Like many nonprofit organizations, your charity will likely be planning its fundraising mix for the year ahead and deciding what campaign or activity to include. But, if you're yet to try your hand at Facebook Challenges or haven't wrapped your head around the concept yet, you might find the idea of including them in your peer-to-peer fundraising portfolio a bit daunting.
How do you find the right Challenge activity to suit both your nonprofit and your supporters? How do you keep people engaged throughout the whole Challenge? What do you budget and how do you convince the decision-makers in your team that Facebook Challenges are the way forward?
The answer: this guide to planning the perfect Facebook Fundraising Challenge for 2023!
If you’re a fundraising lead or manager deciding on the suite of events and campaigns that you’re going to run in 2023, then this guide is for you. It will tell you everything you need to know about planning and scoping out one of these Challenges, how to pitch it to your fundraising director, CEO and board, and what to consider with the cost of living crisis in your planning.
It’ll also be useful to you if you are a digital lead in a charity, and are looking for ways to innovate with your digital fundraising. You can use this guide in collaboration with your fundraising team to see if you can test this highly effective format at your organization.
And, of course, if you’re in community or event fundraising, this is for you too! We’ll provide lots of details about the implementation of these social fundraising Challenges, so you know exactly what it’ll mean for your budgets and work plans.
A Facebook Challenge is a virtual fundraising event that uses multiple features within Facebook to sign up participants, provide an online community, and make online fundraising really easy. Because it all happens within the Facebook platform, Challenges provide a seamless and enjoyable experience for participants.
Facebook's Charitable Giving Tools relies on PayPal Giving Fund to handle the payment processing of donations, ensuring a seamless fundraising experience for nonprofit organizations and donors.
There’s obviously much, much more nuance and detail involved in these Challenges but that’s a broad overview of how they work to get us started.
GivePanel’s 2021 Facebook Fundraising Benchmark Report is all about exactly that! You can download the report and watch the webinar for all the details, but some of the key numbers that you’ll want to know are:
A hugely diverse range of charities have done Challenges with many different concepts finding success – everything from simple walking to intense physical Challenges to quirky craft-based activities. However, they’re not for every single kind of organization.
Here are some initial questions you can ask yourselves:
Take our ‘should my organization do a Challenge?’ quiz to evaluate your nonprofit and figure out if a Challenge is the right fit for you. It’ll only take a few minutes to complete!
It’s really important not to panic, and not to talk yourself into a crisis. Many organizations slashed their budgets and targets at the start of the pandemic, which turned out to be a huge mistake.
Fundraising strategy expert and consultant, Tom Hickey, has the following advice:
Fundraisers need to innovate in difficult times (and at all times, really!). Tom points out that the worst thing you can do is start to disappear. If you don’t ask your audiences, you can be sure that someone else will. Test out concepts on a small scale – don’t bet everything on an untested idea.
Read more from GivePanel’s experts in our article on how to plan your digital fundraising in tough times.
The truth is that there will always, always be competition in fundraising, no matter what format you use! There is competition in the Challenge space, but there’s still so much potential for getting a strong combination of cause, concept and message, and activating a new audience who have never done a Challenge before.
Given competition and the cost of living issue, the fundamentals of doing a Challenge are more important than ever. Invest in training your team so they can plan and deliver the Challenge effectively. And don’t forget that it’s so important to know your audience: design your Challenge with them in mind and make sure the messaging connects with them.
The GivePanel Academy provides the training, resources, coaching and peer support that your organization needs to run a high-performing Challenge.
I’d recommend three steps to start getting your idea together:
We have a number of resources that will help you get buy-in from your senior management team, your CEO and your board:
It’s crucial that your fundraising director understands the way Challenges work, and also the potential for acquisition and the synergy across different forms of fundraising. Challenges are a great lead generator for regular giving acquisition campaigns, and can lead to a serious uplift in birthday fundraisers. There are a huge amount of possibilities, and Challenges should be considered as a key part of the overall fundraising mix, rather than as isolated campaigns.
Plan now for next year. You’ll need a substantial budget to run a Facebook Challenge, and you’re going to want to make sure it’s all allocated and locked down well in advance.
The main costs for running a Facebook Challenge are incentives and ads. Use our free planning calculator tool (download it at the bottom of this blog) to work out what you can spend, and what kind of return you can expect to see. Play around with the numbers – see what you get with a bare minimum budget, and also explore what kind of return is projected with a more ambitious spend.
Challenges have a lot of ingredients and it’s easy to mess things up if you don’t fully understand the user journey (or ‘funnel’), and if you don’t plan properly. Think through all the following points when you’re first exploring the idea of doing a Challenge, and you’ll stay on the right track:
Test your creative and make sure your ads don’t over-emphasise the freebie to avoid attracting people who are just accumulating free t-shirts. There’s some great advice available about how to shape your ad creative from GivePanel’s Danni Adam.
First, download our free Challenge calculator tool at the bottom of this blog and enter what you think you can spend on ads, t-shirts, fulfilment and external support. It will generate projections for you, and you can tweak the numbers until you get the results that are appropriate for your organization.
Once you’ve done that, you can start the process of planning your first Challenge. GivePanel has the following resources that will help you:
Simply fill in the form below to download the free Facebook Challenge calculator tool.