3 Steps to Online Fundraising Events for Beginners
Hosting an online event is a great option when you’re trying to fundraise and collect registration information.
These events can take on many forms, such as a 5k, gala, banquet, Bowl-a-thon, Haunted Walk, Polar Plunge, and more. Events are a great way to help attract new donors, too!
If you are new to setting up online events, here are the basics for what you need to do.
Follow the Steps Provided
When you’re setting up an online event with GiveGab, you’re prompted to take steps that allow you to get your information organized before getting into the bulk of your story. The most important sections that you should sanction time to really get into are the following:
- Registration Form
- Tell Your Story
- Fundraisers
1. Registration Form
The ‘Registration Form’ section is where you’ll add any questions you want to ask your registrants. The registrants are required to answer all these questions before moving on and they get stored for you in nice charts in the ‘Management’ portion of your event.
Some good examples I have seen for this are, “What wave will you be running in?” for a 5k. Below is another question for a Women’s Build event.
These questions can be in either open-ended, multi-select, or single select to give you many possibilities for collecting this data. The ‘Manage’ section is very comprehensive and easy to navigate, as shown below.
2. Tell Your Story
The ‘Tell Your Story’ section can be time-consuming, but it is fun to complete and adds tremendous value to your campaign. The first big white box is going to be where your story goes. You can add pictures, videos, text, headers, and links to engage your registrants and donors. The most successful events are those that have engaging stories!
I would suggest a 2-3 minute video telling your story of why you are doing this event or your past success stories. High-quality photos that are clear and bright are also helpful in attracting new donors and participants.
You will want to fill in this box with rich content of your organization’s story and any additional information about why you are fundraising or about the event specifically. Below you’ll find a great example of a video that engages prospective donors available on a fundraising event page for Literacy DuPage.
Below is a terrific example of engagement through storytelling from VINE Sanctuary:
3. Fundraisers
Lastly, the ‘Fundraisers’ tab is where you can set up peer-to-peer fundraising. This is optional and may not be a good fit for every event, but it is a great tool. Some organizations use this to require registrants to raise a certain amount in order to participate.
Below are a couple of examples of how that could work.
1. This organization chose to do this more manually and charged a fee if the minimum was not met before the day:
2. You could also explain that they are being entered into a fundraiser and must raise a certain amount directly in the registration form like this:
The registration cost does count towards the fundraising goal and the registrant has the ability to share her page through email, Facebook, and Twitter right from the page’s toolkit in order to raise those funds. All donations collected through peer-to-peer fundraising gets added to the total for the event!
A couple of additional examples of some incentives for peer-to-peer fundraising could be:
- Create a contest between your fundraisers or fundraising teams
- Hand out prizes based on who raised the most money
- Hand out prizes based on who had the most donors
- Hand out prizes based on who shared their page the most
- Let anyone who raised over $3,000 get a 10-second head start in the 5k
- Give free tee-shirts to those who meet their goal
All of the teams’ data is shown in the ‘Manage’ section of the event, so the possibilities are endless!
Setting up an event can be time-consuming and may seem like a daunting task, but GiveGab does an excellent job at providing you with the necessary support to get your event up and running, while also making it pop!
If you have any questions along the way, our support articles are available to you in our support center along with #SuccessChat, our live chat feature that directly connects you with our Customer Success Team.
Events really are a great way to raise money while getting your organization’s name and cause out there.
Good luck and Happy Fundraising!
