Peer-to-Peer Fundraising: How to Get Your Supporters to Raise Money for You
There is a group of people who would give to your organization tomorrow, and you will never reach them. Your emails land somewhere else, your building sits in a town they have never visited, and your name means nothing to them. What does mean something to them is your board treasurer, or the mother whose son came through your program, or the volunteer who shows up every Thursday without being asked.
That is the whole idea behind peer-to-peer fundraising. Your supporters make the ask on your behalf, to people who already trust them. I spent years in ministry writing appeals to a list I already had, and what I have learned since is how much of the real opportunity sits one relationship past the edge of that list, completely out of reach of anything I could write or send.
What the Numbers Actually Say
The largest programs in the country give a useful picture of the ceiling. In its 20th annual survey, the Peer-to-Peer Professional Forum found that America's top 30 peer-to-peer programs raised $1.17 billion in 2025, up 3.4% over the year before, with participation climbing 3.6% to 2.63 million people. Twenty-three of those 30 programs grew. The American Heart Association's Heart Walk alone raised $121 million.
Those are national walks and rides with full-time staff behind them, so the dollar figures are not a target for a small shop. The proportions are what matter. Revenue and participation grew at almost exactly the same rate, which tells you something plain about how this works: peer-to-peer fundraising scales with the number of people asking, more than with the size of any single ask. One more fundraiser tends to be worth more than a cleverer campaign.
The same survey makes that point concrete. The program that gained the most ground in participation was the American Cancer Society's Making Strides Against Breast Cancer, which added 68,823 walkers in a single year — growth that came from putting the existing message in more hands rather than from finding a better one.
The average peer-to-peer fundraiser brings in about $244, according to Raisely's benchmark data. Twelve committed people is a few thousand dollars. Forty is a real line in your budget. And here is the part I find most interesting: that same roundup reports only 32% of nonprofits using peer-to-peer fundraising at all, down from 45% in 2023. A channel that grew at the top of the sector is being quietly abandoned in the middle of it, mostly because it looks like it requires an events team.
The work that makes this channel run is mostly repeatable — the same recruiting note, the same coaching message, the same thank-you, sent reliably to every person who signs up.
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Why a Borrowed Ask Lands Differently
When your organization asks someone for money, you are asking a stranger to trust an institution. When a volunteer asks her sister-in-law, she is calling in twenty years of Thanksgivings. The ask carries her credibility, not yours, and that is a kind of trust you cannot buy with ad spend or earn with a well-written case statement.
The practical payoff is acquisition. Most channels in a development office work the same list harder — a better subject line to the same 4,000 people. Peer-to-peer is one of the few that reliably brings in names you have never had. Those donors arrive already warm, having given because someone they love asked them to.
It also changes what a supporter is to you. A volunteer who raises $300 from eleven friends has done something a check cannot do. She has told eleven people what your organization is and why it matters, in her own words, in a conversation you were not part of and could not have scripted. That is real advocacy, and the fundraising total undercounts it. Organizations that treat these people as a donor list to harvest tend to burn them out in a season. Organizations that treat them as the closest thing they have to a volunteer development team tend to keep them for years.
There is an honest catch, and it is worth naming before you build anything. A person who gives $50 because their college roommate is walking in your 5K is answering their roommate more than answering you. Left alone, most of those donors never give again. That is the same leak behind first-time donors disappearing across every online channel, and it is why the thank-you sequence after a peer-to-peer campaign matters more than the campaign itself. You have thirty days to introduce yourself to a few hundred people who just showed they are willing to give. Most organizations spend those thirty days counting the money.
The Part Most Programs Get Wrong
Recruiting is the job. Platform, page design, and campaign theme are all details that follow it, and an hour spent comparing software tends to return far less than an hour spent asking specific people, by name, to fundraise for you.
A signup link buried in a newsletter produces almost nobody, while a phone call that says "I want you to be one of ten people raising money for us this spring, and I think you would be great at it" produces a fundraiser. Your board is the obvious first place to look, since they already carry an expectation to help — the same conversation that gets you to full board participation works here, just aimed at their address book instead of their checkbook.
Then there is the quiet problem every program has: people who sign up and never raise a dollar. Those supporters are stuck rather than unwilling, because asking friends for money is genuinely uncomfortable and nobody ever showed them how. Two habits help more than anything else I have seen. Ask each fundraiser to make the first gift to their own page, which sets a floor and makes the ask honest. Then hand them the words themselves — three sentences they can paste straight into a text message, rather than a link to a resource library they will never open.
Finally, look at where all of this traffic lands. Peer-to-peer links travel through group chats and comment threads, so the people following them are overwhelmingly on phones, and mobile is where nonprofit donation pages convert worst. Recruiting forty fundraisers and sending their friends to a slow, twelve-field form throws away most of the work you just did, which is why fixing the donation page belongs before the campaign rather than after it. Every channel in an online fundraising program eventually runs into that form, but peer-to-peer runs into it hardest, because you only get one shot at a stranger who is standing in a checkout line doing a favor for a friend.
The Small-Shop Version
You do not need a race, a course, or a timing company. What you need is an occasion that gives someone a reason to ask.
Birthday fundraisers are the lowest-effort entry point — a supporter turns 50, asks for gifts to your mission instead of presents, and the whole thing lives on one page for two weeks. A board challenge borrows the same trick of putting a frame around the ask: five members each recruit five friends over one month, which is 25 fundraisers you did not have in March. If you run any kind of annual event, offering a fundraising page to everyone already registered costs you nothing and turns attendees into askers. And a giving day supplies a shared deadline, which is usually the thing that finally makes people send the message they have been meaning to send for a week.
Watch for one more source of money while you are at it. A peer-to-peer campaign brings in a wave of donors who work at companies with employer match programs and have no idea such a benefit exists, so the matching gift habits worth building into your giving pages pay off here more than almost anywhere else.
The supporters who will go out and raise money on your behalf are rarely one-year donors. They are the people most likely to think about how their giving continues long after a single campaign.
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Where to Start
If this sounds worth trying, resist the urge to design a program. Run one small thing well and learn from it.
1. Pick one occasion in the next 90 days. A giving day, an anniversary, the week before your annual event. A campaign with no deadline gets no urgency and no messages sent.
2. Recruit ten people by name. Ten individual asks to people who already love your work, each one explaining why you thought of them specifically. A public signup post is a poor substitute, and you will learn more from ten real conversations than from any amount of planning.
3. Send them the words and ask for the first gift. Three sentences they can paste into a text, a photo they can use, and a request that they give to their own page before they ask anyone else.
4. Thank both ends, twice. Thank the donor for the gift and the fundraiser for the courage it took to ask. Then write to those new donors again within thirty days, about the mission rather than the money.
What I keep coming back to with this channel is how much of it is relational rather than technical. The software matters far less than the invitation. The real work is asking ten people you already trust to spend a little social capital on something they believe in, then making it easy enough that they say yes again next year. Most of them are waiting to be asked, and a surprising number are quietly flattered that you thought of them.
C.J. Bergmen is a pastor, licensed counselor, and fundraising strategist who helps organizations and generous individuals approach giving with honesty and long-term vision.