Below is a recorded webinar on The Advantage of Fundraising. This session offers some valuable information on how fundraising can help increase revenue and registrations and how to take advantage of these tools within your RunSignup dashboard.
Specific topics covered include:
- Why Activate Fundraising
- Basic Setup Steps
- Using Fundraising to Increase Registrations
- Customer Example: Hitting Below the Belt
Below provides highlights from the webinar.
Why Activate Fundraising:
Increases Donations
When events activate fundraising in addition to donations, they typically increase overall donations by 700%! Fundraising clearly works and is an effective way for an organization to raise dollars. Below shows fundraising and donation trends we’ve tracked over time.
Creates Supper Supporters
These are people that are highly engaged with your event. Supper Supporters who fundraise have a longer, more fulfilling interaction with your organization and are more likely to stay involved. They are more likely to invite friends and family to not only contribute, but also join the event. They are also more likely to care about the impact of your mission and look at additional opportunities to engage with you.
Expands Your Funnel (Market Reach)
Fundraisers share and with this sharing expand the awareness for your event. On average, a fundraiser solicits between 5 and 10 donations. That is 5-10 people who may not have been familiar with your organization before – and now they are. This word-of-mouth promotion is a powerful and effective marketing approach.
Setup of Fundraising with RunSignup
Below are the simple steps it takes to activate fundraising capabilities for your event:
Step One: Turn On Donations
In order to turn on Fundraising, you will need to first setup your event for Donations. To do this go to your race Dashboard, Donations Settings, Setup, General and perform the following:
- Set goal for race
- Input start and end dates
- Include 2-3 paragraph description
- Upload logo
- Add donation levels
Step Two: Enable Individual Fundraisers
Next, you need to enable individual fundraisers. From your race dashboard, go to Fundraising, Individual Fundraisers, and General Settings. Then, complete the following:
- Set goal for each individual fundraiser
- Include 2-3 paragraph default copy
- Upload logo
- More customization…
Note: In order to use the team fundraising feature, you must first set up individual fundraising.
Minimums Vs. Goals:
- Fundraising Goal: A default target amount to challenge your fundraisers (not a required amount)
- Fundraising Minimum: For those events that have a required threshold that fundraisers need to reach to participate
Step 3: Set Up Team Fundraising
If your event wants to use the team fundraising, you will want to set this up in advance so people can start engaging in team fundraising from the start. Go to Fundraising, Team Fundraisers, and General Settings and perform the following:
- Set goal for each team fundraiser
- Include 2-3 paragraph default copy
- Configure requirements and preferences
Step 4: Set Up Milestones
You have the option to set up motivational milestone badges to incentivize your fundraisers. This is available for both individual and team fundraising. Go to Fundraising, Individual Fundraisers/Team Fundraisers, Fundraiser Rewards. We suggest events create easily attainable ones such as first donation reached, enabling Facebook Fundraising, and 10th donation reached.
- Create fundraising milestones and badges to incentivize fundraisers
- Badges earned appear in a trophy case on the fundraiser’s page
- Get creative with custom badges!
- Available for both individuals and teams
Using Fundraising to Increase Registrations
Leveraging Teams to Increase Registrations
Teams are a great way to organically increase registrations for your event. Offer incentives, rewards, and even a race day VIP experience for your top fundraising teams to encourage them to invite friends to participate. For example, you could host a donut tent for the top fundraising teams.
Important point: Rather than using social groups/teams (these are SEPARATE features), use the fundraising team feature for events with a charitable focus.
Engage More Organizations with the Charity Partner Tool
Another tool you can take advantage of is RunSignup’s Charity Partner tool. You can have one or multiple organizations represented. If you have multiple organizations, this gives people options for people to choose which charity they would like to put their donations towards and which charity the want their fundraising page to represent. This tool automates the transmission of funds raised bypassing the need for your event to perform accounting services. In addition, this tool provides transparent reporting of funds raised.
- Engage multiple charities instead of just one, expanding the marketing reach of your event
- Encourage competitive fundraising between charities (top teams, dollar amount raised)
- Checkbox donation at checkout
- Distribute funds directly to charity payment account
Optional Fundraising Per Event
One important setup to consider is whether to have fundraising efforts as a required or optional part of your event. If you haven’t done fundraising in the past, you have options!
- Required fundraising for all events
- Optional fundraising for all events
- Required fundraising for select events (i.e. Charity 5K, Charity Ride)
Empower Your Fundraisers Facebook Fundraising
RunSignup’s Facebook fundraising integration allows you to plug in the Facebook page of the non profit you are supporting. This enables you to raise more money as you are able to reach a different set of people than would traditionally be reached for your event.
- Supercharge your supporters by making it easy to reach all their connections
- Available for Facebook pages that collect donations
- Set up for both organizers and fundraisers in seconds
- Funds aggregate on both RunSignup and Facebook
- Facebook donations are FREE
Customer Example
Mindy Conklin, Founder and Executive Director of Hitting Cancer Below the Belt (HCB2), is dedicated to colorectal (colon and rectal) cancer prevention in our hometown of Richmond, VA, surrounding counties, and across the Commonwealth. The organization hosts several fundraising events, including the Boxer Brief 5K and have used RunSignup for about seven years. They recently started using RunSignup’s fundraising tools and Mindy reports they have rasied a significantly more funds by making use of them. She shared that they mostly do team fundraising and provided some tips for other event organizers:
- Offer something significant as a reward. For the Boxer Brief 5K they offer a free week trip for two. They used to offer swag, but found switching to such a valuable reward has resulted in quadrupling the funds raised.
- Stay in touch with the teams, especially the team captains. Mindy shared they use different methods to communicate with the team’s captains such as with RunSignup’s email system. She advised that the relational component is critical. The team captains are drivers of attendance, they bring more participants, they want to raise money – especially for their event since most will have someone in their lives they are close to who have been impacted by colorectal cancer.
- Use communication and encourage link sharing. Mindy attributes their ability to communicate effectively with participants to RunSignup’s email system and advises encouraging participants to share their fundraising and referral links to further help raise funds. She shared that they raised $1,300 just from referrals.
We invite you to watch the recorded session for more information!