DIY fundraising – sometimes called supporter-led, ‘fundraise your way’, or independent fundraising – is one of the most powerful income streams available to charities. It’s also one of the hardest to manage well at scale. When it works, it creates a consistent flow of income across every month of the year, brings in supporters you’d never have reached through organised events, and builds the kind of deep personal connection that turns one-off fundraisers into long-term advocates.
When it doesn’t work, it produces a patchy database, a manual admin burden that grows with every campaign, and a lot of supporters who registered but never started raising money.
This guide explains what DIY fundraising is, why it matters, what makes a programme genuinely scalable, and how leading charities run DIY programmes that deliver year-round without overwhelming their teams.
DIY fundraising is when a supporter chooses their own challenge and raises money for your charity in their own way – rather than signing up for a specific event you’ve organised. The range of activities is huge: running a personal marathon, completing a bake sale at work, cycling across a country, doing something in memory of someone they’ve lost, fundraising on their birthday, giving up something for a month. The supporter sets the challenge; the charity provides the platform, the inspiration, and the stewardship.
The keyword is initiative. Your 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.
For charities, DIY fundraising creates income that isn’t tied to a specific campaign calendar. A supporter who wants to raise money in memory of someone can do so in March or November, regardless of whether you have an event running. A supporter who wants to do something active in January can register and fundraise without waiting for your next organised challenge. The income is distributed across the year rather than clustered around two or three events.
DIY fundraising is also known as: supporter-led fundraising, ‘fundraise your way’ fundraising, independent fundraising, in-memory fundraising (as a specific type), and community fundraising.
DIY fundraising has grown significantly over the past decade, driven by the accessibility of online fundraising pages (particularly JustGiving and Facebook fundraising), the rise of personal challenges as a form of self-expression, and a cultural shift towards supporters wanting more control over how they give.
In the current climate, that opportunity has become even more important. According to the Charities Aid Foundation UK Giving Report 2026, total UK donations fell to £14bn in 2025 – the first drop since 2021. The sector has lost 6 million habitual donors over the past decade, and 1 in 5 people currently say they cannot afford to give. Charities need ways to reach entirely new networks without heavy reliance on ad spend or time-bound campaigns. An optimised DIY programme is one of the most cost-effective responses available: it generates income year-round, it doesn’t depend on your advertising budget, and every supporter who takes part brings their own network of donors who may have never heard of your charity before.
Three types of DIY fundraising deserve particular attention:
In-memory and tribute fundraising
When someone loses a person they care about, fundraising in their memory is an incredibly common response – particularly for causes directly connected to how that person died. In-memory fundraising is a consistently high-value per fundraiser, because the motivation is deeply personal and the fundraiser’s personal network is typically very engaged. A well-stewarded in-memory supporter can raise significantly more than a participant in a structured event.
Personal challenge fundraising
Running a marathon, cycling from Land’s End to John O’Groats, climbing a mountain, completing an Ironman – personal challenge fundraising brings in supporters who already have a challenge in mind and want to attach a cause to it. These supporters tend to be highly motivated and capable of raising significant amounts, because their activity itself drives conversation and donations.
Birthday and personal milestone fundraising
Facebook’s birthday fundraiser feature introduced millions of people to the concept of donating their birthday to a cause. Beyond Facebook, personal milestone fundraising – fundraising on a work anniversary, a decade clean, a child’s first birthday – is a growing category. These fundraisers are typically lower value individually but high in volume and relatively low-effort to support.
The problem with DIY fundraising isn’t acquisition – it’s stewardship. Every supporter has a different challenge, a different event date, a different timeline, and a different level of fundraising experience. In a structured event like a virtual step challenge, every participant is in roughly the same situation at the same time. In a DIY programme, you might have a supporter running a marathon in January, one doing a bake sale in April, and one cycling across Europe in July – some registering at 11pm on a Sunday, others at 6am on a Wednesday. Getting the right message to each of them at the right moment is impossible to manage manually once your programme reaches any scale.
The result for most charities: a growing list of DIY supporters who aren’t being stewarded effectively – because their team simply can’t track individual event dates and send personalised communications for each one.
The drop-off dilemma
Dig into most charities’ DIY data and you find the same expensive problem: a supporter registers with genuine enthusiasm and then never actually starts fundraising. To understand why, it helps to look at what a traditional DIY journey asks of supporters: they feel inspired and visit your website; they fill out a registration form; they receive an automated thank-you email; that email contains instructions and a link telling them to go to JustGiving or another platform to build their page; they click through, create a new login, fill out their details again, and try to connect their page to your charity.
Each of those steps is a barrier. And motivation is fleeting. Your supporters are busy people – registering on their phone during a lunch break, or sitting on the couch in the evening. Every extra click and every redirect acts as an opportunity for them to close the tab and tell themselves they’ll do it later. Later rarely comes. The gap between registration and active fundraising is where charities lose a significant proportion of their DIY income.
The data gap
Many supporters create a JustGiving fundraising page for your charity directly on JustGiving – without filling in any registration form. They might have heard about your charity from a friend, seen a Facebook post, or simply searched for your cause. Your team has no record of them and no way to steward them unless you’re actively monitoring your JustGiving account. At scale, this is impossible to do manually. These ‘in-the-wild’ fundraisers often turn out to be some of your most motivated — they started fundraising before you even knew they existed.
The charities that get the most from DIY fundraising have four things in common:
An always-on registration journey
A well-run DIY programme is open all year. There’s a registration form on your website that supporters can find any time and use to register for their own challenge, create a fundraising page, and enter their event date. The form is short, mobile-optimised, and connects directly to JustGiving or other fundraising platforms so that registration and fundraising page creation happen in one step.
Automated stewardship based on individual event dates
Every supporter’s stewardship journey is anchored to their personal event date, not to a campaign calendar. An email arrives a week before their event reminding them to share their page. Another arrives after their event thanking them and letting them know their fundraising page is still live. A milestone message fires when they hit 50% of their fundraising target. All of this happens automatically – the fundraising team sets it up once, and the system handles every supporter individually.
Complete supporter data, including those who never registered
The highest-performing DIY programmes capture supporters who come through JustGiving directly, without a registration form. This requires technology that matches incoming JustGiving fundraiser data against your DIY campaigns automatically – identifying supporters by event type and bringing them into your stewardship system even if they never registered. These ‘organic’ JustGiving supporters are often some of the most motivated fundraisers in your programme.
Segment-based communication for higher-value supporters
Not all DIY supporters need the same level of attention. A supporter who has raised £1,000 and has a major personal challenge coming up is worth a personal phone call. A supporter who registered three months ago and hasn’t started fundraising yet needs a different intervention. A well-run DIY programme uses filtering and segmentation to identify who needs what, and allocates the team’s personal outreach time to the supporters where it will have the greatest impact.
One-step registration and page creation
A supporter fills in one form on your website. Their registration is captured and their JustGiving fundraising page is created in the same step – no redirection, no separate setup, no follow-up email asking them to ‘complete their profile’. The fewer steps between registration and active fundraising, the higher your activation rate.
Personal event date triggers
GivePanel’s email journey tool supports triggers based on each supporter’s own event start and end date – so every stewardship email arrives at the right moment for that individual. A supporter whose event is in March and a supporter whose event is in October both get their pre-event reminder at the right time for them. You configure the journey logic once; GivePanel handles the scheduling for every supporter automatically.
Smart Match
GivePanel’s Smart Match technology captures supporters who create a JustGiving fundraising page for your charity directly on JustGiving, without registering through your form. After each daily JustGiving data import, Smart Match identifies new fundraisers by event type – running, cycling, bake sales, gaming, and more – and links them to your active DIY campaign. They appear in your GivePanel account and can be stewarded through the same email journeys as your registered supporters. It’s the only way to build a complete picture of your DIY programme, including the supporters you didn’t know about.
Advanced filters and segments
GivePanel’s filtering tools let you cut your supporter data by fundraising platform, matched status, amount raised, event type, campaign, and more. You can save any filtered view as a named segment and use it to target specific groups with the right message – or identify which supporters are worth a personal phone call. Segment data can be exported as a CSV for use in your CRM or SMS platform.
“I was thanking fundraisers manually before and spent most of my time trying to identify who I had already thanked. Now with GivePanel, what previously took hours is taking me 5 minutes.”
— Carla Anikiah, Chief Strategy & Impact Officer, Autism Assistance Dogs Ireland
Find out why 400+ charitable organisations choose GivePanel →
What’s the difference between DIY fundraising and a virtual challenge?
A virtual challenge is an organised event with a specific format, timeline, and campaign. Your charity runs it, promotes it, and all participants take part in the same challenge at the same time. DIY fundraising is the opposite: supporters choose their own challenge, set their own timeline, and fundraise independently year-round. Many charities run both – a flagship virtual challenge once or twice a year, with a DIY programme running continuously in the background to capture supporters who want to fundraise outside of your structured events.
How do I get more supporters to register for a DIY programme?
DIY programmes typically recruit through a combination of: your existing donor base (particularly lapsed donors and lower-level regular givers who might want to convert their giving into active fundraising), social media (particularly Facebook, where in-memory and birthday fundraising are well-established behaviours), and organic search (people searching for ‘run a marathon for [cause]’ or ‘fundraise in memory of’). Having an always-on registration form that’s easy to find on your website is essential. Some charities also drive DIY registrations through JustGiving’s charity page, where supporters can start a fundraiser directly.
How does in-memory fundraising fit into a DIY programme?
In-memory and tribute fundraising is one of the most common DIY use cases, and one of the highest-value per supporter. GivePanel supports in-memory fundraising as a DIY event type – supporters can register, specify their event type as ‘in memory’, and enter the details of the person they’re fundraising for. Your stewardship emails can be sensitively personalised to acknowledge the context. Smart Match also captures in-memory supporters who create a JustGiving page directly, so you don’t miss the supporters who started fundraising before they found your registration form.
Can I run a DIY programme and structured campaigns at the same time?
Yes – this is the norm for larger charities. Your DIY programme runs year-round in GivePanel; your structured campaigns (virtual challenges, third-party event recruitment) run as separate campaigns in the same account. All your supporter data is unified, so a supporter who first engaged through your DIY programme and later signs up for your flagship event appears as a single contact with their full history across both.
How much of my team’s time does a DIY programme require?
Once set up, a well-automated DIY programme on GivePanel requires minimal ongoing manual time. The registration form, email journeys, and Smart Match run automatically. Your team’s time goes into: monitoring dashboards to spot high-value supporters worth a personal call, reviewing segment data, and periodically refreshing email content. Charities that have moved their DIY programme onto GivePanel consistently report going from hours of manual work per week to minutes.
GivePanel supports year-round DIY programmes for charities ranging from specialist organisations running their first supporter-led campaign to large national charities managing thousands of DIY fundraisers simultaneously. Over 400 charitable organisations across 16 countries use GivePanel.