guest post // 4 Ways to Energize Peer-to-Peer Fundraisers Mid-Campaign
By OneCause/Bonterra
Almost every nonprofit professional is familiar with fundraising fatigue — the feelings of burnout you might face after putting significant effort into your fundraisers. Your peer-to-peer fundraising participants can feel the same thing, especially in the middle of a campaign when the initial excitement has worn off!
Losing energy mid-campaign is natural, but it’s also a pivotal moment. Re-energizing your peer-to-peer participants and reminding them why they signed up to fundraise in the first place can reignite momentum when it matters the most.
In this guide, you’ll find four proven ways to help fundraisers regain momentum, deepen their commitment, and stay excited to show up again next year.
1. Highlight Impact Mid-Campaign
One of the easiest ways to reel your peer-to-peer participants back in is to share the impact they’ve already made and remind them how much more they can do by continuing to fundraise.
At the halfway point of your campaign, send personalized communications to all your participants with clear impact metrics. Share tangible outcomes based on the total fundraising revenue each person has raised so far. For example, you might send an email that says:
“Deylyn, thank you so much for participating in the 2026 Save Our Shelter campaign. The $500 you’ve already raised will help us cover life-saving medical care for a puppy in need, just like the surgery that saved Baby Bruno earlier this year. Keep fundraising, and you’ll fund vital care for even more animals at our shelter! Only 2 more weeks to go!”
Along with personalized impact, explain what the campaign as a whole has accomplished so far. Pull data from your fundraising platforms to update participants on their combined progress. Share how many more donations you need to reach your campaign goal and what that will ultimately achieve for your beneficiaries. Use real, tangible examples to motivate participants.
2. Leverage Gamification
Sometimes, all your supporters need is a little incentive to energize them and bring excitement back to their fundraisers. That’s why fundraising gamification tactics can be particularly effective for peer-to-peer campaigns. These strategies make fundraising more exciting by awarding points, badges, and other types of recognition when participants reach certain milestones.
For instance, imagine you’re fundraising for the first time and are starting to lose energy. One day in the middle of the campaign, you get an email saying you’ve earned a “Cause Champion” badge by securing 15 new donors. You’d likely feel an immediate sense of accomplishment and eagerly check your fundraising page, excited to achieve even more for the cause you care about.
To emulate this approach, remind participants midway through to engage with gamification elements like:
Progress bars or fundraising thermometers that help participants visualize progress toward their goals
Leaderboards for individuals and/or teams to spark a playful rivalry and encourage supporters to share their pages
Milestone badges that let your participants “unlock” and show off achievements like first $100 raised, first five donors, and more
Often, you can find these tools easily within your peer-to-peer fundraising software or volunteer management platform. For maximum engagement potential, participants should be able to display their achievements on their individual fundraising pages and get notifications when they make progress.
3. Provide Fresh Creative Assets
Another way to give peer-to-peer participants a boost in the middle of a campaign is to equip them with all-new fundraising materials. Halfway through, participants often stop posting about their fundraisers because they feel they’ve already said everything there is to say. By sharing new marketing materials and creative assets, you’ll give them fresh ideas they can use immediately.
Create a refreshed peer-to-peer toolkit to send out mid-campaign with new, compelling materials. For instance, you could provide fresh:
Social media graphics
Email templates
Appeal language
Sharing prompts
Storytelling tips
Impact metrics
Promotion strategies
When you share fresh creative assets, remind participants about your organization’s voice and the importance of consistent branding. Send examples so they can see what using these assets might look like. Be sure to include a team member’s contact information for any questions.
4. Strategically Time Your Matching Gift Challenges
Matching gift challenges are perfect for injecting energy and motivation into your peer-to-peer campaigns. 360MatchPro explains that these challenges are a powerful fundraising initiative in which “a sponsor pledges to match a portion or all of the donations made to the nonprofit. For example, the donor may pledge to match every dollar donated up to $5,000 or every dollar contributed during a 48-hour window.”
When timed strategically, match challenges bring attention back to your fundraiser mid-campaign and give donors a major incentive to give immediately.
Here’s a quick breakdown of how to use this tactic:
Find a sponsor who’s willing to match donations during your challenge, typically an existing major donor.
Agree on the logistics, like the match ratio (1:1, 2:1, or 3:1), the exact timeline, and a maximum match amount.
Time the challenge mid-campaign when you think momentum is most likely to be waning.
Alert participants about the challenge ahead of time and encourage them to use time-based messaging to inspire urgency.
Launch the challenge and post frequently about it on social media. You can even give participants a boost by sharing their posts.
If you don’t have an individual major donor willing to sponsor your matching challenge, reach out to like-minded businesses. Many companies offer sponsorships for nonprofits along with their own matching gift programs as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts. According to Bonterra, these kinds of philanthropic CSR programs benefit nonprofits by providing additional funding and businesses by enhancing their brand reputation and employee engagement. In other words, everybody wins.
Maintaining Momentum Until the End
Reinforcing impact and excitement with these tactics will bring your participants back into the action when their energy fades. However, to make it to the finish line, you’ll need to keep engaging supporters and recognizing their generosity until the last day of your campaign. When you stay in touch and remind participants about the power of their contributions, you’ll build a strong community that’s committed to your mission.
This guest post was written by OneCause/Bonterra.
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