Fundraising 101
1. Learn to use your Fundraising Hub
Fundraising online is a great way to track your efforts and keep your sponsors up to date on your progress.
Register online and you will automatically receive a personal page and access to your fundraising hub. Your fundraising hub allows you to customize your personal page, collect donations securely online, enter donations that were collected offline (cash, cheque or a written down credit card number) and the opportunity to win cool prizes depending on your location.
The fundraising hub allows you to:
- Send out fundraising emails, and send thank you emails to donors
- Customize your personal and team page
- Set your personal and team fundraising goal
- Get your personal page link for sharing
- And much more!
2. Customize your Personal Page and Team Page
Once registered you'll receive a personal page that you can customize by uploading photos into your scrolling gallery, accept donations, view your thermometer and view your personal message centre.
If you're a part of team you'll also have a team page. The team page has a lot of the same functionality as your personal page, the team captain will be able to upload team photos, accept donations, view the teams fundraising progress, write a team message and view all of the team sponsors and their messages of support .
You can customize eith your personal or team page through the fundraising hub.
3.Send Emails through your Fundraising Hub
Anyone in your contact book is a potential donor. Upload your contacts to your fundraising hub and ask for donations early and often. Our successful participants have said they've received donations from the least expected people! Here are some groups to keep in mind: family, friends, colleagues, alumni, neighbors, church groups, doctors and local businesses.
- Login and click on the Fundraising tab in the left navigation pane
- Click on Get Sponsors in the left navigation pane
- Upload all your email addresses at once by clicking on the brown address book, or enter them manually (200 email max)
- Customize your personal message and then click Send Email
4. Use your social networks to ask for suppport
Think about this: if each one of your 200 Facebook friends gave you $5, you would have already raised your minimum fundraising goal for the Step Up Challenge! Post often to your social networks, share training updates, pictures and encourage your network to share your message.
From the fundraising hub you can send Tweets, Facebook posts and Linkedin posts. You can alternatively copy and paste the link to your personal page directly into the social network of your choice and ask them to donate. TIP! Stay up to date and help spread awareness by using the #DoItForDad tag in all your posts and share pictures of your activities leading up event day and during your climb.
- Login and click on the Fundraising tab in the left navigation pane
- Click on Get Sponsors tab in the left navigation pane
- At the bottom of the page you click on the respective social media icon you'd like share your personal page link to
- Your social media post will pop up for customisation, don't forget to make use of the #DoItForDad hashtag!
5. Make use of the good old fashioned pledge form
A lot of fundraising is still done the good old fashioned way, face to face and offline. You can use this pledge form to help collect and organize your offline donations. There's also a tab in your fundraising hub called Manage Cash and Cheques that let you record your offline donations so you can share your current fundraising level online and automatically update the thermometer on your personal page.