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Your online fundraising campaign

Getting started

Once you’ve written your story/case for sponsorship, you’re ready to start your online fundraising campaign. You’ve put a lot of work into your story and this is the stage where you want to make the most of it by sharing it with your friends and family.

Firstly, you need to set up an online sponsorship page. Mind recommends Virgin Money Giving or Just Giving. It’s easy to set up a page on either of these – they will guide you through the process of setting this up.

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Sharing your fundraising on Social media

Social media (for example, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram) can be a great way to share your story and your fundraising page.

Most people tell us they find sharing their stories on Facebook, with people they know fairly well, works better for them than sharing on a social media channel where they don’t know their followers as well. You can test this out to see what works best for you!

Before you share your page more widely, ask a few people close to you to sponsor you first to get things started. If you can, ask people you think might be quite generous, as this encourages others to be generous too!

"When I warily checked my page an hour later, I'd already raised over £300. I couldn't believe it!" - Mind fundraiser

Three top tips

1. Create urgency

When you post about your fundraising on social media try to give people a reason to sponsor you there-and-then, rather than holding back till later.

2. Create momentum

Post every few days or every week or so to keep reminding people and to create a buzz and sense of momentum around your fundraising campaign.

3. Create hooks

You can create ‘hooks’ or reasons to give updates or to base a fundraising ask around, for example, using your fundraising targets, training milestones, event preparations or just to say thank you. 

Get Going!

Here are some ideas to put these tips into practice:

  • For your first post, tell people what you’re doing and let them know you’d be really grateful for a few donations to get you off to a flying start.
  • Post every so often asking people to help you get to the next fundraising milestone, e.g. “Thanks everyone for helping me reach £160! Can anyone help me get to £200? [link to your page here]”. You could do this every few weeks or so, when you’re approaching a new milestone.
  • Thank people publicly for their donation to keep drawing attention to what you’re and to create positivity around your fundraising, e.g. “Big thanks to Jen, Claire and David for their donations – I’m now at £200! Thanks everyone for your support. It means a lot”. You could do this every week or so, depending on how often you get donations.
  • Use your training milestones and remind people about the effort you’re putting in, e.g. “Just back from a 10k training run, furthest I have ever run. Thanks so much for your support – it’s really helping my legs to keep going! If anyone else is able to sponsor me, I’d be really grateful [link to your page here]”.
  • Payday or towards the end of the month is a good time to ask for donations. If you feel like it, you can just be completely blatant about this with something like “Since it’s pay day… can anyone spare a pound or two to support my skydive? Thanks to everyone who has helped me to raise £400 so far. I’d be super grateful if you could help me get to £500 [link to your page here] :)”.
  • If you have any funny stories or if anything significant happened to you during your training, or event preparations, share these.
  • Photos or videos can really bring what you’re doing to life, and are great for sharing on social media. You don’t need fancy equipment – you could just use your phone. Funny photos or videos always go down especially well. Check out our guide to using video.
  • Reminders in the run up to your event, e.g. “I can’t believe I’ll be trekking 40 miles this time next week. Thanks to everyone who has helped me raise £600 so far. If anyone else can help I’d be really grateful for whatever you can spare [link to your page here]”.
  • Reminders of your story/why you’re doing this, e.g. “A week today is the big day. I’ll be swimming a mile for Mind. Here’s a reminder of why I’m doing this link to page. I would be so grateful for any support you can give.
  • Day before, e.g. “Tomorrow is the big day. I’m really nervous! Thank you so much to everyone who has helped me raise £700. I’d be really grateful for any last minute donations [link to your page here]”.

Sharing your story by email

Don't forget email! Share your story by email with friends and family who aren’t on social media, or with your work colleagues.

You might want to send an initial email (possibly on or after pay day!) and another reminder email (or two!) nearer the time of your event.

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Can Mind retweet/share my fundraising page?

Unfortunately we can't share as many of your amazing fundraising stories as we'd like to on our social media pages and we want to explain why so you don't feel disappointed.

We are incredibly lucky to have thousands and thousands of supporters fundraising for Mind. We sometimes get hundreds of fundraisers contacting us on Twitter in just one day.

We have to make difficult decisions about what to share on social media as we usually have many things we want to share about different areas of Mind’s work – from new information about conditions and support, to campaigns for better services and blogs from supporters. We know that tweeting and sharing too often can sometimes put off our supporters so we have to try to get the balance right.

Lots of our fundraisers have incredibly interesting and moving stories to tell, and are taking part in amazing challenges. As much as we want to support and celebrate every one of them, if we shared all of these pages and stories, it could turn off other supporters and leave us little room to talk about anything else.

We do try to share fundraising stories when we can but we can only share a fraction of them and there’s no easy way to decide what we should share.

Please don't be too disappointed if we can't share yours - it's not because we don't love what you're doing, because we do and we think you're amazing!

Another important point is that Mind sharing your story probably won't help your fundraising! Even with a great story, it's quite rare for a stranger to donate. It's much more effective to concentrate your efforts on telling your story to your own friends, family and contacts and we hope the advice we've put together above will help you to do that!

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Social media etiquette

You’ll be much more successful with your fundraising, in most cases, if you concentrate on asking people you know on social media for support, rather than people you don’t.

We wouldn’t generally recommend asking celebrities for support, or to share you fundraising page, on social media. They get so many requests, they’re unlikely to be able to help, and even if they do share your story, their fans/followers don’t know you so in our experience targeting them very rarely works.

If you do still feel you want to contact celebrities or people you don’t know we’d recommend a personalised tweet or DM rather than ‘spamming’ many people with the same message. Please always approach people respectfully.

We’d also really appreciate it if you could take care not include @mindcharity into ‘spam’ tweets like this ‘@celebrity – please share my fundraising page for @mindcharity’ as this can quickly fill up our newsfeed and can sometimes make it harder to spot tweets from people asking for help or support.

Other ways to get involved

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