by Firefly Partners • 06.16.2014
Event team captains are passionate! They are some of your biggest advocates—not to mention fundraisers—and often have a strong connection with your mission. Keeping this in mind when creating your communication strategy for your P2P allows you to engage these important participants and provides you with the opportunity to harness their passion into engaging email and social media content, too. Here are a few easy ways to place them at the helm:
Get Them Registered Early
Team captains are an important piece of your recruitment strategy because they do some of the recruiting for you. Before launching your P2P event, create an audience group made up of past team captains into your event management center (EMC). Let them be the first to know when registration opens. This segmentation not only helps to get your team captains registered before their teammates but segmenting is a great way to single them out as being important and helps your message gain relevancy.
Welcome Them Profusely
Most EMC tools can be set up to send an alert to you as soon as a new team registers. As soon as your team captain and team is registered, send a personal email or make a phone call welcoming them to your event (best done within a few days of their registration). This is a perfect opportunity to make a connection with new team captains and reconnect with those who are returning. Extra bonus points for sending them a special post-event survey to gather feedback for your next P2P event!
Help Them Share Their Story
Your team captains are usually personally connected to your mission and often have compelling stories to share. Create simple instructions for captains to update their team and personal fundraising pages with their own personal story. Keep tabs on team page content and when you find team pages with a great story and photo, consider sharing them in an email or on social media and encourage other team captains to update their pages, too.
Showcase Successful Captains
Do you have a team captain who has reached a major fundraising milestone? Give them a shout out in an upcoming email, social media post or blog article. If you don’t have a blog and want to write a more “featurey” article – think about creating a web page on your main website and link to it in an email or Facebook post. You’ll most likely find that these spotlights are some of your most popular email, social media or website content.
Your Mom Was Right: Say Thank You
The words “thank you” are powerful. In addition to the standard thank you in your email closings, consider adding a section to your emails or a weekly Facebook post thanking teams that have reached their team goal or another fundraising milestone. Everyone loves to see their hard work recognized in a genuine way.
Do you have a team captain cultivation tip? Share it in the comments!
When you need a partner who gets it – think Firefly! We have many powerful case studies about clients like you.
