Looking for a strong finish to 2020 or a high-impact launch into 2021?
The end-of-year giving season is upon us and while many organizations will be competing for donations on Giving Tuesday and end of the year gifts, it doesn't mean those are your only options to bring in critical funds.
Community Turkey Trots, Holiday Hustles, and New Year Resolution challenges across the nation will not be held in person and many gyms have reduced members and classes too. Nonprofits can create opportunity from this gap. People are eager for something to challenge them and a little accountability to keep them in shape over the winter months. This year, giving back to a cause and getting healthy over the holiday season or kicking off the new year are both things many people want to do.
Set your organization apart from the generic donation asks this season, and combine your priorities with a virtual fitness experience to drive momentum and further interest in your cause
To create a new virtual campaign like this with the right tools you won't need a large budget or a long runway to get it started.
Here are the 3 key portions of the framework to build your "New Year, New You" Campaign:
1. Set the Course
Identify a challenge that aligns with your brand and your participants and create that challenge. Just as you choose a fundraising benchmark for your community to achieve, set an activity benchmark to coincide with that goal.
With DonorDrive's Active Impact you can choose the metric that will be measured. Common choices are steps, miles, reps, km, or minutes. You can do an individual pushup challenge, a steps challenge, or even a collaborative challenge like “lets walk 1000 miles together in January!” or “Let’s track 100000 workout minutes together to start off 2021 stronger!”
Tip: While fitness is often used with activity tracking, Active Impact is by no means limited by it. You can have participants track a broader range of things like hours volunteered, minutes live streaming, mental health minutes, or anything repeatable and trackable that fits your brand.
DonorDrive has helped many nonprofits create engaging virtual fitness experiences this year, and many have seen an increase in fundraising. In May the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia's 31 Day challenge increased their fundraising by 181% YOY. Read their story.
2. Leverage Activity Pledges
Add another layer of depth to fitness fundraising by directly tying donations to activity. This is a great motivator for participants to achieve their fitness goals and deepens the relationship of the donor to the participant. Pledging to donate per mile is an old fundraising method, but didn't translate into modern online fundraising platforms.
Today with new innovations like Activity Pledges from DonorDrive, donors now have two options to donate to give a flat donation or a donation tied to each unit the participant tracks toward their fitness goal (which they can set a max donation amount at the point of the pledge).
Participants can boost fundraising by using their incentives and milestones to relate to their activity tracking, and donors can show faith in them and their mission through activity pledges, resulting in more engagement, more excitement, and more fundraising.
3. Integrate with Mainstream Fitness Trackers
Manually tracking activity leaves a lot of room for error and is an extra to-do item for fitness fundraisers. So utilizing integrations with popular wearable fitness trackers is a key way to remove a barriers for participation. With the wearable devices, participants cannot fudge their numbers or skip a workout, or their metrics will show it.
To make your event truly stand out, DonorDrive we created two avenues for participants to automatically sync their activity from Apple Watches, Fitbits and more with integrations with mobile apps like MoveSpring and Boundless Motion from Charity Dynamics.
With Movespring you make the activity challenge completely immersive. MoveSpring integrates with wearable fitness devices, so activity is synced automatically to DonorDrive fundraising pages. MoveSpring is designed to keep fundraisers motivated and engaged with:
- Visual journey maps with milestones and tips from you or a sponsor.
- Daily workout modules and goals
- Leaderboards to fuel the competitive spirit
- and more...
You can even get sponsors involved with sponsored content, incentives push notifications, journey milestones, journey map features, and sponsored cards.
Conclusion
Take on the challenge by creating an end-of-year activity challenge. It's a low-risk, high-reward campaign framework that's simple to execute, easily customized, and most importantly engages your community to raise the critical funds you need. With Active Impact™, Activity Pledges and Movespring, you can create a holiday-themed activity challenge to help drive critical fundraising revenue from canceled events this year.