more for you.

Looking for a peer-to-peer fundraising software solution that empowers you to raise more at your events? We’ve got you covered!