When you put on a fundraising event, the most important element of success is to sell fundraiser tickets: if no one shows up to your event, none of your other metrics will matter.
Whether it’s an in-person event, virtual, or hybrid, nonprofit leaders are always asking how to get people on board. How do you successfully sell fundraiser tickets for fundraising events that may be virtual or look different from the way it’s always been?
The answer is strong digital marketing. We’ve got 6 tips for making your ticket sales smooth and successful so that your next fundraising event will be packed with participants.
1. Use Multi-Channel Marketing To Get The Word Out About Your Nonprofit’s Fundraising Event
On average, it takes between 7 and 10 touches with a potential buyer before they make a purchase. That means they need to see your message at least 7 times before they’re going to act.
The easiest way to sell more tickets to your nonprofit’s fundraising event is to increase the number of times you reach out, and use a variety of different channels. That could include:
- Featuring your event on your website
- Using an email campaign
- Posting on social media
- Phone calls
- Mass SMS texts
- Livestream events
- Direct mail
- Print advertising
- Digital advertising
The idea is to surround your supporters: no matter what channel they interact with the most, they’ll be aware of your event and more likely to join.
Create a marketing plan so that you know the channels you’ll be using and how often you’ll use each one.
2. Communicate The Benefits Of Attending Your Nonprofit’s Event
No one does something for nothing. People buy tickets to your events for two reasons: they get something from the event, and they know they’re supporting your important mission. If you want more people to buy tickets, you have to communicate those two types of benefits.
When you communicate about your event, share details about what people can expect. Tell them who will be speaking, if there will be exciting entertainment, or the information they’ll get while they’re there. But don’t forget to share that by purchasing a ticket, they’re supporting your important work. Connect the event to your impact in the world so that attendees can see that their fun gala evening is making a difference.
3. Use Scarcity To Drive Urgency + Sell More Tickets
FOMO is real my friends. When you see other people having cool experiences, you suddenly want that experience for yourself. You can use that drive to entice your attendees to buy tickets. Basically you want to show your audience that other people are buying tickets and having a great time. You can share photos from prior events, quotes from attendees, and details about what kind of cool things will happen at the event.
To take it to the next level, add in scarcity: if you don’t buy your ticket now, you might not get one. You can create this sense of urgency by adding deadlines or countdowns to the end of ticket sales, and by having a limited number of tickets available.
If you have an unlimited number of tickets (say it’s a virtual event) create different ticket tiers that give attendees access to something special like a happy hour, exclusive time with a speaker or performer, or extra information.
4. Use Ticketing Tiers To Upsell
Speaking of ticketing tiers, those are another fantastic way to increase your sales. Let’s say you have a potential customer who is interested in your event. They decide they’re going to attend, and they click through to your ticket page simply planning to buy the basic ticket.
The customer sees three or four options listed and suddenly their basic ticket doesn’t look so exciting. So they choose the next most expensive option after seeing all the options.
Creating a few ticket tiers can help you upsell right as someone is making their purchase. Share a little bit of information about what you get at each tier in the description and you will entice more people to move to higher price points.
This works especially well if you can make a higher tiered option a better “deal” – they get a lot of additional perks for not too much more than your first option.
You can easily create tiered ticketing on CauseVox’s integrated ticket system. Here are some of the features that help you create multiple price points:
- Create customized ticketing tiers that fit your event pricing needs.
- Set up promo codes.
- Create a standalone form to simply sell tickets.
With carefully constructed tiers designed to give your supporters a deal for a higher ticket price, you’re likely to increase your revenue for your event.
5. Leverage Your Audience To Drive Ticket Sales For Your Nonprofit’s Fundraising Event
One of the most powerful fundraising approaches available today is peer-to-peer fundraising. When you ask your supporters to ask for donations on your behalf, you exponentially increase your reach.
The same holds true for ticket sales. Ask your attendees to spread the word on your behalf, and if you’re already asking supporters to be peer-to-peer fundraisers, ask them to get involved in spreading the word about ticket sales for the event.
Having your attendees and/or fundraisers invite their friends and family to the event will increase your reach and get you access to a whole group of people that would never have heard of your event otherwise. It will also create more of a community at your event, with people in the same circles who know the peer-to-peer participant coming to support them.
You can even offer incentives and prizes to the fundraiser who sells the most tickets, the same as you might for the fundraiser who brings in the most dollars.
Your sponsors are another audience that can help you sell tickets. When selling sponsorships, include a few free tickets that the sponsor or partner can give away for promotion.
The more you get your partners involved, the more likely they are to share via their networks that your event is happening. That’s a whole new audience who can register for your event.
6. Make It Easy
The fastest way to get me to miss an event is to make the ticketing process confusing. If I don’t understand what option to select, how to pay, or if the form takes me too much time, I’m going to close out of the page and move onto the next thing. And I am not unique.
Your attendees also want an easy ticketing process so that by the time they’ve decided to attend, the ticket is already bought.
There are a few important elements to creating easy ticketing:
- Make sure it’s mobile-friendly. 65% of all web traffic is mobile and that number just keeps going up. You’ll be losing most of your audience if you have a page that they can’t navigate on their phone.
- Go a step further by accepting mobile wallets like Apple Pay. 54% of consumers have used a mobile wallet to make a payment. You can capture that audience by giving them the choice to use a mobile wallet (this also makes payment incredibly fast).
- Finally, keep your form simple! If you don’t need a piece of information, don’t ask for it. The more fields you have, the less likely it is that everyone will complete it. Get the information you need, but no extra.
CauseVox takes this all one step further by keeping everything in one place: your attendees can buy tickets, make donations, and sign on as fundraisers all in one place.
Power-up Your Ticketing With CauseVox
Don’t let yourself stay stuck on a ticketing platform that’s clunky and out of date. With CauseVox’s updated ticketing you can brand and host your eventing ticketing form, collect additional attendee information, and manage guests plus you get:
- Mobile-optimized ticketing forms with 1-click mobile payment options.
- 75% faster-loading forms for better conversion rates.
- Buy one ticket or multiple tickets at different price points.
- Easily use a promo code.
- Simple automatic purchase receipts are sent right to the email of the purchaser.
- Ticket confirmations are automatically sent to ticket holders, making it easy for your supporters to purchase tickets for their friends and family.
- Easily embed the ticketing forms on your website or landing page.
- Custom brand your form so that attendees recognize your brand look.
- Use our easy ticket management to track and export sales, plus manage check ins on the day of the event.
- Receive automatic email notifications whenever a ticket is purchased.
Make the move to CauseVox for the best ticketing platform that will help you to sell more with less effort.
Learn more about how CauseVox can help you run the best event for your nonprofit.
This post was originally posted in April 2021 and was updated for freshness and accuracy in June 2023.
