Traditional fundraising, sponsorship, grants & aids are important, but the processes are long-drawn and arduous. Plus, there is heavy competition which reduces the success rate of nonprofits in obtaining funding and resources.
Online crowdfunding helps fill the gaps in funding and resources, enabling nonprofits to keep moving forward on their mission. However, many nonprofits still consider it a last resort for emergencies or a one-off activity. While online crowdfunding does help those in need of emergency funds, it is not just a last-resort tool or a one-off activity. Online crowdfunding is a powerful tool that should be an integral part of every nonprofit’s fundraising strategy.
Wondering how and where charity challenges figure in all this? Keep reading to find out how charity challenges help put a creative twist to raising funds and resources.
What Are Charity Challenges?
Charity challenges are powerful conduits to raise awareness, funds, and resources for your cause and organization while promoting collective action and community impact. It essentially gamifies charitable giving and your campaign, making it a fun community experience.
Remember the ice bucket challenge? It was a charity challenge used to raise awareness on ALS while raising money for ALS research. Criticism and drawbacks aside, the challenge did effectively create greater awareness of the disease and raise funds.
Benefits of Charity Challenges
- Raise awareness about your cause & your nonprofit by choosing a challenge that aligns with your mission.
- Get donations – monetary and non-monetary such as volunteers, interns, expert help, resources, etc. Break away from donor fatigue.
- Generate interest & buzz around your cause; inspire more people to take action & foster community building.
- Amplify your impact by reaching out to people outside your local community, breaking geographical boundaries & finding your tribe.
How to Create Charity Challenges?
- Establish clear goals for the charity challenge.
- What are the key aspects of your organization’s mission that you want to focus on?
- Are you looking for support on specific activities/ projects?
- Do you want to raise more money? How much money do you hope to raise through this challenge?
- Are you looking to raise other support such as volunteers, resources, mentors, etc.? Is this in addition to funds?
- Choose a challenge that aligns with your nonprofit’s mission and cause. For instance, healthcare nonprofits will benefit from using fitness and well-being challenges. Nonprofits focusing on education can use reading challenges, artistic competitions, etc.
- Keep the target audience in mind, choosing a campaign that will garner their attention and invoke their interest.
- How long should the challenge run? Is it a yearly event? Is it an ongoing activity?
- Is it going to be online, offline, or hybrid?
- Are volunteers needed to organize/ oversee/ manage the challenge?
- Based on the types of support you require, set up your campaigns. With TALGiving, you can create crowdfunding campaigns for fundraising, volunteering, skills, expertise, and more.
- You should plug your crowdfunding campaigns into every promotional activity.
Some Creative Charity Challenges Ideas
Social media challenges such as the Ice Bucket Challenge, photo challenges, and so on where you get a few volunteers to complete the challenge, post on social media, and tag a few friends to do it. If they are unable to complete it or don’t want to, they donate to your nonprofit.
Give up little luxuries: A coffee challenge where the donor gives up one coffee per day and donates the sum total of the coffees they gave up to your fundraiser. You can challenge the participant to take public transport for a month to work instead of their car and donate the savings to your fundraiser. Based on your target audience, you can ask them to give up one little luxury.
Volunteering challenges wherein you ask people to become volunteers with your organization and reward them for volunteering the most hours or getting the maximum number of donors for your crowdfunding campaigns.
Fitness/ Health challenges such as 30-day yoga challenge, 100-day dance challenge, daily walk challenge. Participants share their progress and health/ fitness journey on social media or other platforms along with the challenge hashtag and a link to your fundraiser to help you raise funds.
School challenges: You can partner with schools and gamify the volunteering/ fundraising campaigns, rewarding teams/ students who top the challenge. You can conduct skill-based competitions or bake sales to encourage students to raise funds for your cause.
Reading challenge: Book lovers of all ages can participate in this challenge where they must complete a designated number of pages or books within a designated period of time. Participants update their progress every day on social media with the challenge & nonprofit hashtag along with the donation link. For targets missed, they must make a contribution to the fundraiser.
Concluding Remarks
As online crowdfunding continues to grow in popularity, there will be much greater competition. You will have to think beyond the status quo in running crowdfunding campaigns if you are to maximize ROI. Charity campaigns are creative and effective ways to raise awareness about your nonprofit, generate interest towards your causes, inspire community action, and fill your fund and resource gaps.
With TALGiving as your crowdfunding partner, you can smoothly create, run, and manage your campaigns in tandem with your charity challenges.
