Event Smart is a versatile event registration tool. You can sell tickets or event registrations to your next nonprofit or charity event and receive credit card payments online.
Have you considered letting your attendees donate while registering for your next event? In this post, we’ll talk about using this approach to reach your fundraising goals faster.
Why events are an effective way to raise funds for your nonprofit
Fundraising is a necessity for any charity. More funding helps your organization continue to fulfill its mission each day. That’s how events can help with nonprofit fundraising through ticket sales or event registrations, sponsorships, and donations. Moreover, events bring together like-minded people, introduces your organization to a new audience, and fills a deeper need for feeling connected.
As author Brené Brown writes in her book, Daring Greatly, “Connection is why we’re here. We are hardwired to connect with others, it’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives, and without it there is suffering.”
Let’s take a look at an example to see how donations can fast-track your fundraising goals.
Each spring, your organization hosts an annual cornhole tournament at a local brewery. Your goal for the annual fundraiser is $2,500. A team ticket for two players is $100.
How many tickets do you need to sell to reach your goal?
The calculation is 2,500 divided by 10, which gives you 25 team tickets. However, it would be best if you also considered expenses that go into hosting your event. Here are some examples:
– A venue. A local brewery may host the tournament for free in exchange for bringing out players and friends who will then buy drinks and food.
– An event registration and ticketing tool. Event Smart is a user-friendly and affordable way to sell tickets or event registrations for a fundraiser.
– Transaction fees. These are fees to payment services like Stripe or PayPal for collecting debit and credit card payments for your events and sending the funds to you.
With the above expenses in mind, let’s say that our estimate for the cost to organize the fundraiser is $250. That means that we need to sell 28 tickets to hit our goal of $2,500 after expenses.
Now let’s take a look at the scenario above with some donation options.
We’ll keep our goal for the fundraiser at $2,500. A team ticket for two players is $100, and we are offering several donation options: $25, $50, $100, and $250.
There are many combinations for the donation options to accelerate your fundraising goals. Here are three examples to show you what could be possible.
– 28 team tickets plus one of each donation option = $2,925
– 28 team tickets plus five donations for $50, three donations for $100, and one donation for $250 = $3,300
– 28 team tickets plus one donation for $25, three for $100, and five for $250 = $4,075
Can you see how valuable offering donations alongside event registrations or ticket sales can be for your events?
Donations are powerful because they 1) allow attendees to contribute more and, 2) allow contributions from attendees who cannot attend but still wish to show support for your next event.
How to collect donations alongside event registrations with Event Smart
Event Smart’s Advanced Event Editor gives you the flexibility to set up multiple dates and ticket types. This works well for setting up an event that has tickets plus optional donation options.
Here is an example of a nonprofit fundraiser as a community walkathon with a registration fee and donation options:
An event datetime is when an event takes place. A datetime for the walkathon is connected to a registration option (shown in blue) for the walkathon. Then we have a separate date time for the donation options (shown in yellow). This access is managed through the advanced options (gear icon) for each ticket. Setting it up this way keeps the registrations separate from the donations.
How do you know the amounts that you should offer as donations?
Take a look at the donations that your organization has received over the past year. Then identify the most frequent donation amounts and use those as a starting point. This research can take some time and will likely pay off by increasing your organization’s donations.
“When charities ask you for a donation, they typically offer you a range of options such as $100, $250, $1,000, $5,000, or “other.” If the charity’s fundraisers have an idea of what they are doing, these values are not picked at random, because the options influence the amount of money people decide to donate. People will give more if the options are $100, $250, $1,000, and $5,000, than if the options are $50, $75, $100, and $150,” wrote Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in Nudge.
So far, we’ve talked about a cornhole tournament and a community walkathon as fundraisers. Let’s take a look at several more types of events.
5 more ideas for events that work well with donations
Keeping an ongoing list of ideas for fundraisers can be helpful for saving time on a future event. You won’t need to start from scratch, and you’ll have a jump start when you are ready to raise funds with an event.
Here are five kinds of events where you can collect event registration or tickets sales along with donations:
– Dinners
– Clay shoots
– School plays
– Bowlathons
– Kickball tournaments
Check out what a nonprofit shared with us about how Event Smart helped them:
Event Smart is a user-friendly system, as advertised. The service and troubleshooting are also fantastic. We were impressed by the simplicity – download the app on a few phones, and scan in hundreds of tickets with zero issues. Lookups for lost tickets were also no problem at all. There are price models for everything, and for our nonprofit, it was appreciated that we were able to secure all of the features we needed with little hit to the bottom line. Most definitely will continue our relationship with Event Smart! -Lynne Cohen
Organizing events can help your nonprofit or charity raise funds. And offering donations can help you reach and even exceed your fundraising goals. An added benefit of donations is that participants in the walkathon can donate while registering. Plus, those who cannot make can still give to show support for the fundraiser.
Start your free 14-day trial of Event Smart right now to begin selling tickets or event registrations to your next nonprofit fundraiser today.
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