Birthday P2P fundraising campaign recipe

Jesper Juul Jensen
CEO
3
Min to read

This is your cheat sheet and recipe for how to conduct an ongoing birthday P2P fundraising campaign. A few hours of setting up the automation will create a campaign that generates returns for many years.

Birthday fundraisers are not the P2P fundraisers with the highest average or even the highest success rate. But as a concept, it has something else going for it. Everyone has a birthdate, and you get a new one every year. This makes it maybe one of the only P2P fundraising concepts you with certainty can suggest to everyone in your supporter database. 

Birthday fundraisers are a great entry point for anyone new to P2P fundraising. So if you are not already engaging your supporters in birthday fundraisers, then the below is a quick win to add more volume to your P2P fundraising.

Recipe: Ongoing birthday P2P fundraising

Time to prepare: 4-7  hours. Longer if you go with all the optional add-ons.

Campaign period: Ongoing

Ingredients (list of prerequisites)

  • Dataset of supporters (including email, first name and birthdate)
  • Email automation system
  • BetterNow (or another P2P fundraising system)

Optional ingredients:

  • Promotional video
  • 1-2 case stories of supporters who already have donated their birthday to you
  • Landing page

Campaign Instructions

  1. Get hold of the key ingredients. First, make sure you have access to all systems and that data is accessible. Second, make sure you have the necessary consent before contacting your supporters about donating their birthday to you.
  2. Prepare and write an email. The perfect email to a supporter encouraging them to donate your birthday will be short, but include the following:

    a) Have a clear call to action-link going to the first step of creating a fundraising page.

    b) Have social proof, e.g. a short excerpt from a case study or a testimonial from a supporter who donates a birthday to you

    c) Handle hesitations (e.g. ‘too early to create it now’ or ‘my family will prefer to give gifts rather than donations’)

    d) Focus on the value to the supporter from doing it, with statements like “This year, your birthday will be more meaningful than ever”, “The birthday present you will remember for the rest of your life,” etc.

    e) Optionally: A video with testimonials from actual birthday fundraisers.
  3. Optional: Set up an A/B split test of the email.
  4. Optional: Create a landing page in your own CMS to put in between BetterNow and the email. An excellent landing page might increase conversion, as you can present more arguments for why a supporter should donate their birthdate.
  5. Define target group. Maybe you want to leave out certain donor groups. Or perhaps you want to approach different segments differently. 
  6. Set up the email automation. The difficulty of this depends on your email automation system or its capabilities. When to send? For big round birthdays (40 years, 50 years etc.), try to email 3-4 months in advance. For everyone else, we will recommend one to two months in advance. It will differ on culture, age etc., so test it out and try different approaches.

    Automation tip: Most email automation systems can email in advance of a date. But this is recurring on the same date each year so that you can set it to, e.g. ten months after the birthday :-)
  7. Test, test and test. Read more on how to test your email automation here.

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