Celebrity Fundraising How To

With virtual concerts, comedy shows, exercise classes and story times gaining in popularity, you may be asking yourself how to leverage your existing celebrity relationships to drive awareness and donations for your cause. With Blackbaud Peer-to-Peer Fundraising™, powered by JustGiving™, your mission gets maximized through social sharing and fundraising.

Celebrity campaigns or fundraising pages can be created in just a few minutes and promoted through social media channels, emails and direct marketing efforts. Let’s take a look at how you can launch a celebrity fundraiser.
 

1. Identify your celebrity and determine why he or she wants to fundraise and support your cause (hint: this will become a part of the story).
2. Define a fundraising goal (bonus if the celebrity is willing to match an amount raised).
3. Ask your influencer to record a video (nothing too fancy) for why he or she wants to collaborate with your organization. Provide some talking points for what your organization is doing in the community through your programs or in response to current events. Go ahead and upload that to YouTube.
4. Build your fundraising page and announce it to the world.
5. Thank your donors and share progress updates.

With Blackbaud Peer-to-Peer Fundraising™, powered by JustGiving™, organizations can create a fundraising campaign with celebrity approved imagery and story quickly and easily. Fundraising, social sharing, leaderboards, and a progress meter are all built in, making it an approachable solution for campaign that will drive interactivity. You can also embed that YouTube video that was recorded!

For example, Emilia Clark and her nonprofit SameYou launched a fundraising campaign in response to the coronavirus. On March 30th, she posted a video on Instagram with a favor: Donate to her COVID-19 Relief Fund. In return (or as she says, as a thank you), 12 donors will be selected at random to join her for a virtual dinner party. In less than 48 hours, the campaign generated 24 fundraisers, over 1200 donors and almost 40,000 pounds. 

If you are a looking for a more streamlined or autonomous approach than building the campaign on behalf of your celebrity, you can empower him or her to create a personal fundraising page. Getting started is easy- Fundraisers just click the Start Fundraising page on your organization’s landing page.
There is an orange Fundraise for Us button. Once your celebrity clicks that, he or she will be directed to create a custom link, update pictures, share the personal story or video content, set a fundraising goal, and continuously post updates on Facebook or via social media channels.

Showing donor appreciation is easy for personal fundraisers. Fundraisers can run a report to see all the donors as well as create a personalized thank you message. 

In just a few steps, you can build out a fundraising campaign or a personal page to support your celebrity partners, magnify your mission, and raise more funds! This allows influencers to get up running quickly with the world’s leading donor-focused, mobile-friendly, socially-integrated personal fundraising.