A Challenge Week is a centrally organized, week-long fundraising appeal that invites student clubs, societies and academic groups to raise money for their own activities, inside a structure built and supported by the central development office. The office sets the framework, provides the platform, training and resources, and runs light-touch communications to alumni and supporters. The groups do the primary outreach, sharing their stories and rallying donations from their own communities through social media, email and personal networks.

The simplest way to describe it is Giving Day meets crowdfunding. As Kat Carter, a consultant at Hubbub, puts it: "Crowdfunding is year-round. Giving Day happens in usually 36 hours. And then Challenge Week is a week." Like a Giving Day, it has a fixed timeframe, match funding and central communications. Like crowdfunding, every group has its own project page and owns its own promotion.

University of York Sport Union Challenge Week — The University of York's sport-focused Challenge Week grew from 10 clubs in 2023 to 17 in 2025.

This guide draws on best practice from Hubbub's consultants, who have helped institutions design and run Challenge Weeks, and on the experience of the University of York, whose team has grown the format year on year. It is honest about one thing from the outset: a Challenge Week is about much more than the money. Done well, it builds community, develops a generation of student fundraisers, and brings large numbers of brand-new donors into your wider giving program.

Working templates. Sign in to download our goals planner, group onboarding email, participant toolkit, content calendar, match funding planner and donor thank-you template.

Why run a Challenge Week

A well-delivered Challenge Week serves several goals at once, and income is deliberately not the first of them. The primary objectives are community engagement, strengthening the connections between current students, alumni, staff and local supporters; student participation, empowering student leaders to champion their cause and build real fundraising skills; and donor acquisition, bringing new supporters into your program. Income is a genuine benefit, but treat it as a secondary measure of success. The more you emphasize fun, creativity and impact, the stronger the engagement, and engagement is what drives the giving.

The audience a Challenge Week reaches is the reason it is so valuable, because it does not lean on your alumni file. As Jessica, the University of York's Philanthropy Officer, explains: "Our intention has been to really make students the fundraisers in Challenge Week, and also try and access non-alumni donors, family and friends primarily, rather than adding to the alumni fundraising programme." In York's first year, "97% of all of the donors to Challenge Week were completely new donors to the university." Those are parents, friends, peers and local supporters who would rarely surface through a conventional appeal, and who can be stewarded towards your wider program over time.

It is also a forgiving format for teams that are not yet ready for a full Giving Day, or who cannot resource year-round crowdfunding. You can start small, prove the model, and grow it.

The central team's role

The central fundraising team is the engine room of a Challenge Week. Your job spans six tasks: plan (choose dates, confirm the structure, set goals and prepare the platform), recruit (secure a strong set of participating groups), train (give every group the knowledge and tools to promote well), promote (run the central communications that amplify the groups' own efforts), support (troubleshoot, motivate and celebrate through the week), and steward (make sure donors and participants are thanked and kept engaged afterwards).

The single most important behavior, and the one York's team singles out as their top piece of advice, is direct relationship-building with the groups. In Jessica's words, it is about "taking the initiative to have the direct engagement with the clubs and build those relationships with the students who are going to be doing the fundraising, rather than trying to go through someone else or just sending out generic stuff."

Planning your Challenge Week

Good planning settles four questions before the week begins: your goals, your dates, your groups and their targets.

Set your goals. Decide what success looks like first: the number of participating groups, the number of donors (overall and new), the income you hope groups raise, the level of social media engagement, and the number of ambassadors recruited. Lead with participation and new-donor numbers rather than income. Our goals planner turns these into a one-page target sheet.

Choose your dates. Align the week with a high-energy point in the academic year, such as a sports tournament, a societies showcase, or an exam-free stretch, and avoid major academic deadlines. York moved their week from June to March specifically so it ran in the build-up to their varsity rivalry against Lancaster, and extended it to nine days so it spanned two weekends, giving students with heavy teaching loads more chance to take part.

Select your groups. There are two broad approaches. A focused Challenge Week keeps invitations to one type of group: if the week is about sport, you invite sports clubs, which works well where the student and alumni connection runs through sport. A combination Challenge Week mixes sports clubs, cultural and arts societies, academic teams and special interest groups, which suits institutions whose community is broader. Whichever you choose, resist an open call. York hand-picked and approached groups directly, and Kat Carter's advice to anyone starting out is to "start small, make it easy to manage and then grow it from the first year, and choose something that resonates with your audience."

One relationship matters more than any other at this stage. "You want to get your student union on side," says Kat Carter, "because those sports clubs and societies, the students will be going to them as a first port of call." Bring the union in early, and consider sharing the platform and its costs with them.

Help groups set achievable targets. Guide each group towards a realistic but motivating goal anchored in something tangible: a piece of equipment, travel to a tournament, a festival or a competition. A concrete "what your gift buys" is far easier to fundraise around than a round number.

Recruiting and onboarding groups

Choosing the right clubs and societies, and onboarding them simply, is decisive. Make the first approach personal: reach out directly to club presidents, captains and society leaders to gauge their interest, and hold an online information session where they can learn more and ask questions. Where you can, use examples and testimonials from past Challenge Weeks to inspire them.

Be clear about the benefits, which are not only financial: tangible funding for their group, real skills in fundraising, marketing, project management and leadership, and positive publicity and community pride. Be equally clear about expectations, and set a minimum bar: a level of promotional activity (for example, three posts a week), a fundraising goal (in donors or income), and attendance at training.

York deliberately built a robust application process, because commitment is everything. As Tom, the University of York's Head of Fundraising and Community Engagement, puts it: "You've got to be fully committed as a club to be taking part. We really made sure we had every assurance possible before gambling on wasting everyone's time." That bar exists for a reason, which leads to the hardest lesson in the whole format.

"You can't force people to become crowdfunders or fundraisers. If students aren't motivated to go and put the time and effort in, inevitably a project won't get off the ground."

Tom, University of York

Keep the onboarding light to run but rich in content: one live session, recorded for anyone who misses it, followed by a digital toolkit, rather than a string of separate briefings. Our onboarding email template gives you a first invitation to adapt.

Training and resources for participants

Training is where you set groups up to succeed, and it rests on a simple truth that Kat Carter states plainly: "These students are not fundraisers, they're students. So we need to give them the intel on how to fundraise well, because that's what we do well." Students and academics will lean on your expertise, so give it generously.

Cover four core topics. Goal setting: how to choose the right target and the tangible outcome it delivers. Storytelling: how to share their group's impact in a personal, emotive way while making a clear case for what they need. Promotion channels: how to build a simple plan across social media, email and personal asks. Audience mapping: working out which friends, family, fellow students and local supporters are most likely to give, so effort is focused where it counts.

Back the training with a participant toolkit so no group starts from a blank page. It should include sample appeal copy, social media graphics and templates, email templates for launch, mid-week and thank-you, simple imagery guidelines, and a set of creative "mini-challenge" ideas. Our participant toolkit collects these together. To help groups sharpen their words, point them at the free Fundraising Copy Checker.

Communications strategy

Although the groups carry the core promotion, the central office runs its own coordinated communications to amplify them, and the two work best in step. The good news is that the central effort is lighter than a Giving Day: roughly one email a day, rather than the Giving Day's intensity.

On the central side, set a schedule for when you will email alumni and supporters, and for regular posts on institutional channels. At group level, encourage personal, authentic content, photos, short videos, behind-the-scenes updates and challenge progress, and ask groups to email any contact lists they hold. A light-touch content calendar keeps everyone aligned: a teaser and "save the date" two weeks out; a countdown and "share your challenge" one week out; a big announcement and launch posts on day one; leaderboard updates and donor thank-yous mid-week; an urgent push and final countdown on the last day; and results and thank-you messages afterwards.

Write everything you plan to send and share before the week begins. That single discipline is what makes delivery calm rather than frantic. Our content calendar lays the schedule out, and Hubbub's how-to guides on email and social go deeper on each channel.

Match funding and incentives

Match funding and incentives drive the urgency and the competition that make a Challenge Week move. You can fund the pot from central money already earmarked to support clubs and societies, or solicit new gifts from major donors and corporate partners to create a match and challenge fund. The most effective incentives include milestone unlocks ("once we hit 50 donors, $500 is unlocked"), top-performer rewards (extra funding for the group with the most donors), random donor draws (a prize for a supporter chosen at random), and physical challenges (funding unlocked when a team completes a feat). Our match funding planner helps you map each incentive to a trigger and a promotion plan.

York's experience points to a few design rules worth following. Layer your challenges: include individual challenges that any group can achieve, a group challenge that builds team spirit, and head-to-head match-ups between clubs at similar donor levels, which spark late flurries of giving. Run many smaller challenges rather than a few large ones, because frequent unlocks keep the week interesting and give you constant reasons to message. Front-load the momentum with an early target: a "first 25 donors" challenge produced an unexpected surge at nine o'clock on York's launch morning. And get your leadership involved, as York did when their Vice-Chancellor judged a video challenge that unlocked an extra £100 for the winning club.

One small but valuable lesson concerns the minimum gift. York found students were making token £1 donations to inflate their donor counts for challenges, so they raised the minimum to £3. "That did really seem to have a positive effect in increasing the value," says Jessica, "and no one complained."

Delivering the week

By the time the week arrives, your communications are written and your groups are trained, so your job narrows to execution and motivation. Share daily updates with alumni audiences by email and social, keep leaderboards visible to fuel friendly competition, and stay in daily contact with the clubs and societies to keep them going. Remind groups of the advice from training, spotlight standout groups and the most creative challenges, and offer quick motivational calls to any group falling behind. The week runs on the rails you built for it, and your energy through it is part of what carries the groups.

Stewardship and follow-up

What happens after the week determines whether you have run an event or started a relationship. Thank everyone promptly: donors should hear from both the group they supported and the central office, and participants should be recognized for their effort and their results. Share the outcomes openly, the total raised, the number of donors and the best stories. Then keep the momentum going. Keep donors informed about the impact of their gift and invite them to give again at the next natural moment in your program, whether that is a Giving Day or a regular gift. Keep your participating student leaders engaged for future campaigns with occasional updates on good news and outcomes. Our donor thank-you template gives groups a warm, ready-made message to send.

This long game is the real return on a Challenge Week. The students who fundraise become familiar with your platform and your cause, and the new donors you acquire can be cultivated for years. As Tom reflects on what the format unlocked at York: "You've leveraged some existing funding. You've unlocked 1,500 donors. I can't think of anything else that can do that in this sector, to be honest."

Case study: the University of York

York's Challenge Week began with a single ambitious sports club. "There's always one sports club who is always asking and asking for extra support, and that is our boat club," says Tom. "We encouraged them to do a one-club challenge week, and they were able to raise just over £10,000 in a week. So that's where the idea of a Challenge Week was really born." The wider need was just as clear: in the first post-Covid round, the university "received £40,000 worth of applications" from sports clubs against a fund that had historically been far smaller.

The first full Challenge Week ran in June 2023, in the university's 60th anniversary year, with 10 sports clubs. It raised around £30,000 and brought in 796 donors, an extraordinary 97% of them new to the university, supported by 140 ambassadors. In 2024 the team moved the week to March, extended it to nine days across two weekends, and grew to 15 clubs, raising over £40,000 from more than 1,400 donors with a record 521 ambassadors. Crucially, the value per club climbed too. "Average amount raised per club massively increased, from around £950 to £1,600," says Jessica. "It's not just adding more clubs, it's also increasing the value driven by each of the clubs."

By their third Challenge Week, in March 2025, York featured 17 sports clubs and raised £53,892 from more than 1,800 donors, with 523 ambassadors. The creative challenges that year captured the community's imagination: a 12-hour "Dawn till Dusk" archery event, a Yorkshire Three Peaks hike, a handstand marathon and a rowing world-record attempt. The success factors stayed consistent throughout: strong student leadership, clear and consistent central support, match funding to spur participation, and fun, visible challenges that drew the wider community in.

York's advice to anyone considering the format is to treat it as a low-risk way in. "What we found here is a really clever way of running a short-term trial of crowdfunding that can have a really immediate impact in a key area where you've recognized there's an urgency and a need," says Tom. For the full story in York's own words, see their recorded Challenge Week webinar.

Frequently asked questions

How is a Challenge Week different from a Giving Day or crowdfunding? It sits between them. A Giving Day is a roughly 36-hour, centrally led push for institutional priorities. Crowdfunding runs year-round and is led by the groups themselves. A Challenge Week is development-office-led like a Giving Day, but the fundraising is for clubs and societies, run over about a week.

How long should it run? Most run for about a week. York runs theirs over nine days deliberately, so it spans two weekends and gives busy students more time to take part.

Who actually does the fundraising? The student clubs and societies do the primary outreach to their own networks. The central team provides the platform, training, match funding and supporting communications.

How many groups should we start with? Start small and curated rather than with an open call. York launched with 10 hand-picked sports clubs and grew from there.

Where does the match funding come from? Often from central funds already set aside to support clubs and societies, or from major-donor and corporate gifts solicited specifically for the week. The aim over time is to fund more of it from genuinely new income.

Is income the main measure of success? No. Community engagement, student participation and new-donor acquisition come first. Income is a valuable benefit rather than the sole goal.

Members' resource pack

Tools

Hubbub's Giving Day Simulator: model likely results before you commit to a target
Fundraising Copy Checker: sharpen your appeal and email copy
QR Code Generator: link in-person moments straight to a donation page

How to run a Challenge Week