By Ann Love
In February, I was afforded the opportunity to attend the 2019 Peer-to-Peer Professional Forum Conference. As someone who has been fundraising since long before I worked in the industry, I was especially excited to attend sessions and get inspired!
The biggest takeaway I brought home from the conference is how important it is to keep innovating. In today’s world, sticking to the same fundraising models that worked in the 1980’s, 90’s and early 2000’s is not the way to get your organization where it wants to go.
The tried and true — email blasts, cocktail parties, walkathons — are great and can still work for some demographics. However, if an organization truly wants to raise more funds and engage the modern audience, it needs to embrace technology. Younger people (and many older ones) are moving away from email. They are flocking to “quick hit” platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and Tumblr. They are looking for instant results and quick acknowledgement. Fundraising through live streaming is opening up whole new categories of donors. Whether they’re watching someone play a video game or a guy eat pickles (no, really) millions of dollars are being raised in incredibly short periods of time. The fundraiser can acknowledge their donors in real time and the donor gets their reward (i.e., the guy eats the pickle) immediately.
If your organization is not quite ready to leap into live-streaming, consider Facebook fundraising. Each of your fundraisers has a network of friends for which Facebook is their only means of communication. With Facebook fundraising, those people are easily reachable and donating takes seconds of their time; without ever leaving Facebook. A representative from Facebook who spoke at the conference also announced that they will be rolling out Instagram fundraising in the future.
Next Steps
If you’re ready to modernize your fundraising efforts but don’t know where to start, here are five things you can do today:
- Learn more about Facebook’s charitable giving tools.
- Read about Hustle and why we love this peer-to-peer texting platform.
- Download our Live Streaming infographic.
- Read about YouTube’s fundraising tools.
- Learn more about the future of Instagram fundraising.
No matter what your fundraising goals, utilizing the newest tech tools has the potential to bring in more money and new constituents. Give it a try and see how far you go! Need help getting started? Let us know.
Ann has been with Event 360 since 2013, first as a local coach for the Susan G. Komen Michigan 3-Day and currently as an event planning manager with the 3-Day. When she’s not working you will most likely find her curled up with a good book, or running wild with her husband, Dan, and her two boys, Josh and Henry.
