Walking Challenges vs High-Yield Challenges: Getting Your Activity Mix Right
Knowing which activity types to lean into, and when, can make a significant difference to your fundraising efforts.
We looked at UK campaign data from 2025 across GivePanel to understand how different activity types affect the bottom line.
Walking challenges still carry the most weight
The headline number from 2025: walking challenges accounted for 40.30% of all funds raised across the year. Close to half of all virtual challenge revenue came from one activity type.
The reason why? Walking challenges are accessible to almost everyone: families, older supporters, people of all fitness levels. They reach a broad audience, which is exactly what you want during peak months when you’re going after volume. They may not feel like the most exciting concept on your calendar, but they’re the most reliable. Don’t drop them in pursuit of something fresher — they’re your foundation, and they perform consistently year-round.
Press-up challenges raise more per campaign
The average revenue picture is different when you look at specific activity types. Press-up challenges generated the highest average funds raised per campaign in 2025, at £153,552, despite having lower overall participation numbers than walking events.
Press-up campaigns tend to attract a different kind of supporter: typically younger, fitness-focused, with highly engaged networks. The registration volumes are lower, but the fundraising output per Active Fundraiser is significantly higher. The audience is different, and so is the return.
Using both types together
The goal isn’t to pick one over the other, but to plan your calendar so each activity type does the job it’s best suited for.
Walking challenges belong in your peak months — October, February, spring. You have maximum market attention, so use the most accessible activity to reach the broadest possible audience.
High-yield fitness challenges are better suited to quieter periods. July and August see less ad competition and a smaller but more targeted pool of supporters, which makes for a good environment for a niche challenge like press-ups, cycling, or running, where you’re going after a motivated audience rather than mass registration.
December and January aren’t the right time to launch anything new. Use those months to steward and activate the supporters already in your database rather than trying to acquire new ones.
Test new activities before you scale them
If you want to try a new activity type, it’s worth running it in a lower-stakes period before committing peak months to an untested concept. Look at average funds raised, participation rates, and activation rates — if the data supports it, give it more weight the following year.
Getting the balance right
Whilst walking challenges give you the volume to scale, high-yield challenges give you the concentrated fundraising output to hit ambitious targets — a calendar that uses both deliberately, in the right months, is more resilient than one built around either type alone.
Want to see how this works in practice? Book a demo at givepanel.com/demo to see how GivePanel can help you balance your campaigns, automate your stewardship, and make the most of your challenge mix.
Already a GivePanel customer? Log into your account to analyse your historical challenge type performance and see which activities your supporter base responds to best.