DIY Fundraising: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and What Good Looks Like in Practice
If you’ve read our introduction to DIY fundraising, you’ll know the basics: supporter-led, always-on, and full of potential. But when community fundraising teams sit down to think seriously about building a DIY programme, a different set of questions tends to come up.
What actually counts as DIY fundraising – and what doesn’t? Are there clear boundaries, or does everything a supporter does on their own initiative qualify? And what does a well-run DIY programme actually look like for a UK charity?
This post tackles both.
What DIY Fundraising Actually Is
DIY and Supporter-Led Fundraising is peer-to-peer fundraising initiated entirely by the supporter – not by your charity. They choose the activity, set the goal, pick the date, and reach out to their own network.
The keyword is initiative. The supporter decides to do something for your cause. Your job is to make it as easy as possible for them to get started, and to keep them motivated once they do.
In practice, this covers a wide range of activity:
- A supporter who decides to run every day in November and raise sponsorship.
- Someone who lost a parent to cancer and wants to set up an in-memory fundraising page.
- A group of colleagues organising a charity quiz night at their local pub.
- A student doing a sponsored silence for the first time.
What these examples share is that the energy, the timing, and the motivation all originate with the supporter. Your charity didn’t create the campaign – you made it possible.
What DIY Fundraising Isn’t
This is where it can sometimes get confusing, and it’s worth being clear.
DIY fundraising is not the same as a Charity-Owned Event. When your charity plans “100 Miles in May,” sets the registration dates, runs the advertising campaign, and manages the participant journey – that’s a Charity-Owned Event. You’re in control of the timing and the structure.
DIY fundraising is also not the same as Third-Party Events, where supporters enter an established event like the London Marathon and choose to raise money for your charity. There’s overlap in spirit – the supporter is doing their own thing – but Third-Party Events have their own distinct dynamics and stewardship needs.
The distinction matters because DIY fundraising requires a genuinely different approach. You can’t predict when supporters will arrive, what they’ll be doing, or how long they’ll be at it. The infrastructure needs to work 365 days a year, for any type of event, on any supporter’s timeline.
What It Looks Like in Practice
Charities who are doing this well have one thing in common: they’ve made it genuinely easy for supporters to get started without needing hand-holding from the team.
One of our charities, for example, have a dedicated “I’m doing my own run” page that lets supporters register their challenge, describe what they’re planning, and create their JustGiving fundraising page in a single step. A supporter could be inspired by a friend’s fundraiser, land on that page, and be active and fundraising in under five minutes – without a single email to the fundraising team.
Another charity has taken a similar approach, with a festive fundraising page that walks supporters through the same process. The form captures exactly what the team needs – event type, event date, fundraising platform – while the supporter’s page is created simultaneously. No instructions email. No waiting.
What both charities have built is an experience that meets the supporter where they are: motivated, on a mission, and with limited patience for friction.
The Data Your DIY Programme Needs
One of the things that separates a well-run DIY programme from a frustrating one is what happens after the supporter registers.
When you know a supporter’s event type and event date, you can steward them properly. The person running a half-marathon in three weeks needs different support from the person hosting a bake sale tomorrow. Automated email journeys that segment by event type and trigger based on each supporter’s individual date – rather than a blanket schedule – are what make this possible without a manual effort from your team.
This is also why capturing that data at registration matters so much. A form that asks “What type of event are you planning?” and “When is it?” is doing more than it appears. It’s giving your team everything it needs to steward that supporter well, without ever having to manually check in.
One Platform, Not Five
Most charities don’t start with a purpose-built DIY infrastructure. They start with what they have – a web form, a JustGiving page, and a spreadsheet. For a small number of DIY fundraisers, that works fine.
The problem comes when it doesn’t scale. Registration data in one place, fundraising data in another, email in a third, and someone on the team spending Monday morning reconciling all three.
A connected DIY programme – where registration, fundraising page creation, supporter data, and stewardship emails all flow through one place – isn’t just tidier. It’s what makes it possible to grow the programme without growing the admin alongside it.
If you’re building your DIY programme from the ground up, or looking to get more from what you already have, book a 20-minute walkthrough at givepanel.com/diy-demo and we’ll show you what that looks like in practice.