Training for and taking part in an endurance event is no easy feat!

The dedication, training and self-education that goes into endurance events means that participants go beyond just raising money. They’re on a personal journey.

So, it’s only natural that, in exchange for their efforts, they’ll have high hopes for how much they can raise for their chosen cause. And you can help them raise more with one simple suggestion: using a fitness app.

Fundraisers who use fitness apps raise more money

When I trained for the MK marathon, every mile felt like an incredible achievement. I became obsessed with logging into my Strava account, and found myself talking about running at every opportunity.

But what does this have to do with increasing donations?

Our stats show that fundraisers who log their activity on a fitness app and then share the updates publicly raise an average of 40% more money!

They’re also more likely to proactively ask for support and even self-donate in order to kick start their fundraising.

This could be because the nature of fitness apps like Strava and Fitbit is that they allow fundraisers, to see tangible results. This has three key benefits:

1. Results demonstrate the level of effort that’s being put into training, allowing fundraisers to feel as though they’re providing some “value for money” in exchange for asking their family and friends for donations
   
   
2. Updates about their training provide natural talking points and give fundraisers something new to post about rather than feeling repetitive
   
   
3. Tracking your fitness in an app means you can see your progress over time, which offers a real sense of pride! And when your fitness app sends you a notification to say well done, why wouldn’t someone want to share that?!

The link between fitness tracking and page activation

Not all Fundraising Pages manage to take get their first donation. Our colleagues at Blackbaud analysed the activity of over 850,000 fundraisers, and found a direct correlation between people using fitness apps to track progress and their likelihood to activate their fundraising.

Those with the highest page activation rates (pages are “active” when they get their first donation) were the fundraisers who logged and shared their activity between 11-50 times.

This would indicate that there’s a link between being committed to regular activity and overall engagement with the charity challenge. This is supported by the finding that fundraising marathon runners who log and share at least one fitness update have been shown to have a 39% higher page activation rate.

Fitness app users are increasing rapidly

It’s clear that fitness apps have the power to positively impact fundraising, but they also come with the added benefit of already being popular. In 2024, fundraisers on JustGiving logged 79 million total miles! That’s a lot of people dusting off their trainers and sweatbands.

Connect Strava and Fitbit to JustGiving and raise more!

With JustGiving’s Strava and Fitbit integrations, your supporters can share their fitness activities, including training pics, maps and total distances, straight from the app to their JustGiving Fundraising Page…and raise more money in the process.

Check out our Virtual Fitness Webinar will give you all the practical tips that you need to get started: from how fundraisers can set up the integration to ways you can enhance their fitness fundraising experience!