Quick answer: Peer-to-peer fundraising is one of the highest-ROI, most cost-effective strategies in the sector, because the people who raise money for you and the people who give through them both arrive with unusually high affinity. The Pulse of the Donor 2025 report finds peer-to-peer still shows strong potential but inconsistent execution. The difference between a campaign that works and one that stalls is whether you actively support your fundraisers with tools, scripts, milestones, and encouragement instead of handing them a link and hoping.
Peer-to-peer fundraising is when you ask your supporters to fundraise on behalf of your mission, creating their own pages and inviting their own networks to give. The language gets confusing fast, so here is the simple version. You run a campaign. Your ambassadors create fundraising pages based on that campaign. The donors those pages attract are giving to you and to a friend at the same time.
The person fundraising for you usually has a strong relationship with your organization already, or you enticed them through the campaign. The donors they bring in arrive with higher affinity too, because something personal happened with the gift. They did not just give to a cause, they gave to a friend, an acquaintance, or someone they have a real connection with. That personal relationship is the engine of the whole strategy.
It is worth slowing down on that affinity point, because it is the reason peer-to-peer behaves so differently from a cold appeal. When your organization asks a stranger for money, you are starting from zero trust and trying to build it in a single message. When a supporter asks their own friend, the trust is already there. The friend is not evaluating your mission in the abstract. They are responding to someone they care about, and your cause comes along with that relationship. You are borrowing trust that took years to build, which is exactly why it converts.
Peer-to-peer is high ROI because it is cost-effective and it recruits donors who are warmer than the average cold acquisition. Your ambassadors do the outreach for you, and their networks convert at higher affinity because of the personal connection behind each ask. It is, honestly, one of the highest-ROI activities in the sector.
It is also a primary way younger donors enter your organization. A friend invites them to an event, or to a peer campaign, or they are socially influenced to give through a channel they already trust. If you want to reach donors who would never respond to a direct appeal from an institution they have never heard of, their friend's fundraising page is often the door they will actually walk through.
Recruit the supporters who already have a real relationship with your mission first, because affinity is what makes the whole model work. Your strongest ambassadors are usually the people closest to you: board members, volunteers, repeat donors, event hosts, and the families connected to the people you serve. They are not fundraising for a stranger's cause. They are fundraising for something that is already part of who they are, and that conviction carries into every ask they make.
From there, the campaign itself can draw in a second tier of fundraisers who do not start with that deep connection but are moved by a clear goal, a deadline, and a concrete reason to act now. Both groups can succeed. They simply need different amounts of support, and knowing which is which lets you put your encouragement where it will move the most money rather than spreading it evenly and thin.
Peer-to-peer campaigns underperform when organizations set them up and then hope they run on their own. The report's finding is precise: peer-to-peer continues to show strong potential, but execution remains inconsistent. It is not that the strategy has fallen by the wayside. It is that the way a campaign is run and provided to fundraisers is too often lacking.
The gap is support. Most organizations stand up a peer campaign, hand their fundraisers a link, and assume the rest will happen through some magical portal. It will not. A link is not a campaign, and a fundraising page with no encouragement behind it sits idle while everyone wonders why peer-to-peer did not work for them.
Put yourself in the fundraiser's shoes. They volunteered to ask their own friends and family for money on your behalf, which is a genuinely vulnerable thing to do. Then they got a login and silence. They do not know what to say, they do not have language they feel good about, and they are not sure whether anything they do is even working. Most people in that position will send one awkward post and then stop, not because they stopped caring, but because you left them alone with the hardest part.
Support your fundraisers by giving them tools, scripts, ready-to-use assets, milestone celebrations, and steady encouragement from the moment the campaign opens. Modern peer-to-peer technology, including BetterUnite, gives you settings you can opt into at the outset that communicate with your fundraising teams all along the way.
That can mean milestone recognition, so a fundraiser gets a celebration when they hit $1,000 raised, or whatever your markers are. It can mean copy-and-paste email drafts and shareable assets so the fundraiser never has to start from a blank page. But most of all, fundraisers need encouragement. They need to feel that you are in it with them. The technology makes support possible, but the encouragement is what keeps a page active, and that part is on you, not the portal.
Think of it as three layers working together. The tools lower the effort, the scripts lower the awkwardness, and the milestones and encouragement supply the motivation. Miss any one of them and the campaign stalls in a predictable way: great tools with no encouragement produce silent pages, and lots of cheerleading with no scripts produces willing fundraisers who still do not know what to say. Set the communications up at the outset, when you are building the campaign, so the support runs automatically instead of depending on someone remembering to send it.
What is the difference between peer-to-peer and crowdfunding?
In peer-to-peer fundraising, individual supporters each run their own page on your behalf and tap their personal networks, which is what creates the higher affinity. Crowdfunding typically points everyone toward a single shared campaign page.
How do I recruit peer-to-peer fundraisers?
Start with supporters who already have a strong relationship with your mission, then make participation easy and rewarding with assets, scripts, and milestone recognition so the lift on them feels light.
How long should a peer-to-peer campaign run?
Long enough to support your fundraisers with milestones and encouragement, but tied to a clear goal or moment so the urgency does not fade. The key is ongoing communication, not set and forget.
Before your next peer-to-peer campaign, build the support plan first: assets, scripts, milestone celebrations, and a real communication cadence for your fundraisers.
Email support@betterunite.com to see how BetterUnite equips ambassador teams.
Leya Simmons
Co-founder & CEO | BetterUnite
The Co-founder and CEO of BetterUnite, a platform supporting thousands of nonprofits, she brings a unique lens to the sector, shaped by 15+ years as a private art dealer and gallery owner, board leadership at organizations like the Austin Museum of Art and the Texas Film Hall of Fame, and her own experience navigating nonprofit fundraising as board president of Community Yoga Austin. A yoga teacher, a female tech executive, and a mother of five, she is passionate about equipping nonprofits with the tools they need to do more with less.