GiveWP Peer-To-Peer Fundraising

Peer-to-peer fundraising is a method of raising funds that uses the power of interpersonal relationships to multiply the impact of a campaign. The GiveWP Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Solution allows your donors to form teams and gamify the fundraising process. This article explains how to harness all the power of the Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Solution.

What is Peer-to-Peer Fundraising?

Peer-to-peer fundraising allows organizations to multiply the effectiveness of a campaign by allowing donors and others to become fundraisers and team captains. Now, folks who are passionate about your cause but can’t give have another option: they can recruit their friends and family to give.

Terminology

In setting up and configuring GiveWP’s Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Solution, it’s helpful to familiarize yourself with a few new words and phrases this suite adds into the GiveWP vocabulary:

1. Campaigns
2. Teams
3. Fundraisers
4. Sponsors

Campaigns

Campaigns are the highest level collection of teams and individual fundraisers, bound together to raise money for a given cause. Every campaign is connected to an individual donation form on the site.

Teams

Teams are a way to organize a group of folks raising money for a given campaign. Teams have a captain (also called the owner) who creates the team, and optionally can approve new team members who all join together to fundraise on behalf of the team, toward the campaign.

Fundraisers

Fundraisers are individuals who can either be a part of teams, or separate, raising money for a given campaign. Fundraisers create profile pages explaining to potential donors why they are raising money toward the campaign.

Sponsors

Campaigns have an optional spot to display sponsor logos, allowing your organization to generate more revenue while allowing sponsors to associate their brand with your organization and campaign. When setting up or editing a campaign, you can add Sponsors logos with optional links to their website.

Campaign Statuses

Each campaign can have one of three statuses: Active, Inactive, or Draft.

• Active: A campaign with this status is live and currently accepting donations.
• Inactive: Once a campaign is published, it cannot be deleted. However, you can set its status to Inactive to prevent further donations.
• Draft: This status indicates an unpublished version of a campaign. It allows you to refine and adjust the campaign’s details before making it public.

Getting Started: Creating Campaigns

How Forms relate to Campaigns

Each Campaign is associated with a Donation Form on the site. You can either create a new form, or associate the campaign with an existing form. That enables you to combine GiveWP’s Peer-to-Peer solution with the power of the Funds and Designations add-on or the Form Field Manager add-on (among others!)

Using stories to engage donors and fundraisers

On the Create/Edit campaign page, you have the opportunity to use persuasive copywriting to tell the story of the campaign. The Short Description is one to two sentences designed to clearly lay out the options that a site visitor has. The Long description under that is a spot to call the readers to action. For some campaigns, the primary call to action might be to donate, with a secondary one of creating a team. Use the description sections to clearly tell your visitors the best way to help.

Using images to drive engagement

On the Setup tab of the Campaign add/edit screen, there’s a spot to add two different images, a logo and larger image. The goal of the images could be to show the outcome of the campaign, or the faces of fundraisers once they’ve completed their goal, or something else. As with description, the image you choose for the logo and the campaign image need to push folks toward your specific goals for the campaign.

Setting Campaign goals

One of the most compelling ways to motivate donors, fundraisers, and potential team captains is by tracking progress toward a goal. Don’t underestimate this benefit! Set goals for campaigns that are ambitious and call folks to stretch!

Understanding Teams

Welcoming new team members

Campaign creators have the option to welcome new team members automatically, or to approve team members manually as they sign up. For publicly available sites, it’s recommended to manually approve team members.

Team Approvals

By default, newly created teams require approval before they become part of a campaign. When a team is created, it remains in Pending status until an admin approves it. During this time:

• A notification email is sent to the admin requesting approval.
• Email invitations added during team registration are not sent until the team is approved.

To allow teams to be included automatically without approval, Team Approvals can be disabled in the Peer-to-Peer Campaign Options settings.

Team Goal defaults

The overall campaign goal (referenced above) is supplemented by team goals. The main difference as you think through team goals is to remember that now you’re setting a recommendation for new team owners/captains that they can override during the setup of their team. Set ambitious goals, and also keep in mind that many team captains will go with the default recommended amount.

Using stories to drive team donations

Just like the story of a campaign in general will drive and motivate donors, team captains, and fundraisers, team captains can and should tell a story to motivate donors to give and other fundraisers to join their team.

Like the team goal, the setting on the Teams tab of the Create/Edit campaign screen is for you (as site admin) to suggest things to new team captains. This placeholder text will show up during the flow of creating a new team. Customize it to prompt the team captain to tell their own story in a brief and compelling way.

Gamification for Team Fundraising

It’s in the name “team” that one of the goals of peer-to-peer fundraising is to gamify the process, allowing teams to compete with one another. By default a leaderboard is displayed on team and individual profiles. There’s an option on the Teams tab to disable that display of rankings, if your campaign makes more sense to not include that gamification.

All About Fundraisers

Welcoming new Fundraisers

By default, new fundraisers (just like teams) are set to require approval from a site admin. Team captains can invite fundraisers, but approval still requires an admin.

Fundraiser goal defaults

All the funds raised by fundraisers funnel into the goal for the main campaign, and the setting on the Fundraisers tab of the create/edit page for campaigns for default fundraiser goals allows you as a site admin to set the default amount. Keep in mind that during the fundraiser onboarding flow they’ll be able to set this however they’d like. Set realistic defaults, as most fundraisers likely will not change this.

Setting up fundraisers with compelling story prompts.

Just like with campaign stories and team stories, this is the chance for a fundraiser to tell a great story to compel their readers to donate. As site admin, tee them up with a writing prompt here that will allow them to share personal stories that draw in donors.

Adding Custom Fields to Fundraisers

To add Custom Fields to the Fundraiser Registration, you first need to enable Custom Fields in the campaigns settings in the Fundraiser’s tab.

Once the Custom Fields option is set to Enable, you’ll be able to add/edit custom fields below the setting. Use the Add Field button to add additional fields.

The following fields can be added:

• Text
• Textarea
• Email
• URL
• Telephone
• Number

To remove a field, hover over the Field label and a red X will appear for you to click.

You can also change the field using the Type option, and enable/disable the Required option. Once the fields are added, and have the options you need, use the Update Campaign button to save the campaign.

When a Fundraiser signs up, they’ll be presented with those fields to fill out.

Fundraisers + Multiple Teams

Fundraisers can join multiple teams and create a new fundraiser page for each team they join. A fundraiser’s user information – such as name and email – will stay the same since this can only be changed in their WordPress user profile. However, they may add different content to each fundraiser page, such as “Why I’m fundraising.”

To join a team, use the Join Team button on any team’s page. 

The signup process for the team will require your name, email address, and password. After that you’ll fill out additional details to help promote your fundraising goals.

To join any additional teams, navigate to that team’s page and again use the “Join Team” button. Since you already have a fundraiser profile you won’t have to enter your user information, but you can add content to your new team’s fundraiser profile.

There’s a button on the top right-hand corner of a team’s profile that will allow you to switch between teams. Underneath your profile picture and name, you’ll see “Member of [TEAM]” if you’re a member of the team you’re currently visiting.

If a Peer-to-Peer requires fundraiser approval, an administrator of the site will have to manually accept your fundraiser profile.

Please note that a single site user can have only one name and email across fundraiser pages. 

The navigation across the top of Peer-to-Peer pages gives you quick access to the different areas within Peer-to-Peer such as the Campaign Page, My Page, and My Team. This navigation is only visible to a logged-in fundraiser.

Adding Registration Fees to Fundraisers

To include registration fees in a fundraiser, start by enabling the Registration Fees option in the campaign’s settings under the Fundraiser tab.

Once enabled, a payment step will be added to the registration process.

Maximizing your campaign efforts with sponsors

The final component of setting up a Peer-to-Peer campaign is deciding on displaying sponsors.

Sponsors lend credibility to campaigns as a form of social proof. Plus, sponsors like being able to see their logo on the page.

These settings control how you display your sponsors, whether and how you want to link to sponsors’ websites, and where sponsors can apply for their sponsorships.

Selecting where to display sponsors

When setting up your campaign, the Sponsors tab has an option to either display the sponsor images on the main campaign page only, or on all pages (campaign, fundraiser, and team) associated with a campaign.

Sponsor images and linking

There are several things to consider when it comes to linking out to sponsor pages. The first is whether to link out at all. Online fundraising best practice is to never link to anything that detracts from the goals of the page, since it will likely mean fewer donations.

Consider these options when putting together your sponsor agreement. You might want to require a higher sponsor-level for images that link to websites.

Next, there are SEO implications for whether or not to make a link “no-follow” on the page. SEO rules change often, but generally speaking, linking with follow is better for the sponsor’s SEO but may hurt your SEO, while linking and no following has no effect on SEO. Paid links should also get the “no-follow” attribute.

Our friends at Yoast.com explain the nuances nicely.

Creating an application page for sponsors

If you want to accept sponsorship for a campaign, there’s no interface to make that happen, but you can display a button linking to a page for potential sponsors to reach out. On that page, either you can have a donation form, or a contact form. This just depends on the process you want to implement. Some organizations have official invoice processes for this. Put a full URL (with the https://) in the field. If you leave that field blank, no button is displayed.