My Experience with the Fab Over 40 Fundraiser Competition: Tips, Strategies and Raising Over $4k for NBCF
/“In my view, there is nothing more fabulous than raising money for a good cause and helping others.” - Meredith Corning
I’m writing this on December 3, 2022, the day after I got booted from the Fab Over 40 fundraiser competition. I must admit, I knew nothing about this type of online voting campaign before I got involved. As I became more deeply entrenched, it was virtually impossible to find any type of strategy or real insight about this event online, so I decided to write about my own experience in the hope that someone might find this helpful if they are considering entering Fab Over 40 or any type of online voting fundraiser competition.
Let me first say that I am 100% happy that I entered Fab Over 40, raised funds for the National Breast Cancer Foundation and hopefully inspired other women over 40 to embrace their age and do something outside of their comfort zone. So many good things to say about this type of campaign, but this blog post is about tips, strategies and how to raise funds, so if some parts sound critical it’s only because I am giving you, dear readers, my critical eye and interpretation on how to go about progressing or possibly winning.
I ended in 3rd place in the QUARTER-FINALS round and raised over $4,000 for the National Breast Cancer Foundation (yay!). The Fab Over 40 2022 fundraiser competition started on October 10, 2022 with 100,000 women. By reaching the QUARTER-FINALS, I was left in the top 1% of that number. I did not make the semi-finalist or finalist rounds and the event still has 2 weeks left ending on December 15, 2022. You are not competing directly with 100,000 women as the organizers split all women up into “groups,” so you are really only competing with the others in your group, each round. If you place 1st by the time each round concludes, you move on to compete with others who placed 1st in their groups/rounds.
Photo by L A Y E R S.
I wrote a press release with more details and facts of the competition, which I am not going to mention again in this blog post because again, this is about tips, strategies and raising funds.
You can find that press release here:
Photo by L A Y E R S.
The Voting Software
The software used in this competition is quite genius. We already know that apps like social media are highly addictive and developed to be so. The Fab Over 40 software is no different. It will truly suck you in. You will receive text messages and emails every few days that include some encouragement and of course, links to your profile/status and dashboard making it hard to resist checking constantly.
Each competitor has their own dashboard where they can see who is voting for them and who is making donations and in what amount (sort of, I’ll explain). Each voter must register via Facebook or a credit/debit card to confirm their identity. Voters can issue a free daily vote or donate money to the National Breast Cancer Foundation in any amount to get you more votes per day. A little tip: Anyone who registers with a credit/debit card can issue 2 free daily votes instead of 1, so corralling your consistent voting besties to do this is super helpful.
The software is said to be designed to pick up scammers using voting bots. As soon as you start posting about being in Fab Over 40 on social media, the voting bot scammers will be harassing you until you block their account. Don’t fall for it. The only way I see avoiding them is to just not use #fabover40 in your posts (but that’s not fun).
One of the rules of the competition is that your immediate family cannot vote for you including spouse, parents, children or siblings and if discovered, they can kick you out of the competition altogether. I believe this rule is mostly on the honor system unless you actually win although I can’t say for sure. I don’t know how the software would be able to detect everyone’s family members with such little information given about each competitor when one signs up. The winner is subject to a full background check, so I can see someone losing their winner title if this type of activity was going on throughout the competition. This was one rule I felt made the earlier rounds a bit unfair. For example, if you are trying to follow the rules and not have your family vote or donate but someone in your competitor group is not following that rule, they could beat you in that round with no deep investigation into that 1st place winner’s votes. I realize they would be sabotaging themselves inevitably if they won the entire competition, but at the risk of losing other competitors that followed the rule along the way.
The other interesting thing about the software was that you have two lists of donors in your dashboard. One list simply shows your “top donors” and the amount of votes (not necessarily dollar amounts donated, but votes) they made on your behalf. The other list is a rolling list of the last 10 people who donated and again listed as the number of “votes” and not the actual dollar amount donated. This made it VERY difficult to keep track of because about three times per week, your donors could make donations on double vote days - meaning that in your dashboard it may say, Suzy Q contributed 100 votes, yet on double votes days, this means they actually only donated $50. And what if 20 people donated while you were sleeping? When you woke up, you would only see that last 10 votes and possibly miss 10 whole donations to document. Basically, the software seems to be designed to confuse you a bit. I think the purpose of this is to encourage participants to focus more on what place they are in/to be “in the now” than how much they have raised overall, compelling competitors to focus on how they are placing rather than how much they’ve raised for the foundation. By not listing the dollar amounts and listing the “vote numbers contributed” instead, can also give someone a false sense of how well they’re doing. I realized this early on and started keeping up with my own number. Fyi, I did reach out to the organizers yesterday to confirm my final donation dollar amount number and they responded - they do not give you your final dollar amount raised, so I highly encourage you to document donations from the beginning.
Photo by L A Y E R S.
Free Voting Vs. Donations
Okay, I have some things to say here and again this is my own experience so I’ll try to be as clear as possible. This competition is designed to be a fundraiser, so while the free voting absolutely helps you keep your status, I do not personally believe someone would likely win on the free daily votes alone.
There are always a couple caveats, so I will say that if you happen to have a huge, loyal following…maybe, but keep in mind that it is super hard to get people to vote every single day. People get voting burnout and I don’t blame them. For context, I raised about $2k per round plus I would have on average about 20-30 free votes per day (more or less and this includes the voters registered with a credit/debit card able to give me +2 votes daily). This should give you some indication of how many free votes you would need to garner each day without having anyone contribute financially.
I did also read an article early on about a different online voting fundraiser like this where the competitor won because her husband was a celebrity sports person with an email list in the tens of thousands. The husband sent out email marketing campaigns to his subscriber list, his fans voted for his wife and she won. I have no concrete evidence that this is a true story, but one could conclude that this tactic may work. We all don’t have celebrity spouses, although there could be other ways. For example, if you could convince a large corporation to send out an email marketing campaign for you and they have a large subscriber list (whether internally or externally) or if you could convince several medium-sized companies to do this…maybe.
For my campaign I was running, it was crucial to raise funds. I did not believe I would win the entire competition unless I got a major donor involved. Because I started Fab Over 40 pretty much clueless, this was a challenge to accomplish in a few weeks. I am friends with many small business owners and so many of them helped me and for that I will be eternally grateful. However, to move forward you’re likely going to need deep (and I mean DEEP) pockets. I reached out to a few large corporations in my home state with beautiful presentations I had put together, but without a personal connection and not enough time to solidify anything, this didn’t work for me. If you are thinking about entering one of these competitions, I would suggest starting months to a year beforehand reaching out to large corporations and making those personal connections way before the competition starts. Obviously, having a ton of small or medium-sized businesses supporting you, could get you there with some major pre-planning.
Photo by L A Y E R S.
Instagram Vs. Facebook Vs. TikTok
Obviously, Instagram and TikTok seem to be the booming social media platforms right now. But sorry, this is a Facebook competition. I’ll tell you why I didn’t waste too much of my time posting on Instagram and never did on TikTok (for transparency, I have a TikTok and hardly ever post on there anyway).
Instagram and TikTok only allow users to put clickable links in their bios, not in a post. In general, they just are not great platforms to use when you are asking for free votes because of the amount of work the onlooker has to do. From your post, they would actually have to click your profile AND click your bio link. My Instagram accounts are both business profiles and I use Linktree. Because I use Linktree, I can see how many people actually click my #linkinbio and how many clicked my Fab Over 40 link (not impressive numbers). I mean, how many people are really going to do all that? I would see some AMAZING women and AMAZING reels on Instagram and TikTok with the #fabover40 hashtag asking for votes. Women were posting everyday, just absolutely killing it with the number of reel views they were getting and engagement on their posts/reels, yet when you would click their Fab Over 40 link they would be in 8th or 9th place. That really made me realize those platforms are a waste of time for this. I will grant the fact that it is not a waste of time in the sense of marketing yourself overall, but that’s about it. My opinion was, it was more beneficial to use my time working to get donations instead and inspiring my inner circle to vote daily.
The reason I say this is a Facebook competition is because you can actually post a link in your posts and people do click Facebook post links. Voters even have to register via Facebook (credit/debit card is the only other option), so the ease of voting certainly lies on the Facebook platform and where you should do most of your promotions in my view.
Photo by L A Y E R S.
The Good, the Bad and the Cutthroat
Holy cow, I still can’t believe how crazy it got on the last day of the group round and QUARTER-FINALIST round. The first group I was in started with 55 women or so and cuts were made along the way: Top 20, Top 15, Top 10….etc. When the day came to announce #1, I was feeling pretty confident. I had held the #1 spot for weeks, slipping here and there but always able to get back into 1st place fairly quickly. I felt like I had a good grip on the threshold. Well…boy was I wrong! Here’s what happened.
On the day the #1 winner would be determined, Fab Over 40 ran a “double voting” day up until 8:00 p.m. (CST). At 7:55 p.m. the contestant in 4th place, had arranged a large donation to be made via her link and bumped me into 2nd place with 1 hour left to determine the winner, NOT during double voting time to recoup my placement. It was so sneaky, I could hardly believe it. It’s such a big prize though, I don’t know why I didn’t realize these types of tactics would be used. This is just a word to the wise…get ready and be prepared!
We teetered back and forth in the final hour. Her people would donate, mine would donate and it was a race to the end. The only thing that saved me was a few small donations and one large donation made in the last few seconds. Whew! They are really trying to give us “over 40” ladies a heart attack :-D
Of course, the same thing happened in the QUARTER-FINALS round except this time I had not held 1st place the majority of the round. I teetered between 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th (mostly 2nd). I didn’t give up though because at this point, for me, it was really about raising more funds for the National Breast Cancer Foundation more than anything else.
No, I didn’t move forward to the semi-finals, but by having my donors contributing regularly, we kept moving the needle and forcing the other contestants to donate more. So, for that reason I feel like one could say that in actuality, my people and I helped raise WAY, WAY more than $4k in that sense. I am really proud of that and if you helped raise funds, you should be, too.
Photo By L A Y E R S.
NOT a Beauty or Lifestyle Competition
I think early on when I signed up, I saw the words “photo competition” or something like that. One could look at Fab Over 40 and categorize it as a virtual beauty contest or about who is the most fabulous based on their lifestyle or call it a photo contest, but if you have read this far down you know that is not the case. This is a fundraiser for the most part with a splash of popularity contest infused. It’s truly about your network and marketing prowess. Do you have the biggest or most funded or most supportive network to help you win? If not, take this opportunity for what it is and use it for an alternate purpose.
For me, when I first registered I just uploaded a bunch of photos from my camera roll. Then I talked to my friend (and client), Danielle Green with L A Y E R S, who is a world-class photographer and she was like, “No ma'am. Let’s do a FAB photo shoot.”
I am typically a behind-the-scenes kind of gal, so it was truly outside of my comfort zone. I definitely would not have chosen the wardrobe used on my own without Danielle’s styling help and her eye, too. I knew this would be good for my businesses no matter what the outcome by getting some amazing, updated photography and having a reason to share. It was a good opportunity for me timing-wise, as well. I had been a wedding planner for 10 years and when 2020 rolled around, I decided to restart my PR business, but this time officially opening the doors to my own firm. People have viewed me as a wedding planner for so long and I needed a branding shift and I needed it to happen on a large scale. Mission accomplished.
I will also not downplay the fact that my network and I did a good thing raising money for the National Breast Cancer Foundation. That’s a big deal.
Photo by L A Y E R S.
Why You Shouldn’t Feel Sad if You Lost
If you have read this far, I hope I have given you some reasons why you should not feel bad at all if you lost or if you lose (in the future) Fab Over 40 or any of these online voting fundraiser competitions. Personally, I keep a tight group of people close to me. I would never win something like this based on my personal connections alone. My friend group and client list are fairly small and I am not that active on social media either. I know that it would definitely take some pretty hard hustling way ahead of time to secure a couple large corporate donors for me to win and that’s okay.
I hope this article puts things into perspective for some of you. I know what you’re thinking. Dang, she has put a lot of thought into this competition! Well…duh. I am a strategist and I am also super interested in philanthropy, so I found all this fascinating. Furthermore, there’s hardly anything online to read in depth about how it all works. The SEO nerd in me couldn’t resist.
If you are reading this and you lost the Fab Over 40 competition, girl good for you for even signing up! It takes guts to put yourself out there and you did it. And if you raised money for the foundation, I applaud you even more.
If you are reading this and planning to enter Fab Over 40…buckle up, babe, and good luck to you!
I want to thank all my donors, but especially those that went the extra mile. You guys are the wind beneath my wings (har har) and I most certainly could not have gotten this far without you. More importantly, we raised over $4,000 for the National Breast Cancer Association and for that, my friends, you are truly fabulous!
Thank YOU for Your Support!
Central Arkansas Entertainment
Paul Rainwater with Q Clothier
Rose of Sharon Floral Design Studio
Nichelle Terry with Pearl Grey Designs
Jayme Gregory
Nicole Diblasi
Rebecca Estep
Robert Haws
Candice Craig Bass
Brittany Bloom Events & Design
…and countless others, as well as others who voted for me so consistently! THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!
Everything in this blog post is based on my experience and are my own personal opinions.
The Wardrobe
Champagne Gown: Baltic Born
Boots: Betsey Johnson
Pink Dress: ASOS
Dog Sweater: Bloomingdale’s
Sequin Suit: Nasty Gal
Handbag, Rose-Colored Glasses and Stars Glasses: Amazon