Ettore Rossetti sees peer-to-peer fundraising as a discipline that works across all generations.
Whether it’s a Baby Boomer grandmother walking around a track or a 13-year-old boy playing video games, Rossetti says people with shared interests who are connected to a common cause have the ability to raise a lot of money while having fun.
It’s that idea that prompted Rossetti and his identical twin brother, Ettore, to turn their shared love of tennis into an opportunity to raise money for the charity Save the Children. In 2015, they raised more than $112,000 for the organization by raising money for their attempt to break the GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS title for most consecutive volleys.
In his professional role, as senior director of social business strategy and innovation for Save the Children, Rossetti is engaging with an entirely different demographic — and with similar results.
Rossetti is leading Save the Children’s Life Force campaign, which encourages video gamers to pledge to play a game to fundraise on behalf of the charity — and live stream the contests online. The campaign has been a big success, enlisting a number of video gaming and YouTube celebrities to tap into their vast networks of fans and supporters to take part.
In turn, the effort has exposed a charity with a long history to an entirely new generation of supporters.
“As a venerable organization, we’re trying to continue to innovate and Life Force represents an innovative way to fundraise,” Rossetti says. “It enables Save the Children to be not only your grandmother’s charity, but your grandchild’s charity.”
Rossetti, who will be sharing lessons from Save the Children’s Life Force campaign later this month at the Peer-to-Peer Professional Forum’s annual conference in Orlando, recently took a few minutes to share some of what he’s learned in launching Life Force.
P2P Forum: Why did Save the Children decide to create the Life Force campaign?
Rossetti: We believe that the future of philanthropy rests with the next generation — and not through the traditional channels which we’ve known for in the past. This is a way for us to be at the convergence of two macro trends — one is social and the other is live.
The first part is social — connecting people online who have never been able to be connected before. That ecosystem, that convergence, creates an environment to accelerate fund raising.
The other piece is live. What’s happening online isn’t what happened yesterday or even 5 seconds ago. It’s what’s going on now. Live and Live Streaming captures that urgency — and that’s where the transformation is happening in philanthropy. That’s what we’re tapping in to with Life Force — and that’s why it’s so exciting to be in this space.
P2P Forum: How is this different than other peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns?
Rossetti: I always like to say that the advent of these new tools and technology platforms enable the donor to be closer to the field and bring the field closer to the donor.
As fundraisers, we plan donor trips for some of our big donors and foundations, so they can get a look at the work we’re doing in the field. But it’s prohibitively expensive for us to send every donor into the field.
The next best thing we can do is create a virtual and digital experience for them that is interactive, that all donors can tune in and see.
If you look at the advent of live streaming, no matter what platform of technology it occurs on — Facebook Live, Google Hangouts, Periscope, Snapshot – they enable people to see people and interact with them in real time and that can be applied to philanthropy, can be applied through the nonprofit sector and we’re capitalizing on some of those partnerships ourselves. So I think that that’s really exciting and it’s a game changer so to speak.
P2P Forum: What’s your advice to other nonprofits that might want to experiment with live streaming as part of their fundraising efforts?
Rossetti: Jump right in and be patient. The next big thing usually starts as a small thing, right? And so, start small, fail fast, learn lessons from your failings and that’s how you’ll truly succeed.
It was Thomas Edison who said he didn’t fail 10,000 times to create a lightbulb, he learned 10,000 ways how not to create a lightbulb.