Fundraising occasions have turn out to be more and more difficult for nonprofits and charities over the previous few years. There’s lots that goes into planning, executing, and launching a profitable occasion — on prime of maintaining your donors engaged all through the entire course of. Do you have got a plan for maintaining your donors engaged throughout your in-person and on-line occasions this 12 months?
In a current webinar, Blackbaud and ClickBid teamed as much as offer you the confirmed methods you want to know to interact your donor base and lift extra money throughout your fundraising occasions.
Click on under to entry to the complete webinar or preserve studying to be taught seven key methods for working a profitable occasion.
The way to Run a Profitable Fundraising Occasion in 2023
1. Maximize Your Digital Venue
Earlier than COVID-19, many fundraising occasions occurred in-person. Throughout COVID-19, fundraising occasions occurred solely on-line.
Quick forwarding to at this time with the adoption of a hybrid worldview, your fundraising occasions needs to be performed in the identical manner. With the capabilities of each in-person and on-line occasions, your fundraising occasions ought to have two venues. The in-person venue, and the net or “digital venue.”
As you already know, in-person occasions create a terrific alternative for increasing your community, personally interacting together with your donors and sponsors, and elevating funds to your group. However how can having a digital venue help your in-person occasion?
With digital venues, you’re not restricted by the variety of hours you can afford to hire them. It’s accessible months prematurely and months after the occasion. Nonetheless, your digital venue shouldn’t simply act as your occasion touchdown web page — it needs to be a useful venue to your viewers that works as a side-by-side extension of your in-person venue.
Your digital venue ought to turn out to be a single place for:
- Ticket gross sales
- Sponsorship information
- Registration
- Public sale preview
- Occasion particulars
- Donations
- Pre-event check-in
Organising a digital venue can’t solely enhance the general occasion expertise however enhance the entire donation quantity as effectively.
2. Safe Public sale Gadgets to Increase Your Occasion Expertise
There are 1,000,000 transferring items in the case of managing your fundraising occasions. When it’s performed proper, your digital venue ought to prevent time and enhance the occasion expertise to your donors.
How is that achieved? A method is by securing public sale objects in your digital venue. This could occur by embedding a submission type in your digital venue that enables donors to offer you:
- Public sale merchandise info
- Photos of the public sale merchandise
- Particulars concerning the honest market worth
- And extra
Having donors fill out their information beforehand makes the entire course of fast and straightforward. All it’s important to do is decide a beginning bid, an increment, and a closing time. From there, the knowledge will immediately populate your public sale catalog.
Let’s say that saves you about an hour of your time. You not need to take photos of the objects and do all of the analysis and writing. If 15 individuals submitted public sale objects via your digital venue, that’s 15 hours that you simply’ll save.
3. Leverage Communication Templates
Clear communication is a giant a part of internet hosting a profitable occasion. With a number of transferring items, a number of volunteers to coordinate, and a whole lot of donors to tell, having a communication template can assist preserve you on observe.
You can begin by creating a easy content material publishing guidelines. This consists of figuring out a listing of the emails you want to ship, the textual content messages that need to exit, the social media posts that should be revealed, and different content material communication deliverables that need to occur. Obtain ClickBid’s free communication template right here.
After getting a content material listing, you can begin to find out the due dates for every of the communication items. From there, you’ll be able to delegate this stuff to workers members or volunteers.
4. Introduce Early On-line Bidding to Enhance Raised Funds
The fourth technique for making a profitable fundraising occasion is to increase your occasion past the 4 partitions of your venue.
What does that imply?
The 4 partitions of your venue seek advice from the limitation of in-person occasions. Once you pay to hire an area for a sure time, solely the individuals that may attend the occasion can be impacted by it. Nonetheless, in case your donors are out of city, don’t really feel effectively, or don’t wish to danger getting sick, they gained’t attend.
However now, individuals can bid on public sale objects and donate to your occasion from anyplace on this planet.
And one approach to enhance the success of your occasion is by opening your on-line public sale early.
In case your in-person occasion takes place on a Saturday, attempt opening your public sale on the Monday earlier than the occasion. This supplies you with extra time to speak concerning the occasion, acquire pleasure, and enhance the chance to donate — particularly in case your donors are unable to attend in-person.
As an extra bonus, opening your public sale days earlier than the occasion permits your donors to have early adoption of your cell bidding platform. This helps to scale back confusion and questions in the course of the in-person occasion, whereas setting you up for much more success on the day of.
5. Implement a Loopy Easy Examine-in Expertise
Nothing is worse than having a sophisticated check-in course of at your fundraising occasion. However there are a few issues you are able to do to get your donors via the door as rapidly as doable. A method is by using your digital venue to create a 24-hour registration window.
Consider this as an early check-in possibility for a flight. If half of the individuals for the flight check-in early, they may go straight to safety. Total, the variety of individuals checking in is significantly lowered, relieving the quantity of overhead.
The opposite possibility is to make use of QR codes on the door. Scanning a QR code (quite than manually checking in) lets your donors rapidly get into the occasion and be on their manner.
Right here’s what these two choices might appear to be:
Implementing these two choices places you effectively in your approach to making a loopy easy check-in technique.
6. Invite Donors to Take part On-line (The Painless Approach)
Including video to your fundraising occasions is a straightforward and fascinating approach to seize the eye of your donors and enhance fundraising.
We advise together with informational movies about your group, concerning the upcoming occasion, and even testimonial movies from earlier donors. These movies assist get new donors acquainted together with your group, and returning donors enthusiastic about what’s to come back.
Throughout your precise occasion, not solely must you broadcast your fundamental program, however it is best to broadcast your reside public sale too. This can permit your donors to take part even when they’ll’t make it to the reside occasion fundraiser.
With ClickBid’ EventStream function, you’ll be able to host a reside public sale on-line with the flexibility to just accept real-time bids from bidders attending in-person and just about. It lets you broadcast your auctioneer and lets your donors use their telephones to take part and provides to your mission.
With lower than a one-second streaming delay, you’ll be able to lengthen your reside public sale and paddle increase past the 4 partitions of your venue.
7. Share Your Occasion Information with Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT
Having all of your information in a single place is extraordinarily necessary. It additionally supplies you with a single vacation spot with the mandatory info you want to proceed to host and reconcile a profitable occasion.
There are two methods you can share information from any cell bidding platform or ticket system to Raiser’s Edge NXT.
The primary manner is thru a spreadsheet. You may obtain your information into Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets and import that into Raiser’s Edge NXT.
The opposite possibility is to make use of an API integration. With the API integration, you’ll be able to then use screens and wizards to pick out the information you wish to push to the platform like occasion ticket gross sales, on-line donations, public sale purchases, and extra.
In a cell bidding platform that has an integration with Raiser’s Edge NXT, you’re going to have the ability to select the actions that occurred at your occasion and transfer them again to Raiser’s Edge NXT. And most significantly, synchronize them between your fundraising platform and Raiser’s Edge NXT.
ClickBid’s cell bidding platform has an API integration with Raiser’s Edge NXT that means that you can simply import your information into your ClickBid admin, export any new bidders from ClickBid, and export any gross sales out of your public sale, on-line donations, or ticket gross sales into Raiser’s Edge NXT.
Let’s Proceed Studying
Incorporating these seven methods will get you effectively in your approach to working profitable fundraising occasions in 2023. And you’ll want to watch the complete webinar should you’d wish to dive deeper into this subject!