When and how to use teams in your P2P fundraising campaign

"Should we turn on teams for this campaign?"

It's one of the questions we hear most often from charities planning a peer-to-peer campaign, and the honest answer is: it depends on the campaign. Teams fit some campaigns brilliantly. On others they add setup work and friction without bringing much back.

So consider this a decision guide. Four situations where teams earn their keep, the cases where you're better off without them, and five setup choices that decide whether your teams actually deliver. But first, briefly, what teams are for.

What teams are for: the maths of team fundraising

Teams are a recruitment engine; the leaderboard is a side effect. We've made the full argument in team captains do the recruitment your charity can't, so here is just the maths.

Everything in P2P comes back to one equation: total raised = number of fundraisers × average raised per fundraiser (plus self-donations). A platform can help with the average. The number of fundraisers is the lever only you can pull, and it's the hardest one.

Teams pull it for you.

On BetterNow, the average fundraising team has 7.8 members. That means every team captain you recruit brings roughly seven other fundraisers with them, people you would never have reached yourself, because they join for their captain, and only secondarily for your cause. Recruit 100 captains and you don't have 100 fundraisers. You have close to 780.

Teams are the cheapest fundraiser acquisition channel a charity has access to. Certainly cheaper than ads.

The scale this can reach is real. At Roparun, the Dutch non-stop relay to Rotterdam, the team is the entire fundraising unit: 205 teams raised €4.7 million in 2025, roughly €22,900 per team. Or take Tour de Taxa, where the Danish taxi industry cycles to Paris for Julemærkefonden: the 2026 edition is organised as regional teams, and the leading team, 14 riders from southern Denmark, has already raised close to DKK 69,000 with months still to go before the start. One captain, fourteen networks.

Two honest caveats, because the sector often oversells this. First, the often-quoted figure that teams account for 93 cents of every dollar on walk campaigns comes from Blackbaud's 2019 benchmark, a US vendor figure, so treat it as directional. (Yes, we're a vendor too, and yes, the 7.8 above is our own number. Apply the same scepticism to us; we'd respect you for it.) Second, there is no solid evidence that an individual fundraiser raises more just by being on a team. The value of teams is that you get more fundraisers, and that captains keep their teammates active. Recruitment, in other words.

When teams earn their keep

Teams are worth the setup effort in four situations:

1. Workplace and corporate campaigns. Colleagues are a ready-made team with built-in social pressure, a natural captain (often the one who signed the company up) and an existing communication channel. If you run corporate P2P at all, teams should be the default.
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2. Community-rooted causes. Alumni groups, faith communities, parent groups, sports clubs. Wherever a real-world group already exists, a team page simply gives it a home. You are borrowing social infrastructure that took years to build.
3. 
   Multi-week campaigns. Teams compound. Captains recruit in week one, teammates invite friends in week three, the leaderboard does its work in week five. A one-week sprint is too short for any of that to happen.
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4. Causes people hesitate to fundraise for alone. Mental health, addiction, rare diseases. Asking your network for support on a sensitive cause feels exposed when you do it solo. Doing it as one of eight teammates normalises it. The team gives every member a socially easy answer to "why are you doing this?": because my colleagues are.

And when should you skip teams? Really only when the campaign is too short for them to compound, or when you have no capacity to support captains at all (more on that below). One mistake we see often is treating teams as an event-only feature. They work on birthday campaigns, in-memory pages and ambassador programmes too. And schools are the most overlooked opportunity of all: a class or a year group is a ready-made, high-trust team with a teacher as captain.

How to make teams work: recruit captains, not fundraisers

Here's the mental shift: when teams are on, your recruitment job changes. Stop recruiting fundraisers one by one and start recruiting captains, then make it effortless for each captain to bring their seven.

Five things make the difference.

1. Put team creation in front of people, early. If starting a team is buried behind an admin flow or a support email, it won't happen. "Start a team" should sit right next to "start fundraising" on your campaign page.
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2. Build the invitation moment into team creation. The seconds right after someone creates a team are your golden recruitment window; their motivation will never be higher. The flow should ask them to invite teammates immediately, with one click.
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3. Make inviting team members effortless. Give captains pre-written invitation copy with a space for one personal sentence. The personal sentence is what makes the invitation land ("my mum asked me to join" beats any charity email), and the pre-written rest is what makes it actually get sent. Then let captains invite again later. One-shot invitations leave most of the team unbuilt.
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4. Recognise recruitment, not just totals raised. If your only leaderboard ranks teams by funds raised, you reward the big-network captains and demotivate the rest. Celebrate the captain who brought ten teammates as loudly as the team that tops the board.
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5. Suggest the defaults. Jillian Stewart of Peerworks Consulting calls this the power of suggestion: people follow the norms you set. Suggest a team size ("teams of 5 to 10 work best"), a team goal, and a self-donation to start the page. Blank fields produce timid answers; suggested defaults produce ambitious ones.

And the one mistake that undoes all five: leaving captains to figure recruitment out alone. A captain is a volunteer doing your hardest job for free. Give them a short guide, a nudge halfway through, and a thank-you that matches what they actually did for you.

The short version

Turn on teams whenever a real-world group already exists around your campaign (workplaces, schools, clubs, communities), whenever the campaign runs long enough for teams to compound, and especially when the cause is one people hesitate to champion alone. Then spend your energy on captains: make starting a team obvious, make inviting teammates a one-click moment, and recognise the recruiting, because recruitment is the whole point.

Get that right and every captain you win brings seven fundraisers with them. That's the closest thing to compound interest our field has, and one more way to make the world a little more generous.