Last summer, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital made a decision that many nonprofits may find uncomfortable: They supported online personality Ryan Trahan as he raised money for them from his 22 million YouTube followers — on his own terms.

Rather than dictating how Trahan should communicate with his audience, leaders from St. Jude asked, “How can we support you?” They were deeply involved in the process — providing information and offering support — but they didn’t micromanage his messaging. They recognized that he is the expert at communicating with his audience. And they understood that their role was to give him all the information he needed and trust him to present it authentically.

Trahan’s campaign raised $11.6 million for St. Jude, with $5 million coming from midlevel donations ($5,000 to $10,000) from companies and individuals. But the impact went beyond the dollar amount. The campaign reached new audiences and offered a family-friendly event that attracted support from every type of business, including construction companies, car dealerships, local dermatologists, and gaming brands — many of which had never before engaged with St. Jude.

St. Jude’s approach is rare among nonprofits that offer peer-to-peer fundraising, and that disconnect is creating a problem the sector can no longer ignore. Here are some ways to fix it.

Give volunteer fundraisers flexibility.

During a recent conversation I had on peer-to-peer fundraising, a nonprofit leader was puzzled about why fewer people were signing up to raise money on their organization’s behalf, despite robust marketing efforts and a compelling mission.

When I asked what flexibility fundraisers had to personalize their pages or messaging, the response was immediate and definitive: The fundraiser shouldn’t get to choose. The organization should control.

This mindset reveals a fundamental tension. The desire for brand consistency is colliding with what motivates people to fundraise in 2026. Right now, control is winning — and participation is losing.

Fewer people are giving, even as the total amount of money donated hit a high-water mark of $592.5 billion in 2024. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project’s most recent data shows donor numbers declined 1.9 percent year-over-year, with the steepest drop among small-dollar donors — those giving $100 or less, who represent more than half of all donors. The number of small-dollar donors fell 10.5 percent. 

Peer-to-peer fundraising shows similar trends. While the top 30 peer-to-peer programs saw participation increase 3.6 percent to 2.6 million participants in 2025, they remain well below pre-pandemic levels. Organizations that host traditional walks, runs, and team fundraising events, which once reliably generated thousands of participants, are seeing registration numbers plateau or decline.

The sector’s response has largely focused on acquisition tactics: better marketing, compelling storytelling, improved technology platforms. These matter, but they miss a more fundamental problem. When potential volunteer fundraisers do engage, the experience itself often discourages continued participation.

The control trap doesn’t work.

I’ve seen organizations require fundraisers to use specific words in a specific order. Logo placement must be exact. Every piece of content must be reviewed and approved. The intention is understandable — organizations worked hard to build their brands, and they want to prevent off-message fundraisers from damaging their reputation.

But when you make a volunteer fundraiser diverge too far from what they would naturally do, the content feels inauthentic, and their audience notices immediately. What nonprofit organizers view as brand protection, fundraisers often experience as a lack of trust: We don’t trust you to represent us properly. Stay in your lane. Follow our rules.

Younger fundraisers often have the exact skills nonprofits desperately need: social-media fluency, authentic storytelling, and built-in communities of peers who trust them.

This is especially costly with younger supporters. According to Tiltify’s 2025 giving report, 85 percent of Gen Z donors say they would donate if asked by someone they follow and trust — personal connection over institutional appeals. Donors and fundraisers under 40 have grown up in an era where customization is standard, from social-media profiles to streaming queues to how they engage with brands. When they encounter a fundraising system that offers no flexibility, it doesn’t just feel outdated; it feels disrespectful of their ability to connect authentically with their own networks.

Ironically, these younger fundraisers often have the exact skills nonprofits desperately need: social-media fluency, authentic storytelling, and built-in communities of peers who trust them. They create fundraising content in the form of murder mysteries, live online auctions, endurance challenges, and livestreaming — formats that traditional nonprofit communications do not often embrace or even consider.

Guardrails designed for a different era end up pushing away the people best positioned to reach new donors.

And increasingly, potential volunteer fundraisers are making a different choice. They’re walking away.

Strategic partnerships are working now.

The difference between St. Jude’s approach and the control trap comes down to understanding roles. St. Jude recognized it was partnering with someone who had built trust with his community. It didn’t script every word or control his creative approach.

In practice, its guardrails looked something like this: Here’s our mission in plain language, here are the two or three things we’ll never associate with (political content, competitor brands, anything that contradicts our medical guidelines), and here’s a library of assets and talking points you’re welcome to pull from. That’s it. The red lines are real and firm, but narrow. The space inside them is wide enough for a creator to be themselves.

There’s a difference between saying, “Here are the lines we can’t cross” and “Here’s exactly how you must say everything.” What I’ve learned from working with thousands of volunteer fundraisers is that the fear of someone “going rogue” is vastly overblown. Does it happen? Sure — just as it does with actors, musicians, and celebrity influencers. And most of the time, it’s preventable if you’re thoughtful about how you position your messaging, what resources you make available, and how you support them.

To be clear: Nonprofits need brand guidelines. Mission integrity matters. But there’s a critical difference between setting guardrails and micromanaging execution.

Here’s how to adapt.

Start with a short onboarding document, not a legal brief. Lead with your mission — two or three sentences on who you are and why it matters, written the way you’d explain it to a friend. Then state your nonnegotiables directly: “We don’t take positions on political candidates. We don’t share patient information without consent. We ask that you not associate our brand with competing organizations.” Brief, specific, human. Fundraisers can work with that. What they can’t work with is a 40-page manual that reads like it was written to protect the organization from its own volunteers.

Trust the people who want to help you, or keep losing them to causes that do.

From there, provide templates without mandating their use, offering suggested language as a starting point while encouraging volunteers to share personal stories. Celebrate creative approaches rather than demanding uniformity. When a fundraiser tries something unexpected that works, highlight it as an example rather than shutting it down for being off-brand.

Shift your core question from “How do we control our brand?” to “How do we empower people who believe in our mission?” Invest in genuine relationships with volunteer fundraisers rather than trying to control everything behind the scenes. A fundraiser’s authentic connection to your cause, expressed in their own voice, is more valuable than perfect brand consistency.

When nonprofits ask me why their peer-to-peer programs aren’t growing, I often find the answer in their own policies. The choice isn’t complicated: Trust the people who want to help you, or keep losing them to causes that do.

Source link