How to S.T.E.P. U.P. Your Peer-to-Peer Fundraising on Social Media!

How to S.T.E.P. U.P. Your Peer-to-Peer Fundraising on Social Media!

Here’s 6 actions to help you S.T.E.P. U.P. your social media game, deepen your relationships with potential volunteer teams and sponsors, prospective donors, and ultimately, drive more donations to help fund St.Jude Children’s Hospital.

Share stories - Take action - Exchange value - Play

Understand the data  - Plan to publish persistently 

Let me expand on these 6 steps to help you reimagine your approach to fundraising on social media.

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“S” stands for Share stories and signals your first step up. Ideally, your story is grounded in your why? Your motivation for doing what you are doing because it opens yourself up to more emotional connections, which help people open their wallets. 

I understand there is a wealth of information, as well as existing stories about the St. Jude, mission, research and families, so instead of talking broadly about storytelling, I’ll leave you with three actionable ideas for storytelling on social media. 

  1. Personal beats generic: If you have a personal connection to someone that has been, or could have benefitted from St.Jude’s research, talk about it. The treatments and cures found at St. Jude save children’s lives everywhere. If your fundraising can be aligned to a life event like a birthday or a memorial of that person, it’s been proven to be particularly effective on social media. In a recent nonprofit tech for good survey “ ⅓ of of all donors said they made a tribute gift to honor family or friends”
  2. Visuals beats text: Visuals are incredibly powerful when it comes to quickly sharing a story. The good news is, you have a lot of templates from St.Jude’s, which are pre-approved and on brand! In the Facebook newsfeed people spend, on average 2.5 seconds with a piece of content... even less if they’re on their phone. Consumption is fast, frequent and sound-free on Facebook. So choose your words wisely and combine them with the most compelling visual you can.
  3. Customised content beats same-same: *Matching luggage is an industry term for when brands post the same image or same content in all the different formats across the different social media channels - same same just different sizes. That’s no good. Try to switch it up and use Facebook stories differently from Facebook image posts or TikToks differently from WhatsApp messages. 

Just remember: Create for the format, and optimise it all for viewing on a mobile phone. In America, nearly 80% of people ONLY access Facebook via their phone, which means, less text, bigger, bolder images.

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Next up, “T” which stands for Take Action.

At the end of the day, you’re not sharing stories for the sake of it. You need people to take action, as a result of your content. To maximise donations for your event, I think it’s important to experiment with ALL of the ways people can help you to reach your end goal. Four calls-to-action I’d consider:

  1. Donate Now: of course, you need not be afraid to ask people to donate what they can to help support your cause. Experiment with different ways of asking people to donate, and see what resonates. The reality is, most people will ignore it, some will take action, and others will find fault in your ask. I'm going to pause here for a sec because I’d like to share this advice I once received, “Bless and release.”  If it hasn’t happened already, it likely will at some point. Some people will be rude or upset by your ask, and I’d encourage you to acknowledge them once, and then let them go from your thoughts forever. The truth is, it requires an element of bravery to be active on social media, to put yourself out there, especially when you’re asking for money. Try not to let any “Hard Nos” slow you down.
  2. Get-Involved: Why not see if people within your network want to get more involved? You can help recruit more teams and sponsors to work alongside you for the cause. 
  3. Share: Not everyone can give their time or money, but they can help you to access other people that can. By sharing your content, or even just commenting on it, tagging others, or simply reacting to it, your friends and family can help you to reach their friends and family. I’ll talk more about why this matters in the data section, but for now, suffice to say, encouraging interaction with your content can be critical for you to extend the breadth of your prospective donor pool.
  4. Add you to favourites: This is perhaps the least popular, but among the more valuable CTAs. It’s one that will pay off in dividends time and again. If people are moved enough about you and/or your effort, they can add you to their favourites on Facebook. By adding you to their favourites, your content will continue to be prioritised in their newsfeeds, which means you’ll be given more opportunities to show up in their feed, build a relationship and get them involved in the long-run. 
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Moving on to E, for Exchange Value.

Don’t underestimate the power of profuse and public gratitude in exchange for donations or support, big or small. Recognition begets involvement begets recognition. It’s a predictable cycle on social media. Beyond feeling good for doing good, it enables you to open a channel of trust that can lead to new interest among a wider group of people. Three ways to play to this phenomena:

  1. Give people the social equivalent of the “I voted sticker”. If you have a Facebook donation page it does this for you automatically, but if not, they are easy enough to create. Help people proudly wear their social giving badge virtually, which not only gives them a boost in esteem, but also offers the social proof that others may need to get involved.  Be sure to tag them in your post! 
  2. Go out and interact with your prospective donors, as well as other St.Jude ambassadors. Don’t wait for people to come to you, seek them out!  If you have a targeted donor list in your community, proactively interact with them on their terms. It will keep you top of mind and encourage them to interact with you, which in turn, helps your content get visibility in their feed. 
  3. If possible, this is a good opportunity to think about bridging you online-to-offline activities.  Remember leveraging social media is just part of your mix of touchpoints with prospective donors, I’d encourage you to think about ways you can bring activities online offline and vice versa
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Next up, and to round out the word step, is the letter “P.” P is for Play or peer-to-peer gamification. They both work. ;)

Have you ever taken a Facebook personality quiz: What Disney Princess are you?  Or, have you played Words with Friends just one more time to inch up over a friend on the leaderboard? Is it just me? ;) The marketing term is “gamification”, but really, you just need to think about how you can leverage game mechanics to help your fundraising efforts. Think about including elements that make video games, sports, or even loyalty programs addictive to use and just generally excite people to participate. You will have experienced such tactics in other apps and I’m challenging you to apply this to your own social community efforts. It’s equally effective to get people involved:

  1. Quizzes/Games: think about ways to get people involved in the story through interactive content? Do people know how much it would cost for a family to fund food, housing, and treatment without the help of St. Jude?  There is a giving guide that equates exact dollar amounts to services or treatments delivered at St.Jude. Just 54$ can cover a session of physical therapy for a child in need.
  2. Badges: Can you create a badge for “First Time Donor” or “Donor of the Week” or “Biggest Donor.” Or what about “MVP” for the person who shares the most about your specific fundraiser event?
  3. Leaderboards & Progress Bars: How can you showcase individuals at the top of the leaderboard, and incite a little friendly competition? Ideally, you can get local companies or influencers involved as well. Thermometers are perhaps the oldest gamification mechanism in the book. These work on social as well, which is why you see a progress bar on Facebook donations pages.

Think about these ideas and translate them to your content online. Ideally you think about ways to get people involved in your content, your story, and your cause. Give them reasons to play with you, as it builds understanding, as well as garners valuable interactions to help generate larger audiences.

Moving on to the last 2 points, which are the most important. Because if what we just covered are the basics STEPS, the next two are the multipliers. They are the ones that will propel you UP. 

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“U” stands for understanding the data. Broadly, data helps you understand your content visibility, and specifically it helps you understand your fundraising outcomes. 

Unfortunately, only a fraction of your Facebook family and friends will see each of your posts. “Facebook doesn’t present every available Facebook post in chronological order, the Facebook algorithm evaluates every post, scores it, and then arranges it in descending order of interest for each individual user. This process happens every time a user refreshes their newsfeed. Today, the Facebook algorithm is made up of four main ranking signals: recency, popularity, content type, and relationship.*” So, as we discussed, it’s important that people engage with your content (signals popularity); that you experiment with various creative ideas (content types); and, are doing so frequently. The reality is, what people see has a lot to do with their past behaviour.

Now, that’s broadly how data affects your content visibility. How can it affect your fundraising outcomes? Well, as an individual you don’t have as much data as a brand does. And within Facebook’s walls you have less than you would if you had Google Analytics. So, I’ll call out some of the basic data you should start to look at to try to do more of what’s driving results. 

  1. Clicks - Using a link shortener helps you understand click data on your calls-to-action. At a minimum, this will help you understand what content is driving action.
  2. Engagement - Engagement rate is the total engagement (reactions, comments, shares) divided by the total reach x 100. This is a good gauge of what content is resonating. Live video typically has 6x more engagement than standard videos. Is that true for your content too?

Really, data is a conversation for another day. 

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Finally, I’ll round out this mnemonic with the most important step of all. So important in fact that I had to draw out the P a bit. Plan to publish persistently. As mentioned above, Facebook newsfeed prioritises recency, so the more “fresh” your content is, the more people will likely see it. I believe what I’m asking of you here is to think more like a brand and  be very intentional with your content and know that the investment will pay off. So, what would a brand do?

  1. Brainstorm content themes, or content pillars, which are the different angles you can talk about your cause and/or fundraiser. I know St.Jude has different content pillars as well, for example, research breakthroughs. I’d suggest to use these assets and make them yours. There is a reason why Facebook de-prioritises content from brands and business pages - they want people to talk like people to other people. Maybe you publish a daily time lapse of your personal training for the event for Facebook stories.  Maybe you reshare some of the St.Jude content about patient stories helped by the research...in your own words. Maybe you post a weekly progress bar of the money you’ve raised, or offer a Saturday Shout Out for your top donors. You just need a few content themes. Then, stick with them, so you can measure what content works the hardest for you and adjust accordingly. 
  2. Plan your specific assets to bring them to life. To make it more approachable, think about 3 distinct periods in your campaign and jot down the specific content you want to post within your content pillars for each period.  
  3. Schedule the content to go out consistently at the same time every day. Make it easy on yourself, once you’ve made your content, load it into a tool to publish it. Ideally, you can post 1x a day or at least 5x a week during your campaign period. Publish more than you’re comfortable with because you need to get seen for people to help you. 
  4. Finally, build in time to interact with people.  It’s not enough to share content, you must also respond and seek to keep the conversation going with people who interact with you. 

In conclusion, I hope you’ve learned some practical ways to STEP UP your social media activity. Remember it’s …..

Share stories - Take action - Exchange value - Play

Understand the data  - Plan to publish persistently 

I’d like to close by just saying thank you if you’re going out there and raising money...regardless of the cause. 


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