We were fortunate to meet lots of inspiring fundraisers at DigiRaise this week. Thanks for taking the time to come and chat, and share your event fundraising experiences with us.

During our presentation about peer-to-peer, we shared two issues that keep appearing across our clients’ events in 2026:

• the economy is dragging on donor behaviour; and
• Meta is a fundamentally harder place to recruit.

1. The impact of the economy

We’ve just spent two weeks analysing all the data for a recent large virtual challenge and the resulting picture is striking.

Every indicator of fundraising activation is up compared to 2025. Page sharing, Facebook Fundraiser uptake, supporter journey eDM and SMS open and action rates. Even donation rates from participants themselves. We can clearly see, across each measure, participants are doing more.

However, against this positive picture, the response to all that extra participant action was less rosy. The average number of donations received per active fundraiser dropped by one compared to last year (moving the result just below the 2025 ANZ benchmarks shared by both Funraisin and Raisely). The participants registered and did their best, but were unfortunately not able to attract the same level of support we have regularly seen in the past.

We dug further into the data to explore the behaviour of those who appeared to be ‘inactive’ fundraisers (often measured by their page receiving no donations). Of the tracked actions for this group, more than 5% set up and promoted a Facebook Fundraiser and over 15% shared their page. Despite doing both things, they didn’t receive a donation.

We concluded that participants are keen to support causes and see peer-to-peer events as a strong way to do this (evidenced by the recruitment numbers). However, their networks are currently less able to support them at 2025’s levels.

This coincides with the wider economic pain felt by Aussies, and thus it appears a symptom of that pain, rather than an indication of less effective journeys.

2. Meta’s changes are making recruitment harder

A second headwind is the cost-effectiveness of both retention and acquisition of participants.

Warm recruitment via social has been challenging due to changes at Meta. We have thus seen retention in some areas suffer as a result. Meanwhile the cost and effort to reach new cold leads has grown in various ways too. Recently we have seen the baseline cost of reaching leads rise as the Meta ads market becomes more competitive. This appears to be driven by not only charities but also commercial entities seeking to offset the effects of the economy.

Meta’s continued removal of ‘Interests’ and Apple’s focus on privacy / tracking across apps make it ever harder to operate effective campaigns. In raw numbers, we have seen reach to warm social audiences roughly halve in the first 5 months of 2026.

It’s not all bad news. Andromeda, the newer AI targeting cleverness underpinning Meta’s Advantage+, appears to be excellent at finding highly qualified leads. Then again, this is not all good news, since it also requires an unprecedented volume of creative (video / UGC works best) to reach these leads. The refresh rate for ads is accelerating fast: what could last in the market for two to three weeks in November 2025 is now stale within a week.

The implication for our clients and campaigns is clear: lean into Advantage+ to help mitigate the loss of manual targeting via interests and lower reach to warm contacts but build and operate a much bigger pipeline of UGC video (including impact-led content featuring beneficiaries too) and allocate a larger budget for creative production.

These conditions are mentioned in our refreshed Powering Up Peer-to-Peer guide which you can download here.

Let us know how your event metrics are working this year. We’d love to share more and help everyone do the best to weather the headwinds affecting 2026’s results.