Since Meta’s social fundraising tools first launched, starting with fundraisers and Donate buttons on Facebook, nonprofits have used them to raise over $7 billion in donations.
The power of social giving can’t be overstated, especially considering the impact of the innovation we've observed over the past two years. Facebook Challenges have raised hundreds of millions of dollars, propelling missions forward when in-person events were impossible.
Social giving, defined as socially-native, designed-for-digital fundraising, has emerged as a prominent new fundraising method, allowing nonprofits to experience the best of two worlds—peer-to-peer (P2P) and social media virality—in one solution.
For nonprofits eager to embrace a digital-first approach to fundraising, it’s time to recognize Facebook Challenges as the ideal solution to connect with the next generation of social supporters. This comprehensive guide to Challenges on Facebook will cover the following topics:
- Overview of Challenges on Facebook
- How Do Facebook Challenges Work?
- Our Process: GoodUnited Challenges on Facebook
- 10+ Facebook Challenge Ideas to Begin Brainstorming
- 4 Top Nonprofits That Embraced Facebook Challenges
Before we discuss the logistics of hosting a Challenge on Facebook, let’s first discuss what these fundraisers are. That way, you’ll have a strong foundation in Challenges before hosting one for your nonprofit.
Overview of Challenges on Facebook
What is a Facebook Challenge?
A Challenge on Facebook is a time-bound, social fundraising-based peer-to-peer campaign fully conducted on the social platform.
During a Challenge, participants complete a specified activity while raising funds for your nonprofit using a Facebook fundraiser. Participants also join a Facebook group created specifically for the Challenge to connect with other participants and your nonprofit. Here’s an example to help you visualize this type of fundraiser:
Participants sign up to complete a 30-day walking Challenge in support of a nonprofit that promotes heart health. Each day, they’re challenged to walk 10,000 steps and track their progress. While doing so, they raise funds for the heart health nonprofit using a Facebook fundraiser and log their progress in the Challenge Facebook group.
We’ll delve into several real-life examples later in this guide.
Why are Facebook Challenges for nonprofits effective?
You may have noticed that Challenges on Facebook dramatically increased in popularity in recent years, along with the digital-first, “new normal” of fundraising after the pandemic.
The increasing popularity of these fundraisers comes down to a number of factors. Challenges on Facebook are beneficial for nonprofits because they:
- Have low registrant acquisition costs, allowing your nonprofit to build its donor file efficiently. In an example we’ll explore shortly, one nonprofit saw a $22.41 cost per acquisition, compared to the P2P industry average of nearly $600.
- Are an additive fundraising method. GoodUnited’s research has shown that over 90% of Challenge participants are new to the organization and cause. Rather than drawing existing support from your other campaigns, Challenges engage a new audience you haven’t connected with previously.
- Create a digital community with Facebook groups. While digital-first fundraising is the future, it can be challenging to replicate the emotion in-person events and activities evoke. With Challenge groups, participants use conversational messaging to connect with one another, share tips and encouragement, and experience a sense of community online.
- Establish a repeatable revenue stream. You can repeat Challenges over and over again—whether yearly (or every few months) with the same audience or with those in new regions and territories. It’s a forecastable way to collect and increase revenue over time.
- Open the door for continued engagement. Challenges open the door for one-on-one conversational messaging in Messenger. These messages have over an 80% open rate and allow you to continue conversing with participants throughout the year to build relationships that last.
In short, Challenges on Facebook allow your nonprofit to grow your audience online, engage with supporters near and far, and raise your relationships with social supporters.
Are Challenges on Facebook safe for participants?
Naturally, some people may question the safety of Facebook Challenges. This is largely because a Challenge brings individuals who may not have previously met into an online community. In that community, participants use conversational messaging to communicate about their progress and experience with the Challenge. There is some worry that, by sharing this information with strangers, participants put themselves at risk.
That said, there is no risk associated with Challenges on Facebook as long as participants follow internet safety best practices. For example, individuals shouldn’t share personal information, such as home addresses, workplaces, contact details, or exact locations. Additionally, they should be mindful of the photos they post—for example, not sharing internal images of their homes.
Consider sharing internet safety guidelines with Challenge participants and setting initial rules to join the group. Group admins can require participants to agree to ground rules on privacy and conduct to ensure everyone’s safety. While it’s likely that individuals joining a nonprofit fundraiser have only the best intentions at heart, there is no harm in taking additional precautions.
How Do Facebook Challenges Work?
There are a number of key components to keep in mind when planning a Challenge on Facebook for your nonprofit.
Parameters
Challenge parameters describe the basic, foundational aspects of your fundraiser. They include:
- The duration of the Challenge, anywhere from one day, to two weeks, to a month or more.
- A Challenge activity, such as walking a set number of steps per day or reading a number of books per month.
- Fundraising goals, both for the campaign overall and for individual Challenge participants.
- Participation goals, such as how many registrants you aim to have joined the Challenge and corresponding Facebook group.
Building off our earlier example, you might host a Challenge on Facebook with the following parameters:
Participants sign up to complete a 30-day walking Challenge (Duration) in support of a nonprofit that promotes heart health. Each day, they’re challenged to walk 10,000 steps (Challenge Activity) and track their progress. While doing so, they raise funds for the heart health nonprofit using a Facebook fundraiser and log their progress in the Challenge Facebook group.
The nonprofit hopes to raise $20,000 in donations and sets a goal of $100 for each Challenge participant (Fundraising Goals). They hope to connect with 2,000 participants (Participation Goals).
Participants
Once you’ve laid your foundation, turn to the participant experience. This includes how participants will:
- Raise funds. Supporters will create individual Facebook fundraisers on behalf of your nonprofit.
- Complete the Challenge activity. They will often do this independently and at their own locations.
- Connect with other participants. Supporters will interact and share progress through conversational messaging in the Challenge group.
Remember that many registrants (90%+) will be new to your organization. Consider creating educational guides to share with participants and ensure they know how to engage with the Challenge and continue supporting your nonprofit afterward. You could create a guide on starting a Facebook fundraiser, how Facebook fundraising works, how to have a fulfilling participant experience, and details about your nonprofit and cause.
Conversational Messaging
Challenges on Facebook open the door for continued engagement, specifically through conversational messaging.
Conversational messaging, in this case, refers to one-on-one conversations between a representative from your nonprofit and a social supporter. These conversations take place via Messenger, where your nonprofit can chat with individual supporters just as one would with a friend on the platform.
Challenges allow you to build connections with new supporters who join the fundraiser, as registrants can opt into ongoing contact with your nonprofit.
Via conversational messaging, you can then communicate gratitude, fundraising tips, encouragement, and reminders with individual supporters. You can ask questions and send surveys to learn more about each participant—including asking for their contact information.
These conversations can continue long after the fundraiser itself is completed and allow you to grow a personal, lasting relationship with each individual social supporter.
Digital Community
One major reason that Challenges on Facebook are so successful is the digital community aspect. Your nonprofit creates a Facebook group for all registrants to join for the duration of the Challenge. Throughout the fundraiser, you can then communicate the following with participants in the group:
- Discussion starters
- Encouragement
- Fundraising and Challenge activity tips
- Fundraiser updates
This conversational messaging allows participants to respond in real-time to your posts as well as make their own. They can create “check-ins” to discuss their progress each day and chat with others who are participating in the Challenge.
Facebook Ads
Once you’ve defined the parameters of your event and the participant experience, as well as created the foundation for your digital community, it’s time to market the fundraiser so new supporters know to join.
To accomplish this, use Facebook Ads. With Facebook, you can create targeted ad campaigns that invite individuals to sign up for your Challenge. When prospective registrants click on the ad, they’ll be directed to sign up for the fundraiser and join the corresponding group.
Target your ad campaigns to reach both known supporters and individuals you haven’t encountered before, but are likely to be interested in your campaign. For example, you might target lookalike audiences, or Facebook users with similar characteristics as your known supporters. Or, you may target audiences that have a demonstrated interest in your cause—such as having “liked” a post by a similar nonprofit in your space.
Our Process: GoodUnited Challenges on Facebook
GoodUnited is a turnkey conversational messaging tool and social giving solution designed to democratize the nonprofit supporter experience and empower nonprofits to develop one-to-one relationships with each and every social supporter.
We work directly with nonprofits just like yours to bring Facebook Challenges to life—from the initial Challenge planning, through managing groups and running ad campaigns, to messaging your supporters for ongoing cultivation. Our social giving solution includes:
- The GoodUnited Web App: This includes a Challenge Dashboard, same-day revenue reporting, and social donor and fundraiser profiles. You can monitor and optimize your Challenge performance and identify top social supporters.
- The Lab: Our in-house Optimization and Customer Success resources create the strategy and manage the execution of conversational messaging experiences to ensure maximum ROI. This includes A/B testing, data science, and more.
- Cultivation Engine: Turn raw social fundraising data into actionable insights, identifying social supporters and what drives them to take action. By understanding your supporters’ propensities to participate in another event and give again, you’ll be able to recommend supporter-specific opportunities year-round.
- In-Channel Messaging: Identify, target, and retarget social donors across social channels, connecting with them where they spend time. GoodUnited’s conversational messaging tools are channel-agnostic—meaning they can be applied to any social channel that has messaging and fundraising tools.
GoodUnited is at the forefront of bringing traditional peer-to-peer fundraising tools to social giving.
Understanding Ongoing Innovations in Digital-Native Fundraising
The world of social giving is rapidly developing and we’re continuing to improve our product alongside it.
We aren’t making shot-in-the-dark guesses at what will work in the fairly new realm of social giving. We carefully test our hypotheses and slowly roll them out across nonprofit partners.
The biggest driver for this testing is Messenger itself, where we get to ask participants questions such as:
- Why are you doing this fundraiser?
- Why did you join this Challenge?
- What is your connection to the nonprofit’s mission?
- How was your experience, especially when compared to in-person fundraising?
- Did you know [X fundraising tip]?
The answer to these questions (and more) in Messenger allows us to continue elevating our nonprofit partners’ social fundraising efforts—both refining their strategies overall and hyper-personalizing each individual participant’s experience.
For example, you could discover which types of Challenge activities participants most like to complete, how frequently you can host repeat fundraisers, and even the best wording to use to encourage return participation. And, you can use conversational messaging to understand participants on a personal level, allowing you to share relevant information and experiences year after year to foster engagement long after campaigns are finished.
This testing doesn’t only take place in Messenger. For example, we can use polls and questions in groups to understand participants’ preferences and we can explore data on ad performance to understand which ads best inspire action.
This process has allowed us to make numerous enhancements to GoodUnited’s social giving solution over recent years, including:
- A dashboard view to compare Challenge fundraisers side-by-side
- Fundraiser stories that visualize what motivates your supporters
- One-click Challenge builder to empower supporters to quickly create fundraisers that are consistent with your nonprofit’s branding
- An activity tracker that allows supporters to track their Challenge progress directly on Facebook
- Challenge teams that ignite competition and boost virality
- A referral button that empowers Challenge participants to engage their friends in the fundraiser
These efforts allow us to better support the fundraising efforts of nonprofits like yours.
10+ Facebook Challenge Ideas to Begin Brainstorming
If you’ve encountered Challenges on Facebook in the wild, you’ve likely seen some variation of common run/walk/ride activities. However, there are a wide variety of Challenge activities that you can incorporate into your fundraising lineup to surprise your supporters with an exciting new activity.
Consider incorporating any of the following 10+ ideas into your next Challenge on Facebook.
Physical Challenges
The following Challenge activities test your participants’ physical fitness:
- Walking
- Running
- Biking
- Calisthenics (burpees, sit-ups, push-ups, etc.)
Generally, physical challenges are measured by either distance (i.e. number of steps or miles) or time (i.e. completing a 20-minute calisthenic workout). This type of Challenge activity is often the most popular for nonprofits, as physical challenges are incredibly motivating— participants usually want to show off, improve upon, or test their physical abilities.
Wellness Challenges
As another way to improve the well-being of your supporters, wellness challenges ask participants to slow down and practice mindfulness. This includes tasks such as:
- Journaling
- Meditation
- Making healthy decisions (such as removing traditionally unhealthy foods from one’s diet)
Society is moving faster than ever, and wellness-based challenges task participants to break the cycle (even if for a short period of time). Participants will enjoy the refreshing change of pace and, ideally, adopt the wellness practice into their regular routines long after the Challenge is completed.
Philanthropic Challenges
Philanthropic challenges ask participants to go out of their way to help others while raising funds for your nonprofit. There are two common philanthropy-based tasks that you could use for your next Challenge on Facebook.
The first is volunteering. Participants would be tasked with completing X number of volunteer hours over the course of the month. After each volunteer session— with your nonprofit or another— they’d check in and discuss all that was accomplished.
The second is “paying it forward.” This describes small tasks that participants complete to improve another individual’s life in some way. For example, a participant might purchase coffee for the person behind them in line or shovel the snowy driveway of a neighbor. For this Challenge, participants are tasked with paying it forward a set number of times per week and encouraged to check in with updates on their tasks throughout the fundraiser.
Comedic Challenges
Comedic challenges task your participants with embarrassing themselves in some manner, all with the goal of advancing your cause.
Often, the “embarrassing” task is minimal— the goal isn’t to outright humiliate participants. For example, this could be a:
- “No Shave” challenge in which participants are tasked with growing out their beards or mustaches.
- Wacky clothing challenge, in which participants wear their silliest outfits one day per week.
- Extreme conditions challenge, such as the famous ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.
Comedic challenges are especially effective because they generate conversation. When an individual asks a participant about why they’re wearing wacky clothing or growing facial hair, the participant can share the message behind their actions.
Bonus! We’ve written numerous guides with ideas for social fundraisers. Check out our peer-to-peer fundraising ideas, virtual fundraising ideas, and virtual event ideas to continue brainstorming for your Challenges on Facebook.
4 Top Nonprofits That Embraced Facebook Challenges
We’ve discussed how Challenges on Facebook would work in theory. Now, let’s explore four real-life examples of nonprofits that incorporated Challenges into their fundraising strategies with great success.
Susan G. Komen
Susan G. Komen sought a new way to raise peer-to-peer funds from social supporters. Partnering with GoodUnited, the nonprofit hosted a month-long Challenge on Facebook with the goal of acquiring 6,500 new supporters.
The Challenge tasked participants with completing 25 burpees per day for a month. Komen’s GoodUnited Challenge on Facebook had the following results:
- Over 13,000 participants joined the group, 90% of whom were new to Komen.
- 10,500 email addresses were provided to Komen to add to its donor file.
- Over 2x the projected donation amount raised, via 175k+ donations made at an average donation amount of $31.
Moving forward, Komen continues to build Facebook Challenges into its social fundraising calendar. To see how Komen blew its Challenge goals out of the water, explore the full case study here.
American Cancer Society
American Cancer Society (ACS) partnered with GoodUnited to host a series of three Challenges on Facebook. Each Challenge was one month long and tasked participants to complete a different activity (running, walking, and doing squats).
Here’s how the three GoodUnited Challenges on Facebook panned out:
- 61,000 user-generated fundraisers were created on behalf of ACS, with a $22.41 cost per acquisition compared to the $600 industry-standard peer-to-peer participant acquisition cost.
- 443,078 new leads were generated for ACS, at a $3.12 cost per lead.
- 95% of participants were new to ACS.
American Cancer Society’s Challenges on Facebook were so notable that they smashed the platform’s previous record for the most money raised by a single organization in a single day— receiving 23,000 donations in one day.
No Kid Hungry
No Kid Hungry saw its most popular fundraising efforts— in-person culinary and tasting fundraisers— become derailed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Seeking community-building events, the nonprofit partnered with GoodUnited to host a 31-Mile walking Challenge on Facebook.
The Challenge resulted in the following:
- 1.23 million additional meals funded for children in need with a $30.05 average donation amount
- 5,400 new leads obtained for No Kid Hungry at a $1.93 cost per lead
- A 600% return on ad spend
The nonprofit is continuing to plan additional Challenges on Facebook, leveraging the platform’s fundraising tools and conversational messaging to engage supporters.
Best Friends Animal Society
Best Friends Animal Society (BFAS) has the mission of eliminating no-kill shelters across the nation by 2025. The nonprofit partnered with GoodUnited to host a Challenge on Facebook with the goal of growing recognition for the nonprofit and cause, strengthening its community, and of course, raising funds.
BFAS hosted the 30-Mile Challenge in 2020, during which participants were challenged to run the distance in March. It had the following results:
- $100,000 in donations raised
- A 400% return on investment
- A 14% increase in average peer-to-peer donation size, to $32.42
- The opportunity to connect with new supporters, as 85% of participants were new to the organization
With proper planning, Facebook group management, and conversational messaging, nonprofits like BFAS can make the most of Challenges on Facebook to secure and boost support for their causes.
Wrapping Up: Incorporating Facebook Challenges Into Your Strategy
Challenges on Facebook are ideal ways to connect with the next generation of social supporters and raise your relationships for long-term engagement. To begin planning a Challenge for your nonprofit, consider partnering with a social giving solution such as GoodUnited. To learn more, contact us here.
In the meantime, explore the following additional resources to round out your Facebook Fundraising strategy:
- Facebook Fundraiser Payout: How It Works for Nonprofits. Explore various Facebook fundraiser payout methods and best practices in this guide.
- Virtual Fundraising: The Complete Guide for Nonprofits. If you’re seeking tips for effective virtual fundraising, explore this complete guide.
- The Nonprofit Guide to Facebook Donation & Tax Receipts. Learn more about how Facebook handles donation and tax receipts for fundraisers in this guide.
