Today we bring you another fundraising Best Practice in Action from our weekly series.  Each week, we’ll highlight an organization that has done an incredible job of promoting its online fundraising efforts with Firstgiving and show you how to do the same.  This week’s Best Practice is. . .

Remind your fundraisers to send out an email about their fundraising pages.

Our friends at the Kids Center for Pediatric Therapies were reviewing reports for their annual fundraising walk when they realized that although fundraisers had created 244 personal fundraising pages for the walk, 114 of them hadn’t received any donations.

They scratched their heads.  Clearly these 114 walkers wanted to support the Kids Center for Pediatric Therapies because they had put some effort into creating fundraising pages.  Then the Kids Center folks had a revelation.  Maybe what these fundraisers needed was a simple reminder to tell people about their pages.

They sent this email out to their fundraisers to give them a little pep talk:

As of this week we have 244 web pages, which is up from 210 at the end of last year’s event.   It’s typical for many people to create the page early on and then wait to send it out to their contacts.  As of this week a full 114 of our 244 pages, or 46%, have raised $0 online.  This just means people have yet to send out an email asking others to give.

Now that you have a page – send it out!

There are two ways to send your page:

1.    Use Firstgiving’s email tool in your account.

2.    Use your own email account – write your own email to tell your friends about your page (keep it short and sweet), and include the link to your page.

If all 114 pages yet to raise money hit our average of $200 per web page, we’d raise nearly $23,000 more for our kids!

The Kids Center Walk and Roll event took place a few days ago and raised over $60,000 online. They would have missed out on some valuable donations if they hadn’t reminded their fundraisers to send out their fundraising pages.

So, to recap:

Fundraisers sometimes create fantastic fundraising pages for your nonprofit but then procrastinate when it’s time to ask their friends to donate. Send them a quick reminder to help them raise more money for your nonprofit.

Happy fundraising, and here’s to raising more money than you ever thought possible!

Share your own success stories of fundraising Best Practices in Action by sending an email to bestpractices@firstgiving.com.