Let’s Get Personal: Create Your Own 3-Day Fundraising Page URL

Today we welcome Paula, the Susan G. Komen Seattle 3-Day Participant Coach, who will be sharing details about one of her favorite fundraising tools!

“Help! My donor couldn’t find my web page to make a donation!” As a Susan G. Komen 3-Day® coach, I frequently encounter this crisis in calls and emails from frantic participants, and I take the opportunity to don my “hero” cape and share one of the best Komen 3-Day tips out there – the Personal Page URL! This handy, personalized web link is easy to create, and will make donating to you a one-click piece of cake for your 3-Day® donors!

A URL (which stand for Uniform Resource Locator, in case you were curious) is the “address” or location of a specific web page. When you type the address of a web page into your browser (usually starting with www), you are typing a URL. That’s as technical as I will get.

Every registered 3-Day participant has a personal donation page on the 3-Day website, and every personal page has its very own URL. When you get started, your page’s URL is a messy jumble of letters and characters that no one would remember. Mine looks like this: http://www.the3day.org/site/TR?px=1228513&fr_id=1935&pg=personal. Not very user friendly, is it?

If you send your emails directly from your 3-Day Participant Center, they will automatically include your page URL at the bottom of the email, but if you send paper letters, or send emails from your personal email address, or talk to your donors face-to-face, it’s useful to have a personal page URL that is easy to remember.

So what’s a determined fundraiser to do? This is where the 3-Day Personal Page URL comes in. You can create a “pretty” URL for yourself, then share it with your donors who can then reach your page with just one click. And don’t we all want to make donating as easy as possible? I know I do!

Creating your very own 3-Day Personal Page URL is easy. Here is what you need to do:

Log into your 3-Day Participant Center. Find the Participant Center Home menu on the right side of your landing page, click “Edit Personal Page.”
On the next page you will see a light pink shaded box just under the page header. Click the URL Settings link on the right. (The screenshot below shows my Personal Page URL. Yours will appear once you create it in the next step).
Type your name in the text box as you want it to appear in your new URL. The URL will always start with The3Day.org/goto/ but the ending is all yours to personalize. You could use your first and last name (PaulaHultman), your name and the year (Paula2015 or PaulaHultman2015), your name and the city you’re walking in (SanDiego_Paula) or anything else that is relatively short, easy to spell and easy to remember (Paula.Loves.Pink). You won’t be able to use spaces, but letters and numbers are fine, as are dots, dashes and underscores. IMPORTANT: If the personal URL you’re trying is already being used by another 3-Day participant, you will get a message that the URL is already taken. In these cases, you can try adding your middle initial, or a nickname to differentiate your URL, or try something completely different.

Click Save and your Personal Page URL will be ready to share. Click the link yourself to see how easy it will be for donors to reach your page and make their donation.

It’s that easy! Now all you have to do is share your pretty new URL with your donors. As I mentioned earlier, when you send out emails directly from your Participant Center, a link to your donation page is automatically included, so including your new Personal Page URL here is optional. It’s also automatically included if you post on Facebook using the official 3-Day Facebook app. However, if you are sending emails from your personal email account, sending out an old fashioned fundraising letter, or posting your own messages on social media, always include your Personal Page URL so donors can easily find you. If your email provider allows you to create a signature that will automatically be added to your outgoing email, be sure to add your URL there as well.

There you have it, my favorite fundraising tip! If you need help with your Personal Page URL, your 3-Day coaches are just a call or email away (800-996-3DAY, or The3Day.org/Contact). We are always happy to assist you!

How to Tell Your Story – A Guest Post by Coach Susan

Susan Wynne, the Participant Support Coach for the Atlanta 3-Day, joins us today to talk about the importance that your story has in your fundraising efforts.

“Tales told from the heart reach the heart.” – Steve Sanfield

Who doesn’t love a good story? A really great story can draw people in, transport them to new and different places and move them to act. Stories are what connect us to each other.

Your story is an important way for you to share your message with potential donors. Your story is what will help you achieve the goal that you set out to reach, which is to help create a world without breast cancer.

When participants register for the Komen 3-Day, one of the first things that we as coaches suggest they do is customize their personal 3-Day® webpage. This is the place where you will tell potential donors YOUR story. What brought you to the 3-Day? What made you decide to walk 60 miles and raise $2,300? What will your friends’ and family members’ donations mean to you and to the fight?

Below I’ve outlined a few tips to help you tell your story:

Make your story authentic. The people who are going to be supporting you will be drawn in because they know you, they want to support you, and they can empathize with your story. Don’t tell someone else’s story. Use your voice. Jot down a few thoughts about what you want to share: what made you decide to participate? Why is this cause important to you? Why did you choose the 3-Day? This will become the outline for your story.
Speak from the heart. For most of us, making the decision to participate in the 3-Day was emotional. Maybe you were driven to participate because you were diagnosed, maybe because you lost a loved one, maybe you might not have a personal connection, but were drawn to participate because you want to do something to make the world better. Whatever the reason, it must have been powerful to make you decide to do something that many other people wouldn’t do. Share your reason with your donors. It is the stories, not statistics, that will help connect people to your cause.
Remember that your story is powerful; share it with everyone! As the 3-Day gets closer, we have many participants who reach out to the coaches because they need some last-minute fundraising advice. As a coach, the first thing I do is go online and visit their personal fundraising page. I’m surprised by how often I discover that they had not personalized their page yet; they had not told their story. Many walkers make the mistake of thinking their story isn’t important, or thinking it won’t make an impact, so they don’t share it. But they couldn’t be more wrong! My first suggestion is to get that personal page updated, then share it with the world. It’s amazing the success that people have when they take this very important step.
Make sure to include your donors in your story. Your donors are helping you achieve your goal by supporting you. Their generosity goes so far beyond the monetary gifts they give, because together with you, they have helped make a difference in the fight to end breast cancer. Share how their donations are helping, and thank them publicly early and often.

Sometimes getting started is the hardest step, so if you need a little help with getting your story out there, call your 3-Day coach at 800-996-3DAY.

Fabulous Fundraising Resources in Your 3-Day Participant Center

You Susan G. Komen 3-Day® Participant Center is chock full of amazing tools and resources to help prepare you for the Komen 3-Day. The best advice I can give when it comes to your Participant Center is to log in sometime when you have a good 30 minutes or more to just explore. Click around on all the different links and discover what goodies are waiting inside.

I could devote a whole series of blog posts to detailing the amazing tools in the 3-Day® Participant Center, but today, I want to focus on a few fundraising gems.

You can find the fundraising resources by logging in, then clicking Fundraise in the left-side navigation menu.

From there, click on Fundraising Tools.

Here, you will find dozens of links to fundraising materials, including:

Sample fundraising letters
Sample social media posts
Printable tools, such as posters and business cards
Eye-catching logos and Facebook images
Fundraising ideas galore (Seriously, people. If you want ideas, give yourself 10 minutes and you’ll find loads of them!)

When you’re done poking around and have gathered heaps of amazing strategies, get back to the Home Page by clicking Participant Center Home in the left-side menu.

Now, look to the menu on the other side of the screen and click the pink colored button that says Progress.

This will open a screen that shows you exactly how much you’ve raised and who has donated to you and when. Did you know that your donors can leave you personal messages when they donate (different from the public messages that scroll on your fundraising Honor Roll)? You’ll see them here! And, you can even download a list of your donors, complete with addresses to send those heartfelt thank you notes to.

Your 3-Day fundraising is a big commitment, so we give you big tools to tackle the challenge. Spend some time with your Participant Center, and if you ever have questions that you can’t find the answers to, our 3-Day coaches are just a phone call away at 800-996-3DAY.