Turning the team group text into a fundraiser
The families on your roster already have group texts and grandparents who'd give if they were asked directly. The job isn't finding more donors — it's making it effortless for the donors you already have access to.
Most school fundraisers don't fail because nobody was willing to give. They fail because the ask never reached the right person in a form they'd actually act on. A flyer sent home in a backpack competes with a hundred other pieces of paper. A single shared donation link, with no context about who it's supporting, gets scrolled past. The fundraisers that actually hit their goal are the ones where each family has their own specific, personal reason to share — and a link that's genuinely easy to act on in the ten seconds someone has while reading a text on their phone.
That's the entire idea behind a peer-to-peer campaign: instead of one link for the whole team, every participant gets their own page, with their own photo, their own personal message, and their own share link — built specifically to paste into a text thread, not to be browsed on a desktop. "Help Maya get to the regional tournament" is a specific ask a grandparent will act on. A generic team donation link is not.
Getting the whole roster set up in minutes, not an afternoon
You don't have to add participants one at a time. Upload a roster CSV with first names, last initials, and a personal message for each — even a generic one, if kids haven't written their own yet — and the whole team gets pages in one pass. If you've already set up teams (grade level, position, whatever grouping makes sense for your program), the same CSV can assign each participant to their team by name automatically.
| What a CSV roster upload actually needs | |
|---|---|
| Required | firstName |
| Optional | lastInitial, personalMessage, team (matched by name against teams you've already created) |
| If a team name doesn't match | The participant is still created — just without a team. Nothing fails the whole upload. |
Teams add a second layer that matters more than it looks like it should: a live leaderboard. Kids and families check it. A team that's visibly behind tends to push harder in the last few days of a campaign — not because anyone asked them to, but because the number is right there.
You're not trying to convince strangers to give to a cause they've never heard of. You're trying to make it take ten seconds for someone who already loves this kid to say yes.
The actual job of a peer-to-peer campaign
What to do when a participant is stalling
Every campaign has a few participants who set up their page and then never share it. Rather than a volunteer manually tracking who's behind, the built-in Coach checks each participant's progress and can send an automatic, one-time reminder to anyone under 50% of their goal on a live campaign — skipping anyone who hasn't shared a contact email, and never sending the same person a duplicate nudge within a cooldown window. It also surfaces plain-language coaching tips directly on a low-progress participant's own page — "you're at $40, try texting three more people" — so the nudge comes from the platform, not from you having to be the one to chase people down.
The moment that actually drives the next share
When a gift comes in, the donor sees confetti and a thank-you built around the specific kid they just supported — "You helped Maya get closer to her goal" — and participants get a visible badge the moment they cross 50% ("Halfway there!") and 100% ("Goal reached!") of their personal goal. None of this is decoration for its own sake: a participant who just watched their own number tick up and saw a badge unlock is far more likely to share their link again than one staring at a static progress bar.
- Set personal goals, not just one team goal. Leaving personal goals blank splits the campaign total evenly — fine for a first pass, but a participant with their own specific number tends to push harder toward it.
- Add a real photo, not just initials. Participant pages with a photo consistently read as more personal than an initial in a colored circle — and it takes one upload, not a design project.
- Recruit sponsors for the strip below the cover photo. A local business logo on the campaign page costs you one conversation and adds visible legitimacy for a first-time donor deciding whether to trust the link.