A new fundraising season is here for 2021 and many people are itching to get out and into new positive routines or events.
So why not tap into that for fundraising?
New innovations from 2020 are making it possible for fundraising programs to encourage participants to complete fitness challenges that can not only be tracked through wearable fitness trackers and mobile devices, but also synced together with your peer-to-peer campaigns on your fundraising platform.
Building engaging virtual experiences for participants is vital this year. You need to have something to involve your participants for multiple days and you need to have a viable virtual plan to stabilize fundraising in a season of ever changing advisories and regulations.
Take your planned spring, summer and fall events to encourage your supporters to get healthy with their mobile devices and encourage them to use their wearable activity trackers all for a good cause.
Here are the three key ways to ensure you maximize engagement and why they work and how to enable this for your organization:
1. Track Collective Progress
As the hosting organization, you decide the activity benchmark just like you set the collective fundraising goal. Choose one that best resonates with your fundraisers, such as the number of steps, miles or minutes. Set up individual challenges where the participant selects their individual fitness and fundraising goal or a collaborative one like “Let’s walk 100,000 miles and raise $100,000 together in May!”
Bonus: If fitness isn’t the goal you can choose to track a custom activity like hours volunteered, meditation minutes or other repeatable, trackable things that fit your mission.
Give your event participants the ability to monitor their fundraising and fitness progress all in one spot on their mobile device and allow them to seamlessly sync with common fitness tracking apps such as Apple Health, Google Fit and Strava.
Why it works:
Activity Tracking brings back a sense of competition and camaraderie to participants who love to do in-person physical challenges and community walks. It also allows you to create mission moments with a tangible way for participants to visualize progress.
In May of 2020 ,the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s community went above and beyond the challenge through their virtual 31-Day Challenge. Fundraising for that event increased by 181% from the previous year and their participant base increased by 151%.
How to enable:
DonorDrive has teamed up with Charity Dynamics to extend dynamic fitness fundraising campaigns on the DonorDrive platform through Boundless Motion, an activity tracking module within Charity Dynamics’ leading mobile app, Boundless Fundraising. Thanks to our collaborative partnership, DonorDrive’s Active Impact feature set fully integrates into this mobile environment. The combined functionality of both platforms is designed to bring fundraising and activity technologies together which provides a compelling and seamless experience for participants and fundraising professionals to use.
2. Tie Donations and Activity Together
Nothing is more motivating to a participant to run the extra mile than knowing that mile will literally translate into another dollar to the mission. Activity Pledges are a new way for donors to give online and pledge toward a unit of activity (and set a donation max cap) the participants complete.
Why it works:
When activity data is integrated with your fundraising platform it provides participants to have a more compelling ask to donors. Each time they share and showcase progress they can invite more people to support them. Donors now have two reasons to donate: they are not only supporting your organization, they are also supporting their friends' fitness goals.
How to enable:
DonorDrive created Activity Pledges as a new donation method and when activity is logged in Boundless Motion or Active Impact, their donation thermometer advances in real time.
3. Reward Star Participants
You may not be able to have closing ceremonies where medals and trophies are awarded to the star participants in front of a crowd, but you can certainly showcase them and celebrate them through their mobile and online fundraising experiences. Use leaderboards to showcase top fundraising and active participants. When creating your fitness challenge make sure your strategy includes compelling incentives and clever badges for the participants to chase after them.
Why it works:
Gamification and achievement badges work as a form of motivation in many environments including in education, video games, and fitness tracking. Susan G. Komen recently used Boundless Motion’s challenge badges to engage participants in its More Than Pink Walk. Participants who used the activity tracker and earned challenge badges raised 6.7 times more than those who didn’t.
How to Enable:
Both DonorDrive and Boundless Motion can accommodate custom badge designs and can showcase participants who make their activity or fundraising achievements. Also, these tools enable automatic communications through email and text to send to participants to instantly congratulate them when they complete their goals in real time.
Ready to set up your challenge?
When you tie in fundraising to fitness challenges, your supporters will be more resolved to keep going and that translates to greater fundraising revenue, greater mission focus and greater engagement.
Boundless Motion and Active Impact are designed to help motivate and energize participants toward collective fitness and philanthropic goals. By using their combined functionality, you can revitalize your legacy events or create new ones to diversify and increase revenue and build momentum in the 2021 fundraising season.
