Add and manage participants and teams

Two ways to add (or invite) participants

Your participants are critical to the success of your peer-to-peer fundraiser. It’s their networks and personal outreach that can catapult your fundraising efforts. There are two ways to add (or invite) participants to your fundraiser, which include:

1. Add participants manually: Adding and inviting participants manually automatically creates their participant fundraising pages. This is a great method for adding participants if you’re looking for more control around your timeline and you want to begin promoting your fundraiser asap. When you add participants to your participant table manually, participant fundraising pages are created in real time (this means participants will immediately show up in the participant drop-down menu of your main fundraising page), so there’s no waiting for participants to take action.
2. Share a registration link and allow participants to self register: Alternatively, another way to add participants is by sharing a registration link with your community and allowing them to self register. An advantage of this method is that it allows you to avoid having to gather everyone’s email addresses in advance, while a disadvantage is that participant pages are not created until each participant registers, so it could result in some delay and the need to remind participants to take action.

After someone has been manually added and invited as a participant (or self registered), they will receive an invitation email that allows them to view and customize their participant fundraising page. Learn more about how a participant can customize their fundraising page.

Steps to manually add participants

Take the following steps to manually add participants:

1. From the Participants step within the builder, click the teal “Add Participants” button.
2. Choose your preferred method for entering participant names and emails. You can choose from manual entry, uploading a file, copying and pasting a list, or pulling from your contacts stored within Cheddar Up.
3. Once added, your participants will be shown in your Participants table, which means that individual participant fundraising pages have been automatically generated.
4. When you’re ready, click “Send Invite” next to each participant in the table (or use bulk actions by selecting the checkbox at the top of the table (which will select all participants), and then click the teal “Send Invites” button).

Upon sending invites, email invitations will automatically be sent to your participants. This email invitation will let participants know that you’ve created a page for them and will include a link allowing participants to access and customize their personal fundraising page.

Steps to allow participants to self register

Take the following steps to invite participants to register themselves:

1. From the Participants step within the builder, click the teal “Copy Link” button where it says “Let participants register themselves”.
2. Share this URL with your community via your own communication channels.
3. When clicking the URL that you share, your community will be taken to your fundraiser’s registration page where they can enter their first name, last name, email address, and team (if applicable), and click “Register”.

The Participant will then receive an email invitation that will allow them to access and customize their personal fundraising page. Upon participants self registering, they will show up on your Participants table within the Participants step of the builder, allowing you to see who has registered to be a participant of your fundraiser (as well as in the drop-down menu on your main fundraising page.

Participant table statuses

Once participants are added to your Participants table (by the organizer or when someone self registers), there are a number of different statuses that a participant can have, including:

• Needs Invite: Participant has not yet received an email invitation to view and edit their participant page (you should only see this status when you manually add participants to the Participants table).
• Invite Sent: An email invitation has been sent with access to the participant’s fundraising page.
• Opened: Participant has opened the email invitation and can edit his/her participant page.
• Failed: The email invitation failed to send (likely due to an invalid email address). You can archive the participant and try again with an updated email address.

Steps to create teams of participants

For large fundraisers, it’s common to want to group participants into teams. This is often ideal for grouping participants by grade levels, classes, or other group types. This approach encourages collaboration and friendly competition, creating a more dynamic experience for everyone throughout the fundraiser.

Take the following steps to create teams of participants:

1. From the Participants step within the builder, click the “Teams” tab.
2. Click the teal “Add Teams” button.
3. Enter the team name(s) that you’d like to include in your fundraiser and click “Add Teams”.
4. Teams will then be reflected in your Teams table. 
5. Flip back to your Participants table and select participants and add them to their respective teams. You can add participants to teams by making a selection from the drop-down menus in the Teams column for each participant, or you can take a bulk action and select participants in bulk using the checkboxes to the left of each participant. Once you’ve selected your participants, use the bulk-action “Assign to Team” button to add participants to a specific team.

Keep in mind that when you add Teams to your fundraiser, you then have the option to choose how you prefer to show your fundraiser leaderboard - you can display your leaderboard ranked by participant (illustrating which individuals are in the lead) or by teams (illustrating which teams are in the lead).

Archive, delete and restore a participant

There are a few different controls you can use when managing participants and teams, which are detailed below:

• Archive: Archiving a participant closes their fundraising page (“closed” means the page is still visible online but can no longer accept payments) and hides the participant name (and access to the page) from the main fundraising page as well as from any teams they are associated with. If you want to delete a participant, you must first archive the participant in order for the “delete” menu item to become available. Once archived, you can view your archived participants by selecting the “View” drop-down menu at the top of your Participants table.
• Delete: After a participant is archived, if it has no payments, the organizer will be able to delete a participant. Deleting a participant also deletes their participant fundraising page. Once a participant is deleted it cannot be restored or undone.
• Restore: A participant that has been archived can be restored. Restoring a participant will restore it to its “active” status - making the participant (and their fundraising page) visible on the main fundraising page and on any teams in which they were assigned.

See it in action:

Common Questions