SystemSeed beats fundraising goal for the last ever Concern Fast

Concern Worldwide is a long-standing client of SystemSeed, and this year they held their last annual 24hr fast to end world hunger. 

Five members of the SystemSeed team decided to take part in the fast.

Matching the team's efforts

By the end of the day on the 18th, our five fundraisers had received a total of €604. To support their efforts, the SystemSeed management team had decided to match the funds raised by that point, our total jumped to €1,208 - beating our team goal of €1,000!

More to come?

We're pleased to say that donations are still coming in (you can add a donation here if you want to contribute), and we expect to see the total going up a little more as we had one team member who had to delay their fasting day.

At the time of writing this post, our total stands at €1,446 and the whole campaign by all fundraisers has hit €27,821 - well in excess of Concern's original target of €20,000. 

How do campaigns like this work?

We have been working with Concern Worldwide for over 12 years now, and designed, built, and also host their main site at concern.net as well as their alternative gifts shop, both of which we built in Drupal. 

For these peer-to-peer type campaigns, we helped move Concern to a new platform called Raisely. 

What are peer-to-peer campaigns?

For an ordinary donations campaign, a charity has to find lots of individual donors to give them funds. They might do this around a specific appeal or run an ongoing campaign for baseline funds.

With a peer-to-peer campaign, the charity recruits individuals and teams who will fundraise on their behalf with their friends and families. This allows the charity to scale its reach and (hopefully) add new supporters to its database for future campaigns. The peer-to-peer campaign often revolves around a challenge that the fundraiser takes part in (like the 24 hour fast for Concern). 

Why do charities need a digital platform to manage these campaigns?

It's possible to run a campaign like this without a digital platform, but it's a lot of work and the organizers wouldn't benefit from the additional reach of an online tool. In fact, you may remember the old days of paper sponsorship forms with fundraisers having to get signups and then do a second round with those people to collect the money - so it's harder for fundraisers AND the charities concerned.

How does a digital platform help?

If you clicked through to our team page for the Concern fast, you'll see that it's got great information about the campaign, as well as making it easy for you to see how well we're doing against our team fundraising goal, and details of recent donations to the team. However, there's much more that you can't see, such as campaign management (for the charity), which includes a database of all the fundraisers and donations, and fundraiser portals, with the ability to add custom messages, see their own progress, set up a team, etc. A good system will even automate things like allowing fundraisers and donors to reset forgotten passwords. 

Ultimately a platform like this saves everyone time and effort and allows the campaign to scale much more easily - thereby raising more money for the cause.

If you work with a charity and want to run your own peer-to-peer campaign, get in touch. We'd be happy to help.