Facebook Challenges: How to a Create a Facebook Virtual Event
Facebook Fundraising is a valued income stream. Facebook Challenges offer a new way to harness the tools beyond birthday fundraisers. The Roswell Park Alliance Foundation combined a virtual Facebook Challenge with their fundraising. Their objective: to bring an online community together and fundraise for cancer patients. Alison Lockwood (Senior Fundraising Coordinator) and Sammy Jannik (Brand and Digital Marketing Manager) share the process, results, and lessons learned.
What We Will Cover:
- Using Facebook Fundraising for a Virtual Challenge
- Why a Step Challenge?
- The Participant’s Journey
- Creating a Facebook Group
- Our Facebook Ad Strategy
- Initial Numbers
- Building a Community
- Final Numbers
- What’s Next?
📺 Watch the Video:
About Roswell Park Alliance Foundation
We are the non-profit organization that supports Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Centre, the USA’s first Cancer Centre. The funds we raise go toward groundbreaking research. They also support innovative treatment options and patient care programs. Here at the Foundation, we manage all the donations made to Roswell Park.
🏃 Using Facebook Challenges for Fundraising
We decided to take on a challenge throughout February: 280,000 Steps for Cancer Patients. This was the first time we had ever done anything like it.
We were excited to see where it would go. The timing was perfect, right between our other fundraising events. February was a downtime in the year. Not many people engage in physical activities in the winter. Furthermore, we felt COVID’s impact, like many non-profits. We looked for ways to increase peer-to-peer fundraising without a physical event.
This event also served to reintroduce Facebook fundraising to our audience. We taught them that Facebook offers more than just birthday fundraisers. In turn, this created a brand new digital audience for us.
We partnered with Get Your Stories Straight to choose our specific challenge. You can choose all sorts of things, from walking to push-ups. Given the time of year, we felt walking would reach the widest variety of constituents.
We worked with Get Your Stories Straight to create an extensive project plan. This included a detailed timeline. We mapped out everything from the ad launch date to the end of communications. Once advertisements began, participants followed a specific path. Our staff handled all the tracking, and this is where GivePanel became vital.
Data Management with GivePanel
Every day, I ran the donation reports from Facebook. I imported them into GivePanel. Then, I segmented everyone into a proper group. We tracked donations and our T-shirt fulfillments here (we sent T-shirts for free when a participant filled out a lead gen form.) We also compared the number of participants in the group versus the funds raised. Our comprehensive reporting allowed us to watch our numbers closely. It was a great system involving Get Your Stories Straight, GivePanel, and our team.
Community Engagement Commitment
We ran this whole Challenge specifically out of a Facebook group. That is how we communicated with participants. We all posted in the group daily. Our biggest job was ensuring that every post in the group received a comment from a staff member. We missed nothing.
It required a lot of staff time. We worked on this pretty much 24 hours a day. But the group was excited and engaging. Keeping participants engaged and stewarding them throughout the Challenge was a huge part of the work.
👟 Why a Step Challenge?
Why did we choose this specific challenge? There were a couple of reasons:
- We did not have a walk event in place already at the Alliance Foundation.
- We thought walking would be the most weather-friendly activity here in Buffalo, given the cold and snow.
- The activity was a great option for attracting a variety of participants.
- People did not need to buy equipment to take part (less friction than a challenge where participants have to buy equipment first).
We decided to make it a step challenge. We wanted people to aim for 280,000 steps throughout the whole month. That equates to 10,000 steps a day. Participants might initially think they can’t do 10,000 steps. However, they quickly realize they already get most of those steps in their regular day. It was a very attainable goal. It was also easy for them to track. Many used a Fitbit or Garmin. Others used smartphone applications or a regular pedometer.
🚶 The Participant’s Seamless Journey
Before going further, here’s what the participant’s experience was like from start to finish. This is their journey.
The Ad: Participants first saw an ad in their Facebook newsfeed. It was an ad from the Roswell Park Alliance Foundation with a captivating message. The call to action was simple: “Participate in this challenge, get a free T-shirt, help cancer patients, and join a group of donors.”
The Sign-Up: They filled out the lead gen form right on Facebook. They never once left the platform. The whole journey was right on Facebook. They provided their name, last name, and email. The thank you message at the end had a button prompting them to join the Facebook group.
The Group Entry: If they clicked the button, they were dropped off at the group’s entry page. If they requested to join, we approved them automatically. They immediately saw posts and engaged with the community.
The Activation: At the top of the group, we pinned a post. This post explained how to get their free T-shirt. It contained a link to a GivePanel form. They filled in this form, giving us their email and mailing address. After this, we encouraged them via the group and emails to start a Facebook fundraiser.
🏘️ Creating the Community
We had run groups for other events, but this one was different – we needed automatic approvals for membership requests and didn’t want to lose potential participants.
We wanted the journey to be super easy and offer instant gratification. Ads run at all hours. Therefore, we avoided getting people caught up in a post or membership approval process.
We implemented an impactful header image. Get Your Stories Straight provided the initial content and imagery. We tweaked the imagery for our brand standards, tried to evoke a local, Buffalo-feel and we also made sure to include the Challenge name, our logo, and the cause.
Crucially, any team post came from an individual person. This humanized the group. We posted organically, liked, and commented. We wanted to create an amazing community. People knew they were engaging with humans, not just a brand. We even dropped small gifts occasionally.
We had scheduled posts that encouraged discussion. However, we almost didn’t need them; the community was so engaged. The scheduled posts helped maintain the motivation to visit the group.
💰 Final Numbers and Next Steps
Initial Projections vs. Reality
Get Your Story Straight set up our projections. The Challenge did not start until February 1st. Yet, on day two, we saw 689 signups; projections were only 310. Our fundraising was through the roof: over $22,000 compared to a projected $1,100.
By February 15, we were projected to have 1,800 members. We were already over 3,800 members.
Building a Strong Community
The community truly blew us away. We attracted participants from all over—Europe, California, Florida, and everywhere else. This event was barrier-free. It really allowed us to reach people where they were.
The stories shared were inspiring. People connected with strangers. By the end, participants became Challenge ambassadors. They realized they were connected through a common purpose. When one person had a bad day, others chimed in. People offered things like, “I did 15,000 steps today, I will donate some of my steps to you.” They reminded each other that every step counts.
People got super creative, especially given Buffalo’s cold and snow. They walked around kitchen islands or danced to videos to get their steps in.
Final Results and Acquisition
Our staff fulfilled over 2,700 T-shirt orders. We had 1,200 projected. We had to place reorders! This uptake meant people were proud. More importantly, it helped us capture their information, which can be a downfall of Facebook fundraising.
- Final Raised: Almost $217,000 (Projected: $72,000)
- Total Group Members: 3,100
- T-shirts Sent: Almost 2,100
- Active Fundraisers: 1,172 (pages with at least one donation)
- Opt-Ins: Over 2,000 people opted in for future marketing communications.
What’s Next for Facebook Challenges?
We cannot wait to do our next challenge – we will likely change it up, perhaps to a run or a push-up challenge. We are looking at September to tie it to Paediatric Cancer Awareness Month.
Participants already crave another challenge. One member took it upon themselves to create a new group for March. They invited others to join them to keep the momentum going.
Book a demo
Inspired by the Roswell Park Alliance Foundation success story? Book a demo: givepanel.com/demo