Peer-to-peer fundraising is when your supporters raise money on your behalf, asking their own friends and family to give. It covers everything from a charity-run virtual challenge to a supporter who signs up for a marathon and fundraises as they train.
The three guides below cover the three types in depth. This page explains how they differ, so you can start with the one that matches what your team is running.
In direct giving, a supporter donates to you. In peer-to-peer fundraising, a supporter raises for you, and their network gives because they were asked by someone they know.
That difference changes what your team has to manage. A donation needs a payment page. A fundraiser needs a registration route, a fundraising page, a reason to keep going, and a thank you at the end. Each of those steps is somewhere supporters drop out, and the gap between someone signing up and someone becoming an Active Fundraiser is where most peer-to-peer income is won or lost.
The three types below share that shape, but differ in who starts the campaign and how much control your team has over it.
Your charity sets the challenge, the dates and the target, then recruits supporters into it. Step counts, cold water dips, or a distance covered across a month. You control the campaign, the branding and the timing, which makes virtual challenges the most predictable of the three to plan and forecast.
Our virtual challenge guide covers how to choose a challenge format, when to run it, and how to keep a challenge community engaged through the month. Read the virtual challenge fundraising guide.
A supporter decides for themselves what to do and when. A birthday fundraiser, a head shave, a bake sale. They are individually small but collectively significant, and they run all year rather than in campaign bursts.
Scale is what makes this type difficult, because DIY fundraisers arrive one at a time, through different routes, with no shared start date to organise around. That is why so many teams end up managing them in spreadsheets.
Our DIY guide covers the size of the opportunity, why it gets hard to manage, and what a well-run DIY programme looks like. Read the DIY fundraising guide.
Your supporters take part in an organised event, either one your charity runs itself or one organised by someone else. A charity-owned mass participation run, a city marathon, a local 10k. Either way your team is coordinating tickets or places, registrations, and fundraising pages against a fixed date.
Registration and fundraising sit in separate systems at most charities, and that gap is where supporters drop out between signing up and creating a page.
Our event fundraising guide covers both charity-owned events and third-party places, where income gets lost between the two, and how GivePanel Events × JustGiving brings them into one journey. Read the event fundraising guide.
If you are already running one type and want to grow it, start with that guide. If you are building a peer-to-peer programme from scratch, virtual challenges are usually the easiest to control and the quickest to learn from, because you set the dates and own the whole supporter journey.
Most charities end up running all three, which is where the admin starts to compound: three types of campaign, three sets of fundraisers, and one team trying to steward them all. Each guide covers how to handle that as the programme grows.