Peer-to-peer fundraising platforms: A comparison guide
Explore the top options for peer-to-peer fundraising platforms, including their features, pricing, and how they can benefit your campaigns.
As a nonprofit organisation, peer-to-peer fundraising (also known as P2P fundraising) gives your supporters the ability to engage their friends and family to raise money in support of your cause. It’s an amazing fundraising strategy that’s very customisable and has unlimited possibilities!
Peer-to-peer fundraising is incredibly successful:
- In 2021, the top 30 U.S. peer-to-peer fundraising programs raised over $900 million.
- 39% of Americans say they’ve donated money because a friend or family member asked them to.
- On Raisely, charities using our peer-to-peer template have increased their fundraising goal by an average of 139%!
Peer-to-peer fundraising platforms provide you with the tools you need to streamline your campaigns and maximise their impact. They can make donor pages more user-friendly, email marketing a breeze, and help you stay focused on your message. In this post, we’ll discuss how peer-to-peer fundraising works and compare the top fundraising platforms to help you decide which one is right for you, even if it’s not Raisely.
How Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Works
Peer-to-peer fundraising doesn’t have to be an event, but it’s typically the most common approach, and we’ll use it as an example. Your fundraising event could be a walk-a-thon, a team challenge, a digital scavenger hunt, or anything else you can brainstorm — we encourage you to think outside the box! You can host an individual fundraiser or team fundraising event to encourage friendly competition and larger donations.
Next, you create a user-friendly campaign page with all the key information, including your fundraising goals, on a peer-to-peer fundraising platform. Once that’s set up, you share it on social media, email, and other relevant channels.
Through your fundraising platform, you can encourage your supporters to set up their own fundraising pages, while using the promotional information or templates you provide them. They then share their campaign pages with their peers across their network.
Sounds easier said than done, right?
As you can see, successful peer fundraising campaigns have many moving parts. If you want to take your online fundraising activities to the next level, you need a peer-to-peer fundraising platform that maximises your outreach potential.
Compare the Top Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Platforms
We’ve compiled a list of the best peer-to-peer fundraising platforms for your nonprofit. For each of these platforms, we’ll cover:
- What the platform does
- Fundraising features
- Price
Let’s get started!
Raisely
The basics: Raisely is a modern, mobile-first fundraising platform known for its advanced peer-to-peer functionality. You can create unique, fully branded campaign websites to bring your fundraising idea to life — without the tech hurdles. Just pick from a number of free templates and customise your site with an easy-to-use, visual page builder.
Fundraising features: For fundraisers and donors, Raisely offers a smooth experience with 100% mobile-responsive campaigns. The personalised profile pages are an excellent way for your fundraisers to keep track of their progress and engage with their donors. Payments are secured with automatic anti-fraud, and donors can give with one click via digital wallets such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Paypal.
For charities, Raisely offers a simple admin panel where you'll find total flexibility to manage your campaign. Customise your sign-up or donation forms and store the information in Raisely's built-in CRM or integrate it with the CRM of your choice. You can also keep track of your campaign with custom reports and integrate Raisely with your tech stack — including Google Analytics, Salesforce, and Zapier.
Additionally, gamification features such as a progress bar, leaderboard, and fun, custom badges for your fundraiser's achievements will help you get that extra engagement to make your campaign a success. And if you’re planning a ticketed event, you can sell, manage, and deliver the tickets online.
A series of onboarding emails will help you get started, including YouTube tutorials, or reference the support centre for an extensive library of articles.
Pricing: Our entire fundraising suite is free, but you can sign up for paid add-ons, including email and SMS messaging or a CRM tool, as you grow. Check out our pricing page for details.
Classy
The basics: Classy makes it easy to build branded campaigns to support a new venture or help fund a project. With Classy, your followers can create pages in seconds to further support your cause.
Fundraising features: Classy emphasises engagement by making mobile-responsive pages that are easy to edit. Its highly customisable features are ideal for peer-to-peer fundraising and crowdfunding campaigns. However, more advanced users should note that Classy doesn’t have a coding option, and some of the templates lack flexibility.
Pricing: Classy encourages you to fill out a form for a customisable quote. The professional plan is $299/month. Also, all of Classy’s plans include a 4% transaction fee.
GiveButter
The basics: GiveButter is great for student organisations, teams, and nonprofits, and allows you create customisable fundraising pages for you and your team. You can also sell tickets to all kinds of fundraiser events.
Fundraising features: GiveButter’s ticketing feature makes crowdfunding easy, and you have control over the data you collect. A knowledgeable customer service team can help you out when you hit snags. Also, since it’s ideal for student organisations and sport teams, T-shirt fundraisers are a big hit with GiveButter.
The biggest complaint is the “Tips” feature, which encourages you to also donate to GiveButter. If you turn off this feature, you’ll be charged a platform fee of 1-5%, depending on which features you’re using for your fundraising efforts.
Pricing: GiveButter offers both a free trial and free version. The payment processing fees are 2.9% + $0.30. However, the free version also includes the Tips feature.
Enthuse
The basics: Enthuse encourages you to “fundraise more, [and] build stronger relationships.” With Enthuse, you can manage multiple donation streams and keep your data all in one place.
Fundraising features: Like so many of its competitors, Enthuse focuses on making fundraising tools user-friendly so you and your followers can run more seamless, successful peer-to-peer campaigns. It also emphasises security and pledges not to retarget your donors and other campaign participants. However, some users have mentioned that the customer service team can be delayed responding to help tickets.
Pricing: Enthuse has a flat fee of £34.99/month + VAT (value-added tax). There are no platform or payment provider fees.
Funraise
The basics: Funraise lets you “build branded donation experiences” by making campaign website creation easy, donor feeds engaging, and fundraising progress bars easy for everyone to see.
Fundraising features: Funraise helps you create website donation forms and campaign sites, makes collecting data and reports easier, and allows for recurring, automated giving. The platform is functional and integrates with several social and payment channels, including Facebook, Instagram, Mailchimp, and Constant Contact. However, some of these integrations aren’t as seamless as they should be, as several users have pointed out.
Pricing: Funraise offers two packages: a free package that includes some of the basics you’ll need, and an Enterprise package, which costs $2,500/year. To unlock many of the peer-to-peer fundraising campaign options, you’ll likely need the Enterprise package.
OneCause
The basics: OneCause simplifies event management and makes donation pages more user-friendly.
Fundraising features: OneCause has multiple social media integration features to help your supporters grow their presence. The motivation and rewards systems encourage gamification through leaderboards, milestone badges, and participant dashboards that track your progress. This peer fundraising software also includes custom branding and integrations, event promotion, donor management, and online ticket sales.
Like Raisely, OneCause campaigns are secure, reliable, and 100% mobile responsive. Unlike Raisely, navigation is sometimes clunky, and there can be difficulties with uploading images.
Pricing: OneCause doesn’t offer a free version. Instead, there are three pricing tiers based on what you need: Essentials, Professional, and Enterprise. However, you have to contact OneCause to learn about the platform fees.
Qgiv
The basics: Qgiv creates “donor-centric experiences” by providing peer fundraising tools that make raising money easier. It specialises in DIY and crowdfunding campaigns, livestreams, and more. You can also host your supporters’ donation pages and track their fundraising efforts to see if they need help.
Fundraising features: Qgiv offers many integrations, including email marketing tools, CRM, and matching-gifts services. It also features branded event pages, custom email campaigns, milestone badges and leaderboards, and live fundraising thermometers.
Pricing: Pricing is one of Qgiv’s biggest drawbacks. It costs $229/month plus transaction fees. However, the $229 covers you for unlimited events, free support, training, and donation forms.
Salsa
The basics: Salsa focuses on reaching out to younger generations, which is smart because 43% of millennial donors are inspired to donate through social sharing. Salsa also guides your campaign efforts by providing you with coaching emails to help you become a pro at social fundraising.
Fundraising features: Salsa is known for flexible, user-friendly event registration, and individual and team pages. The custom dashboards show you up-to-date information on your campaigns. You can segment this information based on donation type, average donation, and more. However, some users have complained about Salsa’s inability to accept offline donations, and updating donor information can sometimes be difficult or overly tedious.
Otherwise, between Salsa Engage, Salsa CRM, the customer care team, and client success HUB, Salsa has fundraising solutions for most of your needs.
Pricing: While it has a free trial, Salsa lacks a free version. Salsa's pricing is based on your needs, and you have to reach out to receive a quote.
CauseVox
The basics: CauseVox attracts online and new donors with augmented smart donation forms and easy-to-design fundraising pages. You can create a standard donation page in a matter of minutes for a variety of fundraiser types, but there’s not a lot of customisation available.
Fundraising features: CauseVox emphasises automation. You can automate your social media posts, trigger emails, smart-fill personal fundraising and team donation pages, and receive daily summaries of your fundraiser’s progress. However, some of these features aren’t always intuitive.
CauseVox also integrates with numerous applications and platforms, including Kindful and many of their integration options.
Pricing: CauseVox’s Basic package is almost free to use. The only charge you’ll incur is the 2.2% + $0.30 per donation processing fee. The Standard package costs $155/year or $200 if you select the month-to-month option, and the Plus package costs $275/year or $315 month-to-month.
Other Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Platforms
These are just some of the best peer fundraising platforms available. However, there are several others out there worth considering, including:
- Funraisin
- DonorPerfect
- Donately
- SnowballFundraising
- Charidy
- 360MatchPro
- Blackbaud
- Lumaverse
Each of these fundraising platforms comes with unique features, pricing, and missions.
Why You Should Fundraise With Raisely
Are you still debating which platform you should use? Raisely is the perfect peer-to-peer fundraising platform for your next campaign if you’re looking for:
- Easy-to-build, unique campaign websites
- Amazing donor experiences
- Strava account integrations
- Custom sign-up forms that make information collecting seamless
- Easily customisable donor and team fundraising pages
- Engaging content add-ons, such as a blog
Plan Your Next Peer-to-Peer Fundraiser With Raisely
Peer-to-peer fundraising has to be meticulously planned, engaging, and most of all, fun! Raisely excels in all three of these areas. Raisely’s four-step framework will help your next campaign go from concept to cohesion. We’ll show you how to shape your campaign, attract and engage supporters within and beyond your regular audience, and create a journey to nurture your supporters and help them succeed.
From there, all of our tools are geared toward encouraging your supporters to customise and share their pages with their community, while striving to achieve individual and team goals. We help motivate your supporters so they’ll raise funds for you.Want to know more about how Raisely can work for you? Talk to one of our fundraising experts and discover how to boost your donations and better engage with your supporters.