My experience as a fundraiser on Raisely
Find out how Jordan, Raisely’s Head of Customer Success, got on with her first peer-to-peer fundraiser, after signing up for Kids Cancer Project’s ‘The Better Challenge’, Her goal? To understand community fundraising from the inside, and get behind a fabulous charity in the process.
Want to understand a person? Walk a mile in their shoes.
...Or better yet: raise some funds on their platform!
And that’s exactly what Jordan, our Head of Customer Success, decided to do.
In a bid to better understand the Raisely customer experience, she jumped on board as a fundraiser for The Kids' Cancer Project - a charity dedicated to finding kinder, more effective treatments for the 90 Australian children diagnosed with cancer each month.
Jumping feet-first into The Better Challenge campaign, Jordan committed to walking a huge 90km in 30 days.
Now, she’s got the scoop on the life of peer-to-peer fundraisers - from the inside!
But we’ll let her tell you about it herself...
My experience as a fundraiser - and the 4 reasons I was able to achieve my goal
Guess what, everyone? I did it!
In the brief window of 30 days, I managed to:
- stay motivated,
- hit my kilometre goal
- AND raise a grand total of $1500!
I have to say, I definitely attribute my success to a few nifty features for community fundraising.
Raisely’s features made it easy for me to communicate with donors, stay focused on my progress and celebrate those all-important milestones.
🎖Badges
The Raisely Peer to Peer (P2P) template comes fully equipped with badges, allowing organisations to add icons and milestones tailored to their event.
When I got started, I had already ticked off the Self Donation and First Donation badges, and I couldn’t stand to see only 2 of 10 complete!
So, I added a profile photo to get another and then pushed myself out of my comfort zone by sending an email to my connections, asking for donations, and sharing on socials.
The Kids Cancer Project made it so easy to take that step, by having a thoughtfully drafted email ready, making it easy to share with my family and friends.
From there, the donations and additional badges started rolling in.
The drive to get all those badges definitely compelled me to put myself out there.
Clearly, I am a sucker for gamification!
🏃🏼♀️ Strava Integration
I signed up for the fundraising campaign a few days late in September. Right from the start, I knew I had to do about 3+ kilometres a day to hit my goal.
I connected my Strava account with ease and I was on my way. Each morning I would make my toddler a crumpet with butter and honey, put him and his breakfast in the pram, and get our morning walk done first thing.
Typically, day-to-day life gets in the way of optimistic plans for morning walking, but peer-to-peer fundraising is a great way to hold yourself accountable.
On another note, I’m sure I’m not the only one who forgets they have Strava connected only to realise after you’ve driven to the shops, which means a bit of deleting and manually adding.
Fortunately, even those little mistakes are easily rectified within your personal campaign dashboard.
So there really is no excuse!
💌 Campaign Communication
The Better Challenge team clearly put a lot of thought into their fundraiser communication.
They use the Messaging Add On in Raisely, which sends tailored emails and text messages.
It was a great way to keep me up-to-date on the campaign and my individual progress. And the personalised communication made me feel seen as well as encouraged me to keep going.
🙌 Community
Peer-to-peer fundraising, done well, is a great way to stay motivated.
Once I’d shared the fundraising campaign with my family and friends - and they’d donated - I felt a real sense of duty to complete the task.
There was no way around it; I had to hit my 90 kilometres. And even though it was a remote event, I felt very connected to The Kid’s Cancer Project and their campaign as a whole.
I loved seeing my donors’ comments and being able to easily comment back through my dashboard, which in turn helped to keep the pressure on, so I didn't let them down!
I even shared a blog post to keep them updated (and, of course, to get a badge!).
I couldn’t have done it without their support.
Jordan’s Raisely Review
Understanding the community fundraising experience as the end-user has been so enlightening. As a relatively new member of the Raisely team, this experience helped me to see things from a new perspective.
And I’m impressed!
I love how this amazing platform is allowing creative charities like The Kid’s Cancer Project to create engaging, successful community fundraising campaigns.
I also want to say thank you to Jamie, our Head of Growth, for encouraging us to get involved – to give something back and to understand the peer-to-peer fundraising experience from the inside.
Also, a huge thanks to The Kid’s Cancer Project for making me feel a part of something so great. Despite a bit of a squeeze, we hit our 90 kilometres (even though 20 of those were packed in during the last three days!!).
We did it! And you can too.
Book a demo and see how Raisely could help your campaign hit the ground running.