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A thousand years ago, before the internet and online fundraising systems were ubiquitous, charities would have little clue how their p2p fundraising event-a-thons were doing until event day or later. You would recruit teams and fundraisers, arm them with pledge sheets and brochures, send them out, and then white knuckle it till your team started counting the stacks of coins and cash after the event.
Thank goodness things have changed.
With the majority of participant registration and fundraising now happening online, organizers (like you), don’t have to sweat it out. We’d go so far as to say, the last 30 days of your campaign can be confidently predicted, if you’ve done the work to recruit team captains.
The Big Ifs
If you have the following results 30 days before your event (which, if you’re following our method, you should), you can predict with confidence** how much money your p2p fundraising event will bring in.
The 30 Day Benchmarks
In order for the math to work you’ll need to be within 10% of these metrics:
- Teams – 60% – 30 days out you should be at about 60% of your goal for team recruitment. Did you want 20 teams? Then you should have 11-13 registered and fundraising.
- Participants – 30% – If you recruited your team captains with clear expectations to recruit and fundraise you should have 30% of your expected participants signed up.
- Revenue – 15% – With teams and participants signed up, you’d expect to see some fundraising happening right? If you don’t, you’ve got a problem. If your goal is $30,000, you should be at $3,000-$4,500 at minimum.
- Donors – 10-15% – Your donor total, (assuming you’re hitting the average of 5 donors per participant) should be 10-15% a month out.
Where Are You Heading? Calculate Your Event’s Performance
So enough waiting – if your campaign is in the range for all four metrics above, here’s what should happen in your campaign 30 days later. Grab your pen, a calculator and have some fun factoring in these expected results.
- Teams – should increase by 50%
- Participants – normally swell by 150%
- Revenue – surges 300%
- Donors – grows exponentially by 450%
Let’s look at a pretend event. Here’s what we’d expect to happen based on where they are 30 days out:
| Metric | 30 Days Out | Factor | Add | 30 Days Later |
| Teams | 20 | 50% | 10 | = 30 |
| Participants | 50 | 150% | 75 | = 125 |
| Revenue | $10,000 | 300% | $30,000 | = $40,000 |
| Donor | 60 | 450% | 270 | = 330 |
So now, punch in your numbers below to see if you are trending the right way.
| Metric | 30 Days Out | Factor | Add | 30 Days Later |
| Teams | 50% | = | ||
| Participants | 150% | = | ||
| Revenue | 300% | =$ | ||
| Donor | 450% | = |
Now, there other factors that will impact your results, including but not limited to, your culture of philanthropy, event leadership buy-in, nature of your beneficiary, familiarity and comfort with your cause and charity, age of your charity, demographics of your community of supporters, accessibility of your p2p event activity, etc.
How do things look? Do these stats encourage or concern you?
If you’re on track: Keep your foot on the gas! You are doing great.
If you’re behind: Don’t be discouraged. Call us please. We’ll troubleshoot with you, help you reset and you’ll get your momentum back. Also, consider reviewing these articles below to inspire your recruitment:
- Do You Have Enough Team Captains to Hit Your Fundraising Goal?
- What’s the Scoop on Corporate & Community Challenges?
- Our Proven Process For Team Captain Recruiting
Exponential Success
Visualize successive waves hitting the beach: the first wave of effort is focused on acquiring team captains. The second wave comes as a result of those captains arm-twisting their friends and family to sign-up. This is followed closely by a wave of fundraising revenue as event day nears, and finally, the much larger donor wave hits with force the last 4-5 days before the event
That’s how a well run p2p event looks. It’s exponential.
**Over the past three years, here’s what happened to our four key Coldest Night of the Year event metrics in the last 30 days. Remember, these metrics are averages based on the week to week results of 200+ different campaigns run by small, medium and large charities in the same event, some with staff, some with high-capacity volunteers. A good mix of urban/rural and old/new charities, too. Budgets as low as $100,000 or as high as $25 million. So, a nice wide cross section in the pooling sample.
