By David Hessekiel
Peer-to-Peer Professional Forum President
Just how far would your organization’s supporters go to raise money on your behalf?
Would they walk across hot coals? Shave their heads? Ride a rollercoaster with hundreds of strangers … while fully naked?
The willingness of people to do physically challenging, peculiar, or intimidating things for a good cause is amazing. We see it every day in our work as peer-to-peer fundraisers.
But, until now, we’ve never known just how many different types of peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns there are.
Over the past several months, The Peer-to-Peer Professional Forum, has been chronicling the great lengths big-hearted people take on for charity. The result is a new resource called What People Will Do! The Big List of Peer-to-Peer Fundraising.
As we’ve built the list — which now totals 113 distinct campaign types — I’ve been struck by just how much the equation has changed for organizations that manage peer-to-peer campaigns.
A decade ago the list would have been much shorter and dominated by proprietary programs, physical events like walks that are owned and operated by nonprofits. These campaigns — such as the biggest of them all, the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life —continue to be huge money raisers for many organizations. And I suspect that they will always be a part of the peer-to-peer fundraising universe.
But while the traditional fundraising runs, walks, and rides aren’t going anywhere, they now share the stage with a growing number of supporter-led campaigns.
Perhaps the most famous supporter-led campaign was the Ice Bucket Challenge, which raised $220 million worldwide for ALS research in 2014. Not planned at headquarters, it was the result of passionate supporters of a cause taking it upon themselves to raise money and awareness.
Of course, the Ice Bucket Challenge is also an outlier. It’s rare — and likely even unprecedented — for a single supporter-led campaign to raise nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. And, unfortunately for the ALS community, its grassroots origins and viral nature doomed efforts to revive it in 2015.
There is an extremely exciting middle ground, however, between the highly controlled environment of proprietary programs and waiting for the next Ice Bucket Challenge to appear. Increasingly, nonprofits are finding success in providing their supporters with the tools, freedom and encouragement they need to put their personal passions and preferences into peer-to-peer fundraising. For example:
- Each year thousands of people across the United States publicly shave their heads to raise money for the St. Baldrick’s Foundation‘s fight against childhood cancers. This army of head shavers raised more than $39 million for the charity in 2014.
- The Fearless Challenge invites supporters of the Canadian Cancer Society to pledge to do something that terrifies them (from singing in public to skydiving to handling big, hairy spiders) if friends contribute enough to hit a fundraising goal.
- The success of charity:water in moving supporters to ask friends to make donations instead of giving them birthday gifts has inspired numerous nonprofits to create birthday programs of their own.
When this phenomenon started to surface 10 years ago, many nonprofits saw it as a threat to their proprietary programs and way too complex to manage. The digital revolution we’ve experienced since then has made it clear there is no stopping people who want to do good in their own way and made it far easier for nonprofits to service them.
We’re about to experience amazing growth in this type of more independent peer-to-peer fundraising. Its revenue statistics will be harder to capture than those of the massive proprietary programs that dominate our annual Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Thirty list, but its impact will go a long way to support the missions of groups large and small.
We hope that you’ll use this new list as a way to generate ideas for future peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns at your organization.
And we also hope that you’ll help us identify other campaigns that we haven’t yet chronicled. Thus far, we’ve found 113 — but we know there are many others out there that we haven’t yet identified. We expect to continue to collect examples and add them to the Big List — and we invite you to help us with this fun process!