How Charity Right encourages fundraiser participation and their 4 key pillars to retention.

Charity Right brings regular, nutritious meals at schools for children who would have otherwise worked for food and gone without education. Charity Right is an ambitious global charity, aiming to make a lasting impact and see the children through to graduation.

We sat down with Ramzy Alamudi, Executive Director (ANZ) at Charity Right to hear about their most recent campaign, Ummah 365 (you'll get the name in a bit). In this interview, you will learn how Charity Right developed their peer-to-peer concept with a simple ask of just $1. We will also talk about ways to encourage fundraiser participation and four key pillars to supporter retention.

How do meals in schools eradicate poverty?

Without Charity Right, most children in poverty must work every day to afford a meal. This means they receive very basic education or none at all. Many of the children in our schools are the first in their family to read, write and speak another language.

Charity Right gives children meals at school every day, not an emergency food pack here and there. We free the students and their families from the dread of not knowing if they will eat tonight. Once we support a school, we continue year on year, and work to give children a reliable safe context to grow, develop and graduate.

“So for these children and their lives, they start in kindergarten, and we want to be part of that. We want to participate with them throughout their entire educational journey, all the way to grade 12, or the equivalent in their respective countries.”

Our ultimate objective is taking children out of systemic poverty. Reliable access to nutritious meals keeps school attendance high throughout the year. Ultimately, individuals who are more educated, have a greater chance of pulling themselves out of poverty and being self-sufficient in the future.

What’s the concept behind the Ummah365 peer-to-peer campaign?

Charity Right’s most recent peer-to-peer campaign, Ummah 365, raised an incredible amount of over A$293k, from just 120 fundraisers!

Our mission of supporting children and their families, literally costs $1 per day. That’s $365 to sponsor a child with a daily meal and access to schooling for an entire year. Hence, the 365 in our campaign name. As to Ummah, it is an Arabic word, its root is the same as mother. In the Islamic practice and theology, the mother is the centre of the family, of the community, of the village, and of society.

“When we refer to Ummah, it means our brothers and sisters, regardless of nation, skin colour, creed and location. We are one collective body that needs to support one another, regardless of our differences. In this case, Ummah is the collective global community. So being a collective global community, we need to collectively come together to support these children 365 days a year.”

The ask in this campaign is very clear and simple: raise $365 to feed and educate a child for a year. $1 a day feels easy, it feels doable and the impact feels notably greater than the effort.

How did Charity Right encourage participation in their peer-to-peer campaign?

On Raisely, we have seen that for most charities 65% of all fundraising comes from the top 10%, and 52% comes from the top 5%. Charity Right has had a similar experience, where the majority of our revenue has come from a small subset of our most active fundraisers.

It is important to start with a shortlist of genuine, highly engaged supporters like regular donors, advocates and volunteers. We analysed who these people were and created categories within this already engaged group. From credible public figures, to people strongly connected to the cause, we were able to identify key reasons for them to participate in our campaign.

We then personally invited these people one by one, formed WhatsApp groups of like-minded supporters way before the campaign even launched. Our closest supporters were able to build momentum, create social proof on the page, engage their own communities and encourage others to join.

We also fostered a sense of community, continually reminding our supporters of our shared mission. This is very important: people want to be part of a meaningful, greater cause, they want to meet other people like them and together contribute to something bigger than themselves, something that will last.

We had several categories of engaged supporters, some very different from others, yet we still managed to find similarities and make sure they felt this sense of a collective global community.

“We're doing this all together, we're all encouraging one another, to support these groups of children. We're going to continue to support one another and inspire one another to create a community out of this. Our focus is not just about fundraising, but it's you being part of a broader community. We are trying to make a change as a collective.”

How does Charity Right retain supporters year on year?

The average donor retention rate year on year stays around 45%. To maintain this number or increase it, it is important to nurture genuine relationships with fundraisers and donors. Here are four key pillars from Charity Right, to retain engagement with your organisation.

Stay in contact
Don’t assume your fundraisers from last year will be as deeply engaged the following year. You need to stay in contact from one campaign to the next to maintain the relationship.

“Your fundraisers aren't there purely to raise funds. They're there as community members that need to remain engaged, and need to be updated on their impact. It's not transactional, it's very deeply relationship oriented.”

Give a sense of novelty
Nobody is inspired by stagnation. It is important to communicate a sense of movement, a sense of change and impact to your supporters. You need to switch things up, you need to show them that every campaign they are doing something new. Whether it’s another perspective on the work that you do, another milestone such as a new school or country, another year for a classroom they supported, a new campaign entirely, a new month or a new cause, your supporters need to be fully aware of that.

“Novelty inspires people to stay engaged and motivated. When fundraising is not the same year on year, it does not start to feel like a chore. It remains a genuine contribution that has an impact and feels meaningful.”

Create a challenge
Provide a clear target or an opportunity to exceed last year's efforts that your supporters made. Give them a challenge to work towards something that is relevant to them.

“We had several fundraisers compete with each other over who will raise more, including our board members. Some united in teams with their family, friends, colleagues and coursemates. It is always fun to work together to complete a meaningful challenge.”

Stay within your context & be resourceful
During the pandemic everything has been deeply online, and our peer-to-peer fundraising was also mostly people sharing their campaign links from their phones. Now our community is more engaged in face to face activities again, and we are changing our plans to include that with more community get togethers, catch ups and other activities.

“One of our supporters ran a pizza event, another baked and sold brookies (cookies + brownies), others were  giving away physical and digital art to their supporters. Encouraging people to use their context and be resourceful creates a true community fundraising atmosphere. It creates opportunities to engage around something more meaningful than the usual routine conversations, it makes people feel more alive and connected.”

How has Raisely supported Charity Right in your fundraising efforts?

Charight Right used Raisely’s built-in gamification such as badges and progress bars to motivate the fundraisers to achieve their goals.

“You can actually see your impact, your target and the revenue you're trying to reach. And not only can you see it on an individual basis, you can see it at a collective level too. The Raisely user interface is cleaner and fresher than other platforms we considered.”

Progress bars with custom metrics have helped Charity Right quantify our fundraisers impact. If a fundraiser raises $1 they’ve fed a child for a day, if they raise $365, they’ve fed a child for an entire year.

“Money is money, right? It's transactional. It's not human, it doesn't have emotion, it doesn't have a heart. But a child does. So each time that financial metric moves, another child is fed. A fundraiser sees the number of children fed go up and wants to do more. People got very competitive over who will get it to move from 399 children to 400. In the end, we managed to move it from 399 to 405, and now it is at 804 and counting.”

Leaderboards and team profiles have helped Charity Right foster a sense of a collective global community of fundraisers. Supporters have joined teams to work together, started new teams to run friendly competitions, laughed together over each other’s attempts to move up in the leaderboard and be displayed on the main page. All while feeling great about the impact they all achieved together.

“As you see the number of donors and how many donations have been made, you start to understand that you're part of this broader community. As a fundraiser, you see that you're not only one fundraiser, but you're one fundraiser of many. Being part of a lot of people doing amazing work, you're inspired to drive harder. You see people collectively coming together to make some form of change.”

Join Charity Right’s global collective and support Ummah 365 in achieving their fundraising goal of $300k. That’s over 823 children fed for a year!

If you’re planning a peer-to-peer campaign, try our free world class template with built-in functionality to help engage your donors. Like Charity Right, you can easily customise your campaign with your branding, add gamification, progress bars and leaderboards to retain fundraisers and encourage participation in your campaign.