Saying Thank You in Peer to Peer Event Fundraising

There are more opportunities and need to say thank you in a peer-to-peer fundraising event campaign than traditional organizational fundraising campaigns. Event participants should be thanked from start to finish during their fundraising engagement including when they register, when they finish the event and lots of times in between. In addition, event donors need to be thanked by both the fundraiser and nonprofit organization. With so many opportunities to say thank you, finding a way to do so in a meaningful way can be difficult at times.

Peer-to-peer event fundraising thank yous have the opportunity to show appreciation, recognize participants and donors and inspire them to do more without asking.

Ideas to Say Thank You

1. Autoresponder emails are a great way to immediately say thank you when a participant performs an action that needs to be acknowledged in a timely fashion; registering, fundraising milestones, and making a donation are all actions to be thankful for.
2. Saying thank you by telephone can go a long way.  I liked to call fundraisers who made a large personal donation to their fundraising efforts and say thank you. Most times I caught them off guard because they were expecting me to ask them for something but I always found that they were pleasantly surprised to just being thanked. The best phone calls were the one when the fundraiser used the interaction as an opportunity to share their story with me.
3. You can’t say thank you enough during event day. Inspire your participants to thank your volunteers, your volunteers to thank your fundraisers and your staff to thank everyone. The best people to thank your participants are the ones receiving the benefit from the funds raised at your event.
4. Videos enable you to say thank you in a personal way if you can’t say it in person and are the best way to say thank you in a viral format. Collect footage at your event or about your mission and integrate the footage with thank you messaging. Send it to your fundraisers to thank them for participating and inspire them to send it their donors to say thank you for donating!
5. Thank you for participating emails should go out within twenty four hours of your event, no exceptions. These emails can be pre-written and ready to go before the event and reviewed and sent as soon as the event is complete. It is important to not pre-schedule these emails to automatically go out in the event that something happened at the event that needs to be acknowledged in the email.

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