Peer-to-Peer Fundraising – Great Britain’s success adapted to Romanian reality

A fundraiser must have some special DNA to be able to steer the (financial) beast in the eye. Have learnt some best practice from Andrei Chirtoc, a gentle man with loads of practice working for the charitable sector. His story has crossed paths with the UK more than once. Here it is!

Peer-to-Peer fundraising is a model that in the last years, at an international level, had a spectacular growth. One of the driving forces of this growth is due to sport events that give the fundraisers the reason to collect money for the cause they support. The most successful event is the London Marathon which, in the last five years raised over 250 million pounds for the supported causes. Most of the funds come from online donations and online fundraising platforms, one of the field leaders being British as well: justgiving.com.

Last year when we started the platform called Galantom (“Gentle man” in English), our goal was not to “reinvent the wheel” and we were inspired by this model which proved to be successful. Obviously we had to implement a new system of spokes adapted to Romanian reality. It all started in August 2013, without a big fuss, but by small and steady steps in order to create a context for a slow but sure growth. We are only one year old and we already have many things to be proud of: almost 700.000 Ron donated on Galantom, 71 events, 52 supported organisations and almost 5900 donations. But perhaps the figure that makes us the proudest is the average donation of 114 Ron.

Even if we still have a long way until we can compare ourselves to western countries in what is voluntary fundraising and donors’ culture concerned, we believe that the figures presented above prove that we are on the right track and the system we implemented suits the Romanian reality very well. One of the most important changes we had to make was the payment method. Romanian organisations have smaller budgets and many of them do not afford to pay a commission for external fundraising tools. That’s why we chose donations as payment method. It is the donor who decides to direct an amount of his donation for the development of Galantom platform, if he considers this tool and its impact in communities useful.

This payment method involves reaching a certain sustainability threshold of the project only when attaining a large volume of donations (600.000 euro/year). Taking into consideration the results obtained so far, we predict to reach this threshold in 2017. But we are looking for a corporate partner that can support us in order to speed up our growth and to bring this goal closer. The most beautiful thing about a company deciding to invest in our platform is that their investment would multiply its social impact. By only one investment, the company can have a good impact in different social areas (environment, health, education, social inclusion), and this money could generate in their turn, funds for the beneficiary organisations through personal contributions. This way, on the long term, the visibility of the organisations increases, as well as people’s availability for social involvement in Romania.

In our times the wheel was invented and reinvented almost all areas. Success does not necessarily depend on the originality of the idea you want to implement rather on the extra value that you can bring when you adapt a concept already done to the road where you want to make the wheel moving.