As the world begins to open again post-COVID, nonprofits are faced with a new kind of challenge: it’s been over a year since we’ve been running events the way we used to. We’re all a little bit rusty and a little bit burnt out. So it’s more important than ever for us to be effective and work in ways that make the most of what we have.
That’s why we created this list of tips that will save you time when you’re planning and running your fundraising events. Whether you’re in-person, virtual, or hybrid, we’re all trying to pull off a great fundraising event with limited time and resources. To help you stretch a small team working on big goals, we have our favorite time-saving tricks for nonprofit fundraising events. Trust me, you’ll never want to go back once you start using these.
Before The Fundraising Event
Unsurprisingly, most of the work for a fundraising event happens in advance of the event actually happening. Because your work is front-loaded, a lot of our time saving tips also fall into the “before the event” category. This is also a great place to focus your efforts because a little time spent planning can mean a lot of time saved in the future.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can make the most of your time leading up to a fundraising event.
1. Create A Committee
If you have a board or committed community volunteers, bring together a handful of them who want to make the event a success. They can help you make phone calls to potential fundraisers or donors, reach out to sponsors, ask for donated items, or use other talents. My organization has found that some of our super volunteers have great skills like graphic design or database management and they’re willing to donate those talents on an event committee.
The biggest benefit of having a committee is that it lets you delegate. While board members or community supporters have some limits on what they can do to support you, it’s always wonderful to be able to tap someone else if your plate is too full.
A related element is to consider peer-to-peer fundraising. When you have your supporters fundraise for you, you make your whole event more efficient.
2. Use Templates To Keep You On Track
There’s no reason to create everything from scratch every time you need to do it. Take the time up front to create templates for the work you do during events. That might be a template that lays out your day of plan. It might be a template for your marketing plan. Maybe it’s a template for all of the emails that you’re using for this event. Whenever you’re going to be doing things in the same way multiple times, create a template and just keep using it.
3. Automate Your Social Media and Emails
There are tons of tools available that can help you set up the work you need to do and then let it run. If you use a social media manager like Hootsuite you can schedule your posts in bulk and let them run throughout the course of the campaign (you can also do this on Facebook’s Creator Studio). Learn more about how to build a community online.
Depending on your fundraising software, you may be able to set up an email series that triggers when people sign up for an event. That way your participants will get your custom messaging when they register to attend.
CauseVox’s new ticketing features make this easier than ever. Anyone who purchases a ticket automatically receives a receipt, plus ticket confirmations go straight to ticket holders. That makes it especially easy for your supporters to purchase tickets for their friends and family. On top of all of that, the management side is also wonderfully easy for you. You can quickly export ticket sales and import information to a bulk mailer to set up your email series.
The more of this work you can do up front, the less you have to worry about as you get closer to event day with all its details.
4. Use Tools To Increase Productivity
There are plenty of tools out there to help with productivity. It can be a huge time-saver to take an afternoon looking at your options and finding something that works well for you.
Our recommendations? Find an integration tool like Zapier that will streamline your workflow. Zapier lets you connect different apps and automate repetitive tasks, such as pushing donor data from your fundraising event platform and directly into your donor management software.
Then look for a project management system like Basecamp, Trello, or Asana. These systems allow your team to track different tasks, share notes and comments, and assign elements of the project to different team members. Plus they’re all cloud-based so you can access them anywhere, even if you’re still working remotely.
5. Take Advantage Of Online Fundraising For Your Event
Using a digital platform for all of your fundraising will allow you to keep everything in one place: that includes ticket sales, donations, peer-to-peer fundraisers, and all of the details and information you get from each one.
CauseVox’s administrator dashboard keeps all of the information in an easy to read format that you can export for all of your needs. No more using the Frankenstein approach: why use three different platforms to hold your information when you can have it all in one place?
Day Of The Fundraising Event
So you’ve put in all the work leading up to your event, you’ve run a tight ship, and now it’s time to actually run the dang thing. Everyone knows that event day is busy and stressful, but there are definitely options to make it more efficient so that you can work smarter, not harder. Here’s what we recommend.
6. Keep it Simple!
When you’re planning an event (especially if it’s the first one after a long absence) it’s easy to keep adding on elements. But the more details you include, the more work you have to do.
Eliminating complications makes the event easier for attendees to understand and easier for you to plan.
Instead of having multiple prize levels for fundraisers, just offer one gift to everyone. Instead of having a program with multiple speakers who need to be coordinated, have a single emcee and a single speaker. Think about what you can streamline while keeping the event engaging and true to your mission.
7. Recruit Volunteers To Help With Your Fundraising Event
Your mileage may vary on this tip depending on the style of event you’re running, but having more hands on deck can always be helpful. Reach out to corporate partners and see if they have a group or team looking for volunteer opportunities.
Think about places that you need a group: folks to hand out water at your 5K, a group to run registration/check in for attendees, or support staff to help you set up the event. Many businesses are shifting their support to volunteering, and some of them even come with a monetary donation.
8. Encourage Participation Online
Even if your event is in-person, that doesn’t mean you have to leave virtual fundraising behind. Leave up your digital fundraising page and encourage event attendees to make donations online so that their information is safely stored with all your other data.
You can take it one step further by using QR codes to help attendees navigate to informational pages or merchandise stores.
Learn more about planning a hybrid fundraising event.
After The Fundraising Event
Once your event is over, there’s still wrap up work to complete, and this is another area where technology and advance preparation can save tons of time. Here are our favorite tips.
9. Seriously, put it all in one place
If you use a digital fundraising platform like CauseVox, when the time comes to reconcile all your numbers, share reports, and add details to your database, you don’t have to go searching.
CauseVox even integrates with a number of popular donor management systems through Zapier so you can organize your information quickly and easily. If you’re using a database without an integration, a simple export gets you all the information you need without having to compile it from multiple sources. If you’ve prepared ahead of time you should have your thank yous, reports, and reconciliations almost ready to go. All you have to do is drop in numbers and specifics from your exports.
Run A Great Fundraising Event In Less Time With CauseVox
If you truly want to save time and run your event with less effort, making the switch to CauseVox is the best thing you can do. Raise more with less clunk.
Learn more about how CauseVox can help you run the best event for your nonprofit.
