FUNDRAISING TIPS, TRICKS, AND IDEAS

Whether this is your first time fundraising or you’re a seasoned, long-time Extra Life fundraiser, this article will serve as a living guide of various tips, tricks, and ideas you can use to help jumpstart your fundraising efforts. While asking for donations can seem intimidating, know that you’re not alone in this endeavor, and you have your Program Director (Tyler Adams: tyler.adams@foriowa.org) along with a community of Extra Lifers here to help you along the way. Join our Discord channel today!

First Off: Some Best Practices

1. Make it Personal: Edit and customize your fundraising page. Use your own pictures, set a goal, share why you’re supporting University of Iowa Health Care Stead Family Children’s Hospital. Share your passion and personality on your page so that your friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, and more will want to support you and help you reach your goal.

• Share: Asking for support or donations can sometimes feel uncomfortable. You likely won’t get every donation you ask for, but you definitely won’t get anything if you don’t ask! This is a cause people want to support, they just haven’t been asked by anyone to donate. It takes persistence, and the average donor needs to see your appeal at least three times before they notice and take action to support you. At the end of the day, worst they can say is “No” or not respond back at all.

• Get Social: Share your fundraising link and a sentence or two about why you support UI Stead Family Children’s Hospital on your social media channels. Facebook Fundraisers in particular are still a very valuable tool to use, resulting in an average of $150+ more raised. Ask your followers to share your posts by making them public to help further spread the word with a wider audience, When posting on your Story, include the direct link to your fundraising page with an ask to donate included.

• Other Ways to Contact: Don’t be too one-dimensional with your outreach. If someone isn’t on social media, that doesn’t mean they don’t want to support. Always try emails, texts, phone calls, and even an old-fashioned letter-writing campaign to spread the word about your efforts.

• Make the First Donation: There’s no better way to kickstart your fundraising efforts and show you’re ready to dive right into it than by making the first donation to your page. It gets you off that “$0” mark right away and helps build momentum towards your goal.

• Thanking Your Supporters: A simple “Thank You” goes a long way on your fundraising journey! Sending a quick message on social media or text message thanking them and appreciating them for their support goes a long way in building rapport and potential long-term support if this is an endeavor you want to take on each year. It’s much easier to steward and retain a year-over-year donor than it is to find new ones each year, and properly thanking and acknowledging your supporters will go a long way. Once your fundraising efforts wrap up, be sure to include a wrap-up post or stewardship to let people know how much you raised, your overall experience during the year, and the impact that was made on the hospital.

Second, put the FUN in Fundraising with Milestones, Incentives, and Challenges

Not only will this experience be more fun for you, but it will be vastly more entertaining and enjoyable for your followers and your community to spice things up along the way. There are several built in tools within your fundraising page, but also unique things you can do on your own to help amplify the experience and incentivize additional fundraising. By setting up milestones to track progress towards your overall goals, incentives to help build relationships with your supporters, and challenges to push people to donate, you can boost your overall fundraising efforts. Here’s a fun, robust list of initial ideas, but know that you can do almost anything as a milestone, incentive, or challenge. Make it unique to you, your personality, and your story.

Please Note: There is no pressure to attempt any of these, or to do anything to make you uncomfortable. Simply fundraising is more than okay and always appreciated! This list is more to help spark creativity in what might work best for you:

• Milestones: When you reach certain marks on your fundraising journey (e.g. halfway to your goal), usually engaging in a larger activity for hitting a major milestone.
  • Hair-related challenges:
    • Dying your hair a fun color, and let donors vote to choose.
    • Shaving your hair/beard in a funny or unique way.
    • Shave or wax strip facial hair, eyebrows, legs, arms, etc.
    • Keep the new hairstyle for XX days in exchange for specific donations.
    • Save the Beard vs. Shave the Beard challenge, donate to a team and see which one wins.
  • Let your spouse/child/friend/top donor give you a “makeover” or make-up tutorial on you, that can be either silly or serious and share the results on your streams or social media.
  • Do some karaoke (good or bad skill levels) once you’ve hit certain milestones.
  • Polar Plunge or ice-bucket dump, especially during colder weather seasons.
  • Wear a costume on your stream, find something fun and funny to get your audience engaged.
  • Get at tattoo when a BIG milestone is hit.

• Incentives: When someone donates $XX amount, they get XX reward/experience.
  • Put your unique skills to use here! Have a special cookie recipe, pool in your yard, have great artistic abilities? Entice people to donate by offering to bake them bookies, invite them to a summer pool party, create a custom craft for them, or lean into another skillset to offer them something unique for donating.
  • Double or nothing! Off to match the next $100 in donations or ask a friend or family member if they would be willing to donate and offer it as a match. People hit “Donate” quickly when they know their impact is doubled! Bonus points if your employer matches donations or offers paid volunteer hours for your fundraising.
  • Have a larger item you’re able to offer? Enter everyone who donates into a pool for a drawing to earn a unique incentive from you at the end of your fundraising efforts.
  • Offer a treat or special toy to your pet in exchange for donations. Definitely moderate based on what your pet can handle, but people love to see your furry friends enjoying a special treat or attention in exchange for donations.
  • Wall of Fame: Write donor’s names and special messages on the post and feature it both on your stream as well as your social media. 
  • Donate to add a song to the fundraiser’s workout playlist.
  • Dice Challenge: Come up with a list of things you could do for when each number is rolled (either a standard dice or 20-sided dice). These can be physical challenges (squats, push-ups, burpees, etc.) or random things like joke telling, giving a compliment, tell us something we don’t know about your, or anything else.
  • Incentives that impact gameplay: if you’re fundraising via gaming, here are some fun incentives you could offer in exchange for donations:
    • Invert screen or controller
    • Tunnel vision with screen covered where you only see through a small section of the screen.
    • Movement delays 10 seconds after a donation, or donation earns you a headstart.
    • Play with oven mitts on, using your non-dominant hand only, or a pair of tiny hands.
    • Have to speak in a baby voice, robot voice, etc. for a specific time during your stream. Or only single-syllable letters or inability to use a specific letter.
    • Donations to earn a player or their opponent a boost that’s specific to the game they’re playing.
    • Donate to re-roll or take another turn.
    • Stand up for 5 minutes of play, stand on one leg, or jump nonstop for a minute while playing.

• Challenges: When someone donates hits $XX amount, they get to see/experience you doing something challenging/funny/embarrassing.
  • Write your donor’s name or special message on a t-shirt in exchange for donations. You can wear that t-shirt on stream throughout your fundraising efforts. Know someone who’s a huge Hawkeye fan? Have one of the messages be a “Go Cyclones!” message for donations that they then have to wear on stream.
  • Wear a t-shirt of a rival sports team that the fundraiser does not like.
  • Post old embarrassing or childhood photos of yourself in exchange for donations.
  • Pie-in-the face with whipped cream, plate of ranch dressing, water balloon, silly string, crack an egg, or bucket of ice water dumped on you from one of your kids, spouse, friend, or top donor.
  • Food Challenges:
    • Spicy food challenges with hot wings, hot sauce, peppers, and more.
    • Mayo or condiment sandwich that you despise.
    • Edible bugs like crickets from specialty stores.
    • Weird tasting sodas: corn, bacon, PBJ, pickle, etc.
    • Jelly Bean wild flavors, could be good ones or really gross ones, and won’t know until they’re eaten.
    • Twisted pizza/nachos/smoothie where miscellaneous items are added in exchange for donations and eaten once a collective fundraising goal has been reached.
    • Wheel of baby food, spin for each donation and eat a scoop that it lands on.
    • Abstain from a food or beverage you love in exchange for hitting certain fundraising milestones. 
  • Dance challenges or TikTok trend videos.
  • Have friends fundraising too? Host an informal game night or cooking contest where everyone “buys-in” to participate, and the winner gets those funds sent to their donation page.
  • Run, hike, bike, or read a book for every gift made to your fundraiser. Depending on your activity, have people pledge donations in exchange for however many miles you will run/bike/hike or books you will read.
  • Happy Birthday “Donations” for UI Stead Family Children’s Hospital rather than birthday gifts.

Third, your Resources and Support

For any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to Tyler Adams, Associate Director of Children’s Miracle Network at University of Iowa Health Care Stead Family Children’s Hospital, at tyler.adams@foriowa.org.

• Join our Discord channel and meet a community of Extra Lifers supporting kids and families across Iowa!
• More info about our hospital, including a virtual hospital tour.
• Our local hospital toolkit with hospital information, patient stories, and other fundraising resources.
• CMN National Resources/Toolkit.