5 Ways to Sustain Fundraising Event Momentum Throughout the Year

With the fall event season coming into full swing, it’s likely that many of your fundraising campaigns are already under way. Whether your organization is hosting a gala, an intimate cocktail reception or a large community event, you know these events are the best chance to increase awareness, strengthen relationships and inspire involvement for the coming year.

Of course, events with your donors, volunteers and the community at large often only happen a few times a year. The big question is how to harness those face-to-face interactions to continue to build the relationships you develop and keep your constituencies engaged throughout the year.

One way nonprofits do this is by changing how they communicate with their constituents. It’s no longer OK to talk at your constituents with a one-way conversation. Instead, constituents expect two-way dialogues that let them in on who you are and build relationships. The great news is that there are plenty of tools that make this type of engagement marketing easy, affordable and effective.

Why is engaging your audience important? Quite simply, it prioritizes cultivating stronger, more rewarding relationships with a core subset of your audience. By focusing on establishing genuine connections with your most passionate donors, partners and volunteers, you can create a community of the most vocal advocates for your organization, resulting in good, old-fashioned word-of-mouth recommendations for your organization.

This helps increase on-going donations and volunteer commitments as well as raise greater awareness of your organization throughout the year. It also enables you to interact with a more responsive audience of interested parties on a more frequent basis.

Ideally, you can use the upcoming fall event season to set the foundation. Following are five no- or low-cost ways to start building an engaged audience that will help you inspire others throughout the year. Since these ideas are based on elevating your traditional marketing approaches, you can put these actions in place today to keep your organization top of mind among donors, volunteers and the community at large before, during and after your event — and throughout the year.

Create and sustain excitement in advance
Consider using various e-mail and social-media marketing vehicles to build buzz for the weeks leading up to the event. Activities can include:

• Promoting your event in any regular e-mail marketing or newsletters in addition to sending an event invitation. Be sure to encourage your subscribers to share the information with their social networks, too.
• Going beyond “event-only” information in your communications. Share relevant industry articles or other information that will inspire readers to pass your content along to others. Your event specifics will get shared, too.
• Posting reminders on your Facebook page — or even creating a separate Facebook business page dedicated to your event.
• Choosing a Twitter hashtag for the event and including it in all event promotions so people know about it. Use the hashtag to keep followers informed before and during the event.

Fresh and relevant content
Boost your placement in search engines by:

• Sharing a steady stream of compelling and relevant information on your website, Facebook page, blog and Twitter feed.
• Showing as opposed to telling. The stories most likely to inspire action are those that leave feelings or create images in the audience’s mind. In all of your social-media and e-mail communications, illustrate the benefits your organization provides to the community and the role of donors to enable these efforts.
• Enabling social sharing of those anecdotes through buttons that allow you to forward and post the stories on Facebook, blogs and Twitter.

Personalization
Keep your e-mail contacts list up to date based on information collected during your event registration. This way you can segment your e-mail list and tailor your messages to specific groups. A few ideas:

• Ask event registrants a few simple questions on your registration form to better understand their interests.
• Conduct a quick online survey either during or after your event to see what further information your registrants would like to hear about.
• Consider customized messages after your event based on specific details from your one-on-one conversations. Since it can be challenging to keep all of your conversations straight amid the event activities, be sure to jot down notes on the back of each person’s business card quickly and privately after the conversation ends.

Mobile check-in
If your event is large enough, consider using a free mobile check-in application. It helps to:

• Streamline the reservation process and eliminate the snake-like lines. This way, attendees and staff can spend more time catching up with each other while reducing administrative processes and paper waste.
• Keep your lists up to date automatically. For instance, Constant Contact’s mobile check-in app seamlessly updates your account so you know who came to your event and who was a no-show, so you can send personalized follow-up notes after the event.

Introduce and connect your community
After your event is over, use social media to start conversations among your audiences in the following ways:

• Initiate a conversation on your Facebook page through a poll, survey or open-ended question to spark more conversations. Provide a steady stream of updates on the polling and survey results, and use the information as fodder for more conversations.
• Introduce and connect others — perhaps connecting those with common interests from your event or making introductions to those who were unable to attend — to help establish stronger ties with your organization and between members of your network.

By fully engaging your community, you can build a stronger base of supporters and extend your presence beyond the fall event season.

Chris Litster is vice president and general manager of the Event Marketing Business Unit at online marketing solutions provider Constant Contact.