How to Harness Online Tools to Fundraise for Breast Cancer Research

These are the platforms and features to know when you’re setting up a breast cancer fundraiser

Social media and email are powerful tools to leverage when you’ve set out to raise critical dollars to support lifesaving breast cancer research—helping you share your fundraiser with friends and family, track your goal, give updates on your progress, and more. And today, there are more tools than ever to start hosting a fundraiser for BCRF in minutes.

RELATED: 7 Breast Cancer Awareness Month Ideas to Help Fundraisers Make an Impact

Whether you want to launch a Facebook fundraiser in honor of your birthday or another meaningful date, raise money with just one Instagram post in October, or have a handy and secure link to email to everyone you know, we broke down the latest and greatest ways to support research online below.

Fundraising with a Custom BCRF Page

Want a completely personalized page you can easily share? Start a BCRF fundraising page here. You’ll get your own BCRF URL and can customize the story, images, and updates sections. With your fundraising link ready to go, you can easily email it to your friends, family, and colleagues, add it to your Instagram and TikTok bios, and post about it on Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Unlike many other tools, our platform also allows you to create a team breast cancer fundraiser with others. Each member creates their own page, and then you can funnel them together in support of a primary team page and fundraising goal. See this in action on the Pink Lemonade Stand Challenge’s page.

Find inspiration from some of BCRF’s top fundraisers here.

Fundraising on Facebook

Facebook Fundraisers: The Facebook fundraiser has been an impactful tool for nonprofits, helping to raise millions of dollars for charitable causes. You may know them as birthday fundraisers because many people choose to do them in honor of their special day, but they can be set up any time of the year, such as in October for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

If you are already logged into Facebook on your computer or phone, it could not be simpler to set up your breast cancer fundraiser. Just log into Facebook, click this link, and set your goal. You can customize the end date, story, and image on the page.

Otherwise, when you log into Facebook, select “The Breast Cancer Research Foundation” as your nonprofit when setting up a fundraiser from your account.

Share your page regularly and be sure to thank every person who donates on your Fundraising page or via Messenger. Facebook will also push your page up to the top of your friends’ feeds if you make changes to your page like customizing the image or posting an update to the “Activity” section.

Facebook Post Donation Button: If you aren’t interested in hosting a full fundraiser, you can ask your friends and family to donate to BCRF on a single Facebook post. This feature can be a particularly meaningful way to honor a loved one who has passed away or in tribute to a breast cancer thriver who just completed treatment. Here’s how to set up the donate button:

• When you draft your post on Facebook, click the “…” button to the right of “Add to your post.”
• Under “Raise Money” type “The Breast Cancer Research Foundation.”
• This will create a donate button on your post for anyone to chip in.
• Go one step further and encourage your friends to click the donate button in your post caption.

Fundraising on Instagram

Instagram Feed Fundraiser: You can fundraise on Instagram in a similar format to a Facebook fundraiser. To start, pick a photo you would like to use as the main image and as a post announcing your breast cancer fundraiser in your feed. Once you have your image ready, follow these steps:

• Make sure you’re on the latest version of Instagram.
• Tap the create icon (+) in the top right.
• Select Post, choose an image for your fundraiser, and click Next.
• Under your image and caption, tap Add Fundraiser.
• Choose @BCRFcure as your nonprofit and set your fundraising goal.
• Write a caption about why you’re fundraising for research and tap Share.

Your fundraiser will be active for 30 days. During this time, you can share your fundraiser to Instagram Reels or Stories and add it to more feed posts to keep promoting your initiative to your followers.

Instagram Stickers: Like the Facebook Stories donation sticker, Instagram has its own for its Stories format. Once you’ve added your Story image, click the square smiley face at the top right and select Donation. Choose @BCRFcure as your nonprofit and your sticker or existing Instagram fundraiser will come up. You can then customize the text and color of your sticker.

Try adding this sticker to a Story about why supporting breast cancer research is important to you or download and use our designed template here. All you need do is add a sticker.

Tip: After you’ve added the Donation sticker, go back and search “BCRF” in the gif library to add BCRF’s pink ribbon or another custom gif to your Story.

Instagram Live Donations: Instagram also allows you to fundraise while hosting a live video. Before starting your stream, select ‘Fundraiser’ and search for @BCRFCure. If you already started an Instagram fundraiser, that should come up as an option to add instead. You might try this while singing a song or talking about how breast cancer has impacted you.

Promote your live video to your followers a few days ahead with a set time to maximize the number of people who might join, and be sure to thank your donors on camera as Instagram alerts you that gifts are coming in.

No matter how you’re fundraising, keep these best practices in mind:

• If you’ve got a personal connection to breast cancer that you’re comfortable opening up about, share it. Sharing why research and BCRF are important to you will inspire donations.
• Tell your friends and family that any amount helps! A $25 donation funds a half hour of research in a BCRF lab.
• Make time to thank every donor for their generosity in person, by email/text, or on social media.

Find more breast cancer fundraiser ideas and inspiration here.