5 Event Fundraising Best Practices

However, Shuck did provide some caveats to registration fees:

• Registration fees will slow participation growth. If you really need to get 5,000 people there, the easiest way to do that is to make it free. Events with registration fees grow slower than those without, he said, although they raise more money.
• They don’t guarantee that participants will fundraise. You have to do more to convert them later.
• There are times when it’s smart to have no registration fee. For example, if your event is small or new and you’d like to get many participants to grow the event and establish its reputation.

“Registration fees are a way of setting value to the participant,” Shuck said. “When the fee is zero, it sets a very low value in their mind about how to measure your event and mission.”

3. Fundraising activation
As obvious as it sounds, it’s important to mobilize your fundraising event participants to actually raise funds. Shuck offered a few ways to do that:

• Fundraising minimums. Set minimums to let participants know there’s an expectation to raise funds.
• E-mail prompts. Successful groups actively use e-mail. The sooner an organization starts sending out targeted messages, the more money it will raise. Shuck provided the example of Breast Cancer 3-Day for the Cure, an event that Event 360 helps Susan G. Komen for the Cure organize. For the event, which raises about $100 million a year on 15 events around the country, Susan G. Komen sends segmented e-mail communications. Someone on a fundraising team gets different messages than someone not on a team. Someone who registered two weeks ago gets a different message than someone who registered eight weeks ago. Breast cancer survivors get different messages than supporters who are not breast cancer survivors. The organization talks to people differently but keeps them all engaged in segmented ways.
• Make it easy. Meet people where they are. Suggest content. Have template e-mails in place that participants can use. Set up URL short tests. Integrate communications into Facebook and other social networks.

Shuck cautioned the use of incentive levels. “Incentive levels do work, but sometimes they work too well,” he warned. “Sometimes when you have an incentive level of $50, people will fundraise to $50 and then stop. This a very complicated subject. You have to be very careful how you do it.”