How Arts And Cultural Institutions Are Making A Comeback With Crowdfunding 

In our guide for Navigating the New Normal, we highlight a few ways you can incorporate peer-to-peer fundraising to connect your audience with the meaningful work you do. These ideas help bring your in-person experience to a digital audience. (Pssst. If you are thinking about Fiona, you are on the right track.) Let’s explore how you can combine peer-to-peer fundraising to bolster your goals.

Zoos and Aquaria

• Crowdfund a habitat: Need to help build your next panda habitat? Connect with your community by empowering individuals to both fundraise and donate to the exhibit, while sharing stories of what the creature, aquarium or zoo means to them.

• Make your animals the fundraisers: Consider a representative from each of the exhibits as your ambassador. Allow your supporters to donate to each of the animals in order to fund habitat improvements or modernize your events. For example, one of the animal handlers can create a fundraising page for “Perry the Penguin”, sharing his story, personality, behind the scenes pictures and videos, all with a call-to-action on social media for people to donate to Perry. This campaign can be featured at your Gala, newsletter, website, and more until you reach your goal.

• Appeal to your audience: Supplement your annual fund, or in the case of the Dublin Zoo, exceed the goals of your emergency fund so you can ensure your doors stay open. Their videos, puns, sense of playfulness and behind the scenes content really brought the campaign to life, bringing them over 100 fundraisers and over 30k donors. Turning on peer-to-peer fundraising pages on your campaign is as easy as toggling a button. You will be glad you did too as examples like Christina and Brendan sign up in creative and effective ways.

Performing Arts

• Leverage the peer-to-peer network for building repairs: By asking your patrons, board members, volunteers, actors, and stagehands to create a fundraising page and solicit donations from their community, you can raise money for new equipment, building repairs, stocking the prop closet and more!

• Virtual production or awards ceremony: You can run a talent show where each performer gets a personal fundraising page and supporters vote with their dollars. Similarly related, I love this example where a productive ensemble created a campaign for their virtual benefit, with the performers as fundraisers. Ready to take it up a notch? Purchase a customizable webpage to host the virtual awards ceremony of your dreams like this beautiful Honors event.

• Host a Giving Day: You can target alumni of your classes and host a 24-hour giving day, full of excitement like this example.

Museums

• Crowdfund an exhibit: Connect with your community by empowering individuals to both fundraise and donate to the exhibit, while sharing stories of what the culture, artist, time period, or museum means to them. In this example from the New Royal Marines Museum, they are using a campaign to drive all direct donations to fund the museum.

• Leverage existing donors: Ask them to help create fundraising pages in order to acquire new supporters and fill in any gaps you have in the annual appeal. For example, you can run a campaign that asks for a part of the target amount you need to hit your annual goal. Then, email your donors and ask them to solicit gifts on your behalf. Offer discount codes to donors who gave $10-50. Offer non-peak season day passes for your larger donors. Creating incentives will drive performance and offer a tangible takeaway for the virtual campaign.

• Recruit your exhibits to be your fundraisers: Get creative by having King Tut and Van Gogh be fundraisers. Or create a competition for the Renaissance wing and the Space and Exploration wing. Use the “personal” fundraising pages to share the stories and histories that make up these areas, sharing neat facts, behind the scenes views and raising money for the museum, while acquiring brand new donors.

Looking for ways to build relationships and acquire new audiences digitally? Try these tactics with JustGiving:

1. Direct donations and fundraising pages - Create brilliant momentum for your campaign by finding support from the ability to solicit direct donations. Encourage individual Fundraisers and Teams to create their own activities to help raise the essential funds needed.

2. Update your Story - The Chester Zoo added to their campaign story with frequent statements to update their supporter base. Along with these updates were amazing videos from the staff, which really brough the campaign to life.

3. Livestream- Create a fundraising page associated to your campaign. From there, you can livestream! The video will show at the top of the page, conveniently next to the donation button.

4. Take your event virtual- We may be a long way out from 100% in-person events. Until then, you should consider hosting hybrid or virtual events like Frances Perkins Center’s Virtual Garden Party.

5. Customize your links- Make sure your page visitors are following your call to action and ending up at the intended location. See how customizing your links can prevent distractions and get you results.

Can we get a round of applause? YOU are doing incredible work and your gift of sharing art, music, culture preservation, education, history, and more are essential parts of the human experience. I hope you found a few ways to incorporate peer-to-peer fundraising as a method of elevating your community’s awareness and increasing connections. Let me know in the comments below- What do you have planned?