The Power of Wellness Challenges for Non-Profit Fundraising: Benefits and Tips for Success
Non-profit organizations are constantly looking for new and innovative ways to raise funds and support their important causes. One of the most popular and effective strategies to achieve this goal is having a wellness challenge tied to the fundraising campaign. Wellness challenges leverage the power of community and commitment, leading to increased donations and participation rates in their campaigns.
In this post, we will explore the benefits of combining a wellness challenge with a non-profit fundraiser campaign, and some of the practical tips on how to plan and execute the challenge.
Benefits of a Wellness Challenge Fundraiser
1. Build Community
Without a doubt, the most beneficial aspect of having a wellness challenge tied to a fundraising campaign is building community around the challenge and your organization. Participants can connect with each other through their shared goals and experiences, creating a sense of belonging and accountability for the organization. Community also encourages participants to invite friends and family to join in on the challenge and fundraiser, increasing your reach and donations. The real magic starts to happen when participants feel connected to each other and the cause they are supporting!
2. Raise Awareness
Having a wellness challenge tied to your fundraiser helps raise awareness about your organization and its’ mission. By promoting the challenge through social media, email campaigns, and other channels, you can reach a wider audience and educate people about the work you do.
The wellness challenge gives your participants an extra reason for generating word-of-mouth marketing about your cause, which is the most powerful form of marketing. As participants their progress in the challenge, they also bring awareness to your non-profit.
3. Raise More Funds
When participants feel themselves making progress in their wellness challenge, it increases their motivation to fight for the cause too! Participants can even pledge to donate a certain amount for each milestone they reach in the challenge, or ask their peers to donate based on those milestones. These add up quickly and can provide a much higher in your fundraising campaign.
4. Promote Healthy Living in Your Community
Finally, of course, having a wellness challenge tied to your fundraiser promotes healthy living among your community and donors. Supporters can improve their physical and mental health while also supporting your cause. The long-term benefits of improved wellness can then lead to healthy habitual behaviors of the donors, leading to even more repeat donor participation!
Tips for Planning and Running a Wellness Challenge Fundraiser
1. Set Clear Goals
Before starting your challenge, it is important to set clear goals of what your organization wants to achieve. This can include a fundraising target, a specific number of participants (increasing reach), or a certain number of activities completed by the participants. Having clear goals helps you stay focused, measure the success of your campaign, and learn how to improve next time.
2. Choose the Right Challenge
This is where the expertise of the FytFeed team can help you. Choosing the right challenge is critical to keeping your participants excited and engaged, which ultimately leads to more community and more donations! The challenge needs to be exciting for most participants, but something that seems achievable by everyone involved. Creating a challenge that is too easy doesn’t create enough buzz (for the challenge goal or donation milestone), and having something too hard can deter donors from joining in. Consider your audience and what type of challenge that will be most engaging and accessible for them. Consult with the FytFeed team with no obligation if you want some help!
3. How to Track the Challenge
Planning, organizing, and hosting in-person, on-site wellness events (such as a 5K run) are very expensive and time-consuming. Virtual wellness challenges allow you to take advantage of these in-person events with a fraction of the cost and time. Virtual challenges also offer your organization greater reach, as you are no longer geographically limited to a physical event! If you are planning to hold an in-person event, you could consider adding a virtual option to increase your reach! FytFeed provides a simple and user-friendly platform that makes it easy for participants to join, track their progress, encourage each other, and share your fundraiser campaigns. FytFeed is capable of tracking any type of challenges from miles, to activities, to mindfulness challenges.
The big difference between FytFeed and the other guys is that each of our challenge fundraisers include community support/accountability and goal-tracking, which is the recipe for motivation!
4. Promote the Challenge
Once the goals and challenge have been decided on, you need to make sure you promote it to your entire network through social media ads, email campaigns, and encouraging peer-to-peer promotion. Having a wellness challenge tied to the fundraiser makes it easier for participants to share the fundraiser and their progress, increasing your reach and impact. FytFeed provides you with all of the tools to help you spread the word about your challenge, including social media graphics, QR codes, and direct links to your challenge.
5. Create a Fundraising Page
Make it as easy as possible for supporters to donate to your fundraiser and share it with their peers. FytFeed is designed for non-profit organizations to build and host fundraiser wellness challenges, so we make it easy to connect your fundraiser campaign within the wellness challenge. We can offer integrations with your current fundraising software, or help you get integrated with ours! These pages should be sharable to all forms of social media and from peer-to-peer easily.
6. Provide Support and Encouragement
Once participants decide to join the wellness challenge, it is important to utilize the power of social encouragement to keep them motivated throughout the challenge. This can be done by regular check-ins, motivational messages, and tips for staying healthy and active. FytFeed provides you with the tools to quickly and easily connect with all of your donors, while also providing the platform for social encouragement from their peers. The FytFeed virtual coach also gives them health and wellness tips at the click of a button!
7. Celebrate Success
Finally, make sure you celebrate success both from challenge milestones and fundraiser goals. Thank your participants for their hard work and dedication, and share the impact of their donations in the future. This will help you build momentum for future campaigns and generate repeat donors!
You Can Get the Most Out of Fundraising Using Wellness Challenges Too!
FytFeed has worked with many non-profits to build and host wellness challenges in a platform that is driven by community. We utilize the power of social encouragement and friendly competition to help motivate donors to hit their fitness and donation goals in a simple and user-friendly platform. We work with the non-profit organization to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to formulating, building, and hosting the wellness challenge and fundraiser. We also provide all the materials the non-profit needs to promote their challenge within their community. All of this is done at a fraction of the cost and time of organizing and running in-person events (or greatly expand the reach of in-person events with little extra work), and we can get your first fundraiser challenge up and running in less than a few days! Schedule a 30-minute meeting with us today to find out how!