Blue Sky Collaborative's Viral Fundraising Blog

Techniques to improve fundraising in your walkathons, athons and other pledge events

As you've probably guessed by now we are big proponents of the pledge fundraising model.  Often times, our clients who use the SWEET fundraising software ask us how to improve their fundraising results.  We decide to share some of our advice to a recent client with the world.  So here goes. 

Here are some tactics that you can use to boost fundraising by your event participants.

There is no doubt that people want to help! They just need a little push.

• Incentives: Create incentives for the top fundraisers. Prizes, opportunities, recognition, etc. If cost is an issue, you can be creative about what the prizes are! Incentives have the dual benefit of giving people motivation to fundraise, and also giving you an excuse to blast more emails!
• Feature top fundraisers: Play on the competitive nature of athletes! Profile top fundraisers as a challenge to others to get involved. Put these profiles in email blasts, on the marathon site, etc.
• Email blasts—lots of them! For people who have signed up for the athon but not the fundraising, send emails telling them how important the fundraising is. For people who have already signed up, they have made the first step already so you know they’re paying attention. Send them periodic emails with news about:
  • Incentives
  • Top fundraisers
  • The importance of fundraising for the cause
  • Getting their friends to participate as fundraisers as well
  • Fundraising tips – an easy, scannable, top 10 style list of fundraising tips.  Some examples:
    • “1. Email Email Email! - Send emails to your friends, family and co-workers.  Let them know that you'll be running, and tell them why our cause is so important.”
    • “2. Personalize your page. Share your story, put up pictures. People who visit your page are there because they care about you and what you’re doing!”  

• Strong messaging: All of these messages (the email, the website copy) should have a simple and clear message about what the fundraising is for and why they need to do it. For on the web, people tend to scan more than read properly. Be direct about why their help is needed how meaningful their involvement is, and make it as short and striking as possible, because people have low attention spans when reading websites, and rarely make it to the end of a paragraph.

Online Pledge Fundraising: That's how the kid's are doing it these days

We recently implemented a version of SWEET Pledge event software for Students Helping Honduras.  We learned a lot from another one of our awesome clients.

1. Students Helping Honduras is awesome.  Learn more about them at www.studentshelpinghonduras.org

2. Kids these days... are amazing.  They are serving in substantial ways in faraway places.  Check this out.  http://giving.studentshelpinghonduras.org/shh/participantpage.asp?fundid=1555&uid=2830&fkroledescid=3
3. The Students Helping Honduras fundraising model reflects the abilities of the constituents and their comfort with the internet.  Students' helping Honduras has raised over 25K in less than 3 weeks.  And frankly, their model is so scalable that it seems like the sky is the limit.
4. Students Helping Honduras owns SWEET software that let's them scale their pledge fundraising efforts without any limitations.  That's a key component in their success.  Imagine having to  administer all of these simultaneous events manually?
5. Videos, photos, and stories have a direct and positive impact on fundraising success.  More on this in future posts.
6. Finally, the faltering economy seemingly has no impact on pledge fundraising - a long tail effect for sure.  More nonprofits should utilize this proven fundraising model.