Fundraising events are opportunities for nonprofits to raise a lot of money for their missions, but executing these events successfully is no easy feat. While ironing out the fine details of the event is a job on its own, so is the next phase of planning: promotion.
The foundation of any must-attend event lies in the place where people go to learn more about the event itself: the website. In today’s digital environment, having a website is no longer an option when it comes to planning an event; it’s a necessity. Otherwise, where can people go to learn more about your fundraising event and, even better, participate in the event and raise money for your nonprofit?
With GiveSignup | RunSignup, each of your fundraising events gets a free website that you can customize in minutes with a simple point-and-click website builder — no coding skills needed.
If you’re still deciding whether or not your upcoming fundraising event really needs a website to reap better results, read on to learn more about how a website can upgrade your event tenfold.
1. Get an All-in-One Event Website
It’s time to kick promotion for your fundraising event into high gear, and the best thing about having an official website for your one-of-a-kind fundraising event is that all of the important information about the event is in one place. That means basic event information (what, why and where), registration and ticketing information, along with information about how to volunteer, fundraise and donate are all in one central location. Kick it up a notch by adding call-to-action buttons throughout your entire event website. This way, you don’t have to be concerned about losing potential donors and supporters from the frustration of having to go through a maze of websites to find relevant information, and the call-to-action buttons encourage website visitors to take action immediately — sign up, donate, volunteer and fundraise.
As a nonprofit professional who is often juggling multiple tasks at once, having an effective, easy-to-navigate website means that’s one less thing for you, and your organization, to worry about. Plus, having an accessible place where people can find information about your event, register, engage and share with their networks is an absolute no-brainer. Who wouldn’t want that for their fundraising event?
2. Put Your Brand First
When it comes to the look and feel of your nonprofit’s website, consistent branding is key. It’s part of your organization’s identity; it’s how supporters recognize you. Take a look at your nonprofit website. Observe the color scheme, the fonts and the images and creatives that are used. Here’s a tip: Your fundraising event website needs to reflect that.
GiveSignup | RunSignup makes it easy to feature your brand (and never ours). Set your brand’s colors in the dashboard, and your free website will automatically update with your nonprofit’s theme. Upload your logo one time, and GiveSignup | RunSignup will automatically feature it in all of the strategic touch points on the website, ticket purchase path, donation receipts and confirmation emails. You can customize every part of your website, even the footer!
Other ticketing platforms put their branding first. Your event website is an opportunity to promote your mission and your brand — not your ticketing platform’s.
3. Use Your Own Nonprofit’s Domain or Subdomain For Free
Another important element of your nonprofit’s identity is the domain being used for your fundraising event. While most ticketing platforms only let you use their domain name (e.g., examplewebsite.com/NonprofitXYZ), using your own domain name puts your nonprofit’s name front and center and also gives your brand a more polished and cohesive look.
In today’s modern world, innovative tech tools offer a world of opportunity for nonprofits. GiveSignup makes it free to use your own domain or subdomain for your nonprofit’s fundraising event website, and it has a number of benefits that you should consider:
- A branded URL (e.g., http://www.NonprofitXYZEvent.org)
- Free SSL certificate
- Subdomains
- Secure registration and payment processing
4. Easily Create an Eye-Catching Website
These days, you don’t have to be a web design expert or need to know all of the fancy UX lingo to create a beautifully designed website. Plus, with the responsibility of carrying out the day-to-day tasks of hosting a fundraising event, you might not even have the bandwidth or energy to do so.
With a tool like GiveSignup, you have access to a website wizard that takes all of the important information you want to display on the website and creates a standard website in a snap of a finger. And then, once that template is in place, you can go back in and customize the website with different designs, with a video or with images that you have on file. We recommend Canva if you need help creating eye-catching graphics for free.
5. Automate Your Fundraising Event Website
Traditional websites are a lot of overhead to maintain. There is a constant need to update information in many places. For example, if your event is delayed by two weeks, you need to find each place where you put the date and make edits manually. This takes too much time and can lead to mistakes, which puts your event at risk by providing outdated information.
GiveSignup | RunSignup lets you enter information in one place on the dashboard. Then, we automate the process by updating that information throughout the website. If you change the date of your event, dates will automatically update everywhere that’s important — from your website, to search engines, to confirmation emails.
There is even more power that your nonprofit has with a data-driven website. GiveSignup | RunSignup’s free websites let you feature live components like a donation goal, top fundraisers and a countdown clock to event day that automatically updates. This is a great way to add engaging and real-time information to your fundraising event’s website.
6. Extend Supporter Engagement With Key Features
Your website doesn’t just serve as a hub where people can find basic information about your upcoming fundraising event. It can offer additional ways for you to engage with your existing and potential supporters. Including buttons that direct people to your social media channels encourages people to follow and share your content. Kick it up a notch by asking people to share that they registered for your event and use a unique hashtag just for the event — don’t forget to ask them to share photos!
Speaking of photos, if this is an event that you’ve done in the past, you can create a page on the website that shares photos from past events taken by your organization, your supporters or both! Or, if you are offering virtual challenges, ask people to share photos of them performing those challenges for an extra level of engagement.
And finally, if you are hosting a run/walk/ride event, we encourage you to create a results page where people can submit their event results (e.g., time it took to run a 5K). This is a fun and engaging way for organizations to promote a little friendly competition and optimize gamification by offering milestones and badges. And you can feature your fundraising goal progress on the results page to always keep fundraising front and center.
7. Have a Mobile and SEO-Optimized Website Out of the Box
In today’s hyper-digital world, SEO (search engine optimization) is vital to gaining recognition from a wider audience and increasing overall brand awareness for your organization. Simple as it sounds, having a SEO-optimized website requires organizations to understand which keywords and key phrases to use in order to organically gain traffic through search engines.
GiveSignup | RunSignup’s free websites are used by more than 25,000 fundraising events and sign up more than 7 million attendees and fundraisers. In 2020, 72.9% of website views and 55.1% of transactions happened on a mobile device. With GiveSignup | RunSignup’s free websites, every page is mobile-first — without your team needing to do anything.
With over 1.5 million nonprofits in the U.S. alone, competition for donors and their dollars can be steep. This is why remaining competitive in the industry with tools, like a mobile and SEO-optimized website, is a must-have. With GiveSignup’s all-encompassing website wizard, the point-and-click templates make it simple for you to have a mobile-responsive, SEO-optimized website for your fundraising event. Having such an invaluable tool at your fingertips takes the guesswork out of figuring out which keywords and key phrases you need to be using to make your website stand out from similar competitors.
8. Analyze, Track and Report on Website Traffic and Conversions
The digital transformation is forcing the world to rely on technology — and nonprofits are no exception. One of the biggest perks of technology is not that it’s more convenient and effective, but that it gives organizations a wealth of data. Sure, analyzing data at the most basic level (e.g, transactional history or donor information) is incredibly beneficial, but what’s more is analyzing data to learn more about donor interests and giving behaviors. With that information, you can make data-informed decisions about how you want to think about your fundraising efforts on a strategic level.
GiveSignup | RunSignup has two layers of analytics for your nonprofit to optimize your marketing spend and targeted communications. First, integrations with Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, Google Adwords and dozens more tracking and ad conversion platforms enable you to directly measure your ad spend. Even with major changes regarding user privacy and the ongoing battle between Apple and Facebook, GiveSignup | RunSignup has the tools to help your team navigate changes to traditional ad platforms.
In addition to integrations with ad platforms, GiveSignup | RunSignup has a powerful insights analytics platform that every member on your nonprofit’s team can easily understand and use. Monitor how your marketing strategy correlates to page views, ticket purchases, donations and registration with a simple and real-time event dashboard. Create custom source codes that you can attach to digital ads to discover which incentives drive additional revenue for your nonprofit. Dig into analytics to determine the key points during ticket purchase and donations to maximize your visibility at these points through strategic marketing and communications.
Website hosting platforms will typically have a data and analytics tool. But with GiveSignup, you can get easily customizable and exportable reports in a click of a finger. Plus all the data is displayed on one dashboard to make it even easier for you and your team to access.
9. Utilize the Website for Your Marketing Efforts
Now that you have an eye-catching and informative website for your fundraising event, you’ll have to do more than just wait for the registrations to flood in. It’s time to market your event and get the word out!
With the website, you can now promote your event — and add a link to your nonprofit website so that interested people can find more information about the event and register — on social media channels, through e-blasts or on direct mail pieces. The website serves as the backbone to your fundraising campaign.
10. Create a Fundraising Website Free of Charge
Now that you’re fully informed on how a website can grow your fundraising event, drive donations and promote your nonprofit’s brand, it’s time to build the foundation for your upcoming event.
Are you interested in all of these website capabilities, but are concerned about the potential costs associated with having such unique features? If you’re a nonprofit, the best part is that access to the plethora of GiveSignup tools are absolutely free. This includes other features like Facebook Fundraiser integration, email marketing and more! Learn more about GiveSignup here.