What Is Peer-to-Peer Fundraising?

Learn more about how you can use team fundraising to get others involved in your fundraising efforts.

Team fundraising, also known as peer-to-peer fundraising, is a way for others to join your experience and raise funds on your behalf. It gives participants the ability to share the fundraiser with their family, friends, and social media network. In doing so, they can maximize the experience’s outreach, which results in funds raised for your organization.

Here’s an example of how team fundraising works: 

Let’s say a school wants to hold a jog-a-thon to raise funds for a new football field. With team fundraising, each student at the school can join the experience to raise funds based on the number of laps they run. The students can also be grouped into classes to track how much each class raises. 

Who can be added?

Participants. Participants are the individuals who sign up to raise funds through your experience.  A participant can be a single person or a group of people.  Each participant added will receive their own personal fundraising page. They’ll be able to send that link out to friends and family to solicit donations.  

Teams. Teams provide a way to group together participants that have registered for the experience. People can also be invited to join a team once it has been added or registered on the experience. 

Yet, it’s also possible to have teams without participants (unless you’re running an a-thon experience, since participants performing the activity must be added). In these cases, the teams can receive one-time donations.

Here are examples of how participants and teams can work:

Scenario 1: Teams With Participants. A baseball little league wants to raise money and sets up an a-thon experience. The players want to compete among themselves to see who can raise the most money by making the most hits, encouraging donors to pledge an amount per hit recorded. In this scenario, each team in the league would also need participants, or the players making the hits.

Scenario 2: Teams With No Participants. A youth soccer organization organizes a raffle. The soccer teams (not the individual players) want to compete among themselves to see which team can raise the most funds. In this example, all donations on the experience are credited to a particular soccer team, but there is no need to have individual participants in the experience (although that is still an option).

Each team will receive a team fundraising page that can be shared on social media or sent to family and friends. If a donation is made to a specific participant of any team, the amount that participant has raised, as well as the team’s total amount raised, will reflect the donation. 

Private vs. Public Registration

When team fundraising is enabled, participants and teams can visit your experience and sign up. Or, you can keep the participant list closed and only add specific participants and teams. Learn more about these two options here:  

Private vs. Public Registration: What’s The Difference? 

How to enable 

1. Go to My Experiences in the left menu.
2. If you have chosen list view, click on the title of the experience. If you have chosen grid view, click on the experience image.
3. Click Edit Fundraiser. 
4. Click Basics in the timeline at the top.
5. Look for the box below and click the toggle switch to enable Peer-to-Peer.

Prizes

One effective way to generate excitement and healthy competition among your participants is to add prizes. Doing so can motivate your participants to share the experience and receive donations. Prizes are awarded to participants or teams based on how much they raise. You can choose the criteria for the prizes right in the experience setup. Learn more.

Participant Center

When team fundraising is enabled on your experience you will automatically be given a participant center. Here you can manage participants and teams who join your experience. Check out this article to learn more about how to use your participant center:  What Is The Participant Center?

Donors 

When donors visit the main experience page to make a donation they will be able to credit their donation to an individual, team, or to the overall experience.  

Good to know

• Team fundraising can be added to any experience type, except for auctions.
• When organizers are utilizing all-in-one fundraising, team fundraising will only apply to the A-thon component of their experience. Donors will only be able to credit the A-thon portion of their donation to a participant or team.
• When organizers are utilizing all-in-one fundraising without an A-thon component, team fundraising will apply to all the components selected (except for auctions. Donors will be able to credit their entire transaction to a participant or team.

Other articles you may find helpful:

How can I run a pledge experience but only take one-time donations?
How to add participants to team fundraisers.

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