Fundraising events are an excellent opportunity to attract new supporters for your organization. But thereafter, what really matters the most is fundraising event conversion – how many of them are actually turned into donors! Think about it: you put in so much work to make your event a success. But how do you make sure…
Fundraising events are an excellent opportunity to attract new supporters for your organization. But thereafter, what really matters the most is fundraising event conversion – how many of them are actually turned into donors!
Think about it: you put in so much work to make your event a success. But how do you make sure these new supporters are here for you in the long run?
Converting event attendees into long-term and loyal donors can seem tricky. But with the right tools and some smart steps, you can create lasting relationships with anyone who has attended your event.
In this article, we’ll review:
Fundraising event conversion refers to the process of getting an event attendee to become a regular donor to your organization.
For example, let’s say you have 100 people attend your latest fundraising event. Maybe 75 regularly give to your organization, but the other 25 are new.
That’s 25 new people that you can convert to long-time, loyal donors! And, with good event planning and execution, you’ve just made an excellent first impression on them.
But to convert attendees into donors, you need to use tools that ensure your success. Let’s take a look at how Donorbox can help boost your event conversion.
Donorbox offers a variety of tools that make it easy to convert event guests into donors before, during, and after your event. Let’s go through them all.
Why not convert someone into a donor right away?
People love to give to a charity while checking out for something else. Well, this can be very much effective for your fundraising event ticket purchase as well. Take advantage of that fact and increase your donations.
Donorbox Events lets you accept donations right from the ticketing form. Ticket buyers can select the checkbox, as shown in the example below, and enter their donation amount. It will be added to their ticket purchase amount during checkout.
Create Fundraising Event on Donorbox!
When someone buys a ticket for your event created using Donorbox Events, their contact information gets stored in your supporter database on Donorbox.
You can apply filters to this list of records to find out your ticket purchasers, as shown below.
This means even before they’ve attended your event, you have an easy way to connect with them and work on building up that long-term relationship.
You can begin to reach out to these people to strengthen your relationships. It doesn’t have to be a solicitation; you can simply thank them for buying the tickets. And if they’ve made an extra donation, then show gratitude for that as well.
It is important for your nonprofit to be transparent about a few things as you sell tickets. The first and foremost being the ticket receipt. Donorbox Events automatically sends these receipts along with a digital copy of the ticket to your purchasers.
Our tool also helps you easily calculate the tax-deductibility of tickets by inputting the fair market value and the tax rate. It helps you highlight this data against all ticket levels on the form. This enhances transparency for your purchasers.
You’ll have already won their hearts even before the event with these simple measures.
Look at this live example of an event ticketing form highlighting the tax-deductibility of its tickets for a better understanding –
Start Selling Tickets with Donorbox Events!
When you design an event page for selling tickets, you want to write a little content about the event, your organization, the work you do, etc. This space where you talk about these crucial details can also be a good opportunity to add a little about your ongoing fundraising campaigns.
This little act enables people to know about what you need help with and how they can support you. Just share a link to your donation page where they can go to donate.
With Donorbox Events, you get to add content, image, video, links, and more to customize your event page. Here’s an example of the same. This organization has added a donation link to its fundraising page on Donorbox to encourage donations.
To make your event a success, you’ll want to offer your attendees as many ways to give to your organization as possible. Text-to-give is one of them, which facilitates quick mobile giving.
Donorbox Text-to-Give gives you a unique campaign ID for your campaign on Donorbox. You will share that along with the texting number with your attendees. Guests will text your ID to that number to receive a link to donate through your mobile-friendly donation page (shown below). They can also easily repeat their donation through text without having to go to the donation page again.
Bonus – Watch Hydrating Humanity, our nonprofit user, talk about changing lives via the effective use of Donorbox Text-to-Give!
You can share a QR code to easily connect event attendees with your online donation campaign. Donorbox gives you free QR codes for campaigns you create on the platform. Just download and paste it across your event venue.
You can easily customize this QR code to change the destination link, size, and format.
This is one of the easiest methods to engage people and direct them to your online donation page to help them know more. Chances are your event guests will turn into serious donors.
No one wants to spend all their time at your fun event on their phone. You have got to make your donation form super fast for them. That’s where Donorbox UltraSwift™ Pay comes in.
With this tool, your event attendees won’t need to add their personal details like name, email address, and physical address while making a donation. They can quickly choose from digital wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Venmo, etc. to give.
Their information will be automatically picked from these platforms and stored on Donorbox. This makes the giving process quick and easy – and it helps you reduce donor drop-off rates!
Check out this example of a donation form including digital wallet options to make giving super fast and smooth for donors.
There is no alternative for a giving kiosk in terms of making donations cashless and convenient for your attendees. Your giving kiosk comes enabled with a card reader app that helps people make donations by quick swipes or taps using different payment methods.
Donorbox Live™ Kiosk is an app for iOS and Android that does just that! With speedy transactions and a smooth experience, your attendees will easily convert into donors with a tap, dip, or swipe of their credit or debit card, or digital wallet payment.
Donorbox Live™ Kiosk - Learn More!
During or at the end of your event, take time to let your attendees know what different ways they can support your organization. It could be recurring donations, memberships, peer-to-peer fundraising, volunteering, and more.
With Donorbox, you get a plethora of fundraising tools – ranging from Recurring Donations to Membership campaigns to Crowdfunding to Peer-to-Peer fundraising, and more.
While you share these options with your attendees, ensure you also have a way to share how they can get started. You can share brochures with them including separate campaign details. Include your recurring donation page link, membership campaign link, details about peer-to-peer campaigns, and more.
On Donorbox, all these campaign pages come packed with great storytelling potential. Make sure you have added stories about beneficiaries and added images and videos to help convert guests into long-term and steady donors.
So the event is over. But your efforts toward converting attendees to donors should not. Details of whoever bought tickets to your event or made a donation during the event have been stored on Donorbox.
You can find all these records on the supporters’ list on the dashboard. Segment these records by applying basic and advanced filters to create targeted communication pieces.
Manage & Retain Donors with Donorbox
Follow up to know what they felt about the event and if they have feedback to share. Find out their giving abilities through segmentation and use that for future appeals.
The opportunities are endless with Donorbox Donor Management. You can also seamlessly integrate with leading CRM tools like Salesforce, Blackbaud RE NXT, HubSpot, Rock RMS, and 2000+ more apps via Zapier.
Finally, you should remember that keeping track of all data, following up on ticket purchases and campaign donations, and managing the donor data can be overwhelming for you alone.
Divide the job of effective fundraising event conversion among all team members and use the power of teamwork to get tasks done. This step will help you spread the workload and bring efficiency to your work post-event.
Donorbox lets you invite your team members to have access to your campaigns. You can decide what roles you want to assign them – admin or member. You can also give them access to specific campaigns on the dashboard.
Your first step to converting your fundraising event guests into long-term donors: making the event a successful connection.
To truly connect with a new supporter, your event should focus on the following:
A fundraising event can be valuable in so many ways. One of those ways is to establish a solid relationship with a soon-to-be donor.
Now that you’ve connected with someone through your event, you need to keep in touch.
In addition to adding event attendees to your usual email communications, consider reaching out personally to thank them for attending your event.
Host a thank-a-thon with your entire team and volunteers to call each attendee and show your gratitude. Do not make it about a solicitation for donations. You may talk briefly about your work and connect it to the way they’re helping you make a difference.
Followed by that, your team should send an email with more information on how they can continue to support your organization.
Part of following up with your event attendees might be to gather intel about how the event went. You can send a survey out to both attendees who gave and attendees who didn’t give and compare their answers.
In addition to helping you plan your next event, sending a survey makes event attendees feel like their input is valuable. This will help them feel connected to your organization and one step closer to donating.
Fundraising events are fantastic ways to connect with new donors. Conversions should be at the top of your strategies list while planning for your next event.
Converting event attendees into long-term donors can sound tricky but all you need are the right tools and a solid plan to get started. Donorbox is there to help make it happen.
With a wide range of event-ticketing and fundraising features that are donor-friendly, Donorbox aims at boosting your event revenue and conversion rates. Learn about our online fundraising platform and other important aspects on the website.
Read insightful guides and articles and find free resources on the Donorbox Nonprofit Blog. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive these useful resources every month in your inbox.
Lindsey spent years wearing many hats in the nonprofit world. Whether she was helping arts nonprofits with their messaging and content, planning a fundraising gala, writing an NEA grant proposal, or running a membership program with over 400 members, she learned how to navigate – and appreciate! – the fast-paced world of fundraising. Now, she loves sharing those hard-earned lessons with the Donorbox community.
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Lindsey Baker Bower