If you’re planning on hosting a fundraising event and you want the perfect online fundraising platform, you need to do your research. A good nonprofit event fundraising platform will help you raise more with less effort: it creates a streamlined, simple experience for you, your fundraisers, and your donors.
If this is your first time running a nonprofit fundraising event (or even if you’re just on the lookout for a new platform) you may be wondering what features to look for in your platform.
What you’re looking for here will depend on what you need for your personalized nonprofit fundraising event. Before you start looking for a platform, ask yourself what you need to be able to run your event.
This checklist will help guide you through the qualities of a top-tier event fundraising site so that you can find the best platform for your nonprofit fundraising event.
1. Ease Of Use
Hopefully, it’s obvious why this is our first point. If a platform is confusing to navigate, difficult to set up, or hard for donors to use, it’s not going to work well. You don’t want to waste time trying to learn how to write HTML or pay someone to do custom design work.
You want a platform that will:
- Let you customize your nonprofit fundraising event page quickly and easily. It doesn’t have to take forever to set up your fundraising site. In fact, the best platforms are easy enough that you can complete setup in minutes.
- Easily manage your event by giving you the power to make edits, add offline donations + tickets, and manage peer-to-peer.
- View and export data easily, so you don’t waste time trying to reconcile data.
For example, running a nonprofit fundraising event with CauseVox requires no IT experience: anyone can set it up easily and quickly. You’ll have your fundraiser up and running in minutes.
2. Peer-to-Peer Fundraising
Peer-to-peer fundraising is one of the most powerful digital fundraising strategies and can be integrated into nearly any fundraising event you may be hosting: galas, walkathons, challenges, anniversary events – you name it. In fact, we’ve seen that peer-to-peer fundraising helps organizations raise 2x as much – as opposed to hosting a nonprofit event without it.
The way peer-to-peer works is that you ask supporters to set up a personal fundraising page, then reach out to their friends and family to solicit donations. They should be able to easily create a page, share updates, post pictures and videos, and get donations.
A good fundraising platform will let fundraisers easily create a page in under 60 seconds. If it’s too hard, or takes too long to set up a page, you’ll lose out on people who otherwise would make powerful fundraisers for you!
The best ones will let you create a template for your fundraisers with pre-written text, images, and more so they don’t have to start from scratch when it comes to telling their friends and family why they should give to your organization.
CauseVox’s platform lets you set up text and images for your fundraisers that they can edit to their taste. Plus, each fundraiser gets their own page with a goal and tracking, where they can share updates, post pictures, and more.
3. Progress Tracking
Everyone loves to see a tracker tick up. Donors are more likely to make a gift when they can see how close you are to your goal, and they know their gift could push it over the edge. A great feature of most fundraising platforms is a tracker that lets you set a fundraising goal and show how close you are. Some platforms take it one step further and let you add in other goals as well: miles walked, meals provided, and so on.
Caption: With CauseVox you can track your progress towards a dollar amount, but also add an activity metric to track things like miles walked, kilometers biked, hours of activity, and more.
4. Ticket Purchasing/Registration
If you’re running a fundraising event, you’re probably looking for a platform that allows your guests to buy tickets or register for an event right alongside making a donation or building a fundraising page.
By keeping ticket sales and fundraising in one place, you’re making it easier for your supporters to join, donate, and participate. This way, you’re likely to sell more tickets and raise more for your event.
When you look for a ticketing platform for your nonprofit fundraising event, ensure that:
- The form loads quickly, so your supporters are more likely to complete their purchase.
- Your supporters can easily purchase a single ticket or multiple tickets across different ticket prices + use a promo code (if you have one!)
- The ticketing forms are mobile-optimized + supporters can pay with credit card or 1-click mobile payment options like Apple and Google Pay.
- You’re able to add your own custom questions to the ticketing form so you can get all the details you need.
- Automatic purchase receipts sent right to their email + ticket automatic confirmations are sent to ticket holders.
5. Mobile mobile mobile
In 2020, 28% of online donations were made on a mobile device. That number just keeps going up. If you want an effective fundraising event platform, you need it to be mobile-optimized so that your donors can make their gift anywhere, any time.
The best event platforms will go a step further and also accept mobile payments like Apple Pay or Google Pay. Donors don’t have to enter credit card information and they can make their gift more easily and quickly, meaning you get a better conversion rate.
6. Customization
You don’t want your fundraising page to look the same as everyone else’s. Even worse, you don’t want it to have a different company’s branding on it. Some fundraising platforms plaster their logo all over your page, which confuses your donors. Instead, you want to look for a platform that lets you customize the appearance to fit your branding.
Customization is also important when it comes to content: a platform that doesn’t let you share all the information that you want in the way you want it won’t give you the best experience. The best platforms let you feature content and sponsors so that you can create a visually appealing page that graphically helps visitors know what to look at.
Mojave Desert Land Trust used CauseVox to build a beautiful page that featured their color palette and logo, a strong theme, and custom graphics.
7. Integrations
We’ve all had the experience of Frankensteining: you try to run a fundraiser, but you’re using one platform for your emails, one platform for donations, one platform for registration, and one platform for t-shirt sales. It’s messy, it’s frustrating, and it’s confusing.
The best nonprofit fundraising event platforms integrate easily with your donor management software, and keep all the information neatly in one place. If you’re interested in having a video on your site, you want to ensure your platform allows for video or live stream embeds.
You can even go a step further with integrations like Strava, which allows participants to track their activities and have the information show up on their campaign page. No more looking through page after page to find the info you want.
8. Simple Administration
You’re busy. It’s a fact of life for nonprofit fundraisers that we always have more work than we have time. So one of the most important pieces when picking a fundraising platform is choosing one that works well for you. You want to be able to see your data clearly on your dashboard, look up any participant and see their activities, and import or export data easily.
CauseVox has a straightforward user interface that lets you look at all of your fundraising in one place, then dig deep into the details you need.
Get Started with CauseVox to See Why It’s the Best Platform Around
Ready to make fundraising events an absolute breeze?
CauseVox helps you raise more with less effort whether you’re running an in-person event, a virtual event, or something hybrid.
Use CauseVox to easily spin up crowdfunding campaigns, donation pages, and peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns, plus integrate event ticketing and management directly into your fundraising.
Learn more about how you can use CauseVox for your online fundraising events.
