Virtual fundraising events are becoming an indispensable trend for non-profits.
Whether you want to plan your virtual event in reaction to the modern challenges or as an attempt to grow the organization’s digital footprint, having a plan to keep your audience engaged will be non-negotiable moving forward.
A well-to-do virtual fundraising event indeed comes in many shapes and sizes. To figure out a virtual mold that fits perfectly with your fundraising aspirations and community-building targets, read through until it’s a wrap.
Virtual Fundraising For Non-profits: A Run-Through
Virtual fundraising events create an opportunity for the NGOs to interact and engage with their donors and solicit online donations. They can cater to every kind of cause and fundraising goals initiated by the NGOs.
These events are effective because they are highly flexible not only for non-profits but also for the community. Additionally, they are easy to conduct, are comparatively lower in operational costs, and boundlessly fetch the audience’s participation.
However, it is worth noting here, that advanced technology and compelling user-engagement strategies are essential to keep the audiences attentive and interactive throughout the event.
To know what all can be the best practices, keep reading.
Ideas That Can Engage Audiences’ In A Virtual Fundraising Event
Conducting the fundraising campaign virtually opens up a whole new world of opportunities for non-profit organizations to better engage their audiences and gather support. Virtual fundraisers that are time-bound can easily immerse the audience in a plethora of activities.
Interestingly, the overall revenue generated by non-profits increased by 23% over the past year, from 15% for online fundraising events. The reason for this can be attributed to the different tactics that the organizers adapted to.
Explore the top 10 ideas that you can incorporate to amp up your virtual fundraising event.
1. Run Open Mics
Quarantine has helped many people discover their hidden talents and love for art. Fundraisers can take advantage of this by hosting an open mic allowing people to share their knack with others.
Attendees via a ticket can narrate stories, recite poetry, or maybe share a TED Talk, which can be used further for the event’s cause. Conducting an open mic is interactive and awe-inspiring and a great way to attract more people to participate and donate, indeed.
Furthermore, don’t overlook the use of ticketing software for nonprofits to ensure a seamless sales process and to facilitate the analysis of results afterward.
2. Conduct A Roundtable
The best part about community-building activities like a series of Q&A and roundtables is that they can easily adapt to the virtual sphere.
You can invite industry leads, celebrities, authorities, board members, activists, etc., to promote discussions around your cause and raise awareness. Active minds look up to knowing what people holding influence and superiority have to say about societal concerns and their upliftment.
An insightful conversation would prompt attendees to support and make a contribution to the cause.
3. Play Games
Playing online games is a great way to bring people together, facilitate healthy competition and gather support for your mission simply by giving them something to be excited about.
You can choose to host online gaming tournaments with timeless video games or bring back the era of board games, like chess and scrabble. Charge an entry fee into the tournament, set up a scoreboard, and display the list of rules, competitors, and rewards that the winners will be entitled to.
This will excite more participation from the audience and keep their spirits at an all-time high, thus boosting your virtual fundraising efforts.
4. Display A Social Wall
There cannot be any better time than now to leverage the power of social media. Your presence on media platforms can do more than you can fathom to the virtual fundraising event.
Promote your campaign on social media via an exclusive hashtag, seeking participation and support from your audience. The hashtag campaign would further inspire people to create content, reinforcing the cause. In addition, UGC generated across different social media channels can be aggregated and put to effective use via social walls.
Promising social wall platform, Taggbox Display, enables you to grab the attention of your guests seamlessly by providing them with authentic and alluring content.
It helps you collect UGC generated via multiple sources and filter it out to make it most relevant to the cause.
Wait, it doesn’t end here! You can also enhance the look and feel of your social wall by using vivid themes and backgrounds and turn it aesthetically pleasing for your viewers.
A social wall is not just engaging and informative but also credible and induces the people’s reliability in the cause.
Also Read: Oxfam’s Noble Initiative With Taggbox: Turkey & Syria Earthquake Disaster Relief
5. Set Up A Virtual Concert
Audience engagement is a subset of concerts, for they are entertaining and ring a bell in the hearts of the attendees when they reminisce about it.
Gathering engagement is no big deal in live concerts. But, with virtual events having the limelight, it might get overwhelming.
So, organize the concert keeping in mind the audience’s entertainment. For example, book a band or a singer to inspire the attendance of masses.
Such events do not only gather impulse but also a wider reach as excited attendees spread the word about it with their friends and family.
6. Organize Workshops
It is always a great idea to share expertise and knowledge with your community. Of course, subjects that directly relate to your mission can be your best bet. But, in this respect, you can also consider other educational and artistic workshops like teaching a foreign language, conducting a craft workshop, cooking class, or something similar.
It will make it easier for you to engage the audience by giving them an experience that they will remember while potentially improving your fund generation process.
7. Virtual Movie Nights
A virtual movie night is another amazing way to keep your virtual fundraising audience entertained and ignite a spark in them.
To successfully conduct it, leverage platforms that allow an aligned watch time for everyone.
While choosing the genre and movie to watch, opt for the one closest to your cause, maybe a documentary, and add an entry ticket to support your fundraiser.
Watching together is fun and fosters a sense of belonging to each other, which might be a contributing factor to a better virtual fundraising event for your NGO.
8. Live Webinar
Doing a live webinar isn’t a bad idea when trying to raise the targeted amount of funds. People today are actively looking out for ways in which they can level up their knowledge. Coupling their quest with social upliftment can be an influential way to gather attention and participation.
With some R&D in place, you can know the trending and most sought-after genre and topics to choose for the webinar.
Alternatively, you can host the live webinar around your social cause, which will also help the audience have a deeper understanding of the communal fundraiser they contribute to.
The biggest advantage of conducting a live webinar is its interaction-boosting capabilities. Interconnectivity is important for NGOs as it enables the community-building process, which further has advantages of its own.
9. Virtual Marathon Or Bootcamp
Bootcamps or marathons have been quite a go-to for fundraisers because these events tend to receive maximum participation and hence, contributions.
Brands must try adapting a traditional walkathon/marathon or boot camp to take place virtually! By leveraging a centralized virtual event software, brands can launch a peer-to-peer variant of the fundraising campaign.
Plan an engaging schedule of challenges that need to be included and place such activities that can be undertaken remotely. The participants can maintain a log of their activities in the campaign center, which will help generate donations along the way.
Let’s take Hill Country Ride for AIDS(HCRA), the iconic 20-year-old on-the-ground fundraising event from Texas, for instance. For the year 2020, they took the ride virtually to generate funds for the local health organizations isn’t disrupted.
The peer-to-peer virtual event was spread over 12 weeks which enabled HCRA to raise over $430,000.
What made this possible was the use of- mission messaging, an interactive visual gallery, differential participant tools, and showcasing their sponsors digitally on the fundraising site.
10. Online Contests/Competitions
Conducting a social media contest for your supporters is a low-stress method of boosting engagement around the clock.
Build a contest or competition around the cause of the fundraising event and give the attendees some award incentives. Think of a dedicated hashtag to enable tracking of entries and fixate a deadline.
For example, you can ask your followers across social media platforms to share the most creative photograph ever clicked by them by tagging the NGO and using the exclusive hashtag. In addition to this, you can ask them to also spread the word about the virtual collection drive.
This will help you in reaching out to the masses and ease out the fund collection process.
How Can You Plan And Host A Virtual Fundraiser?
A. Know the pros and cons
Before youtake a leap into organizing a virtual fundraising event for your non-profit organization, evaluate the pros and cons of it.
Sure, a virtual fundraising event is more cost-effective than an in-person event; it provides greater flexibility and can have people in attendance across the globe. But, all of this and more depends upon the prevailing circumstances of your NPO.
Hence, analyze the scale you would want your virtual fundraising event to be held at before you run wild.
B. Decide upon your budget and target
Draft your budget and your way around it. Pre-determining engagement goals and aspirational revenue can help you have a successful fundraising event.
Know what audience you want to reach out to and the medium that can help you do so, the timeframe for which the event will be held, and the activities that would be undertaken to fetch audience attention?
Having an outline is a smart and effective strategy to ensure the performance of your virtual event.
C. Choose the right platform.
The virtual platform will be the central place where your fundraising event would run so, choose wisely!
Speaking of features, you can lookout for a cloud-based design, flexibility, and customizations, secure payment getaways, powerful data collection, and hassle-free tools for registrations.
Do your research and opt for the top virtual event platform to be the deal-maker for your virtual fundraising event.
D. Gather your team
Being a one-person army is not the kind of approach you want to have while conducting virtual fundraising events. Instead, assemble your team and split out the tasks to have a simplified process.
For example, you can divide people to have them look after; the promotional aspect of the event, sponsorships, research and development, technological requirements, etc.
E. Promote and launch your virtual fundraiser
To land upon a big launch of the virtual fundraiser, heavily promote your campaigns as it is the only beneficial thing for you in the long run.
Leverage your presence on social media by aggressively posting content on the feed and stories, sign up for an ambassador or an influencer who can effortlessly promote your event, send emails, and ask more and more people to participate.
Also Read: Strategies To Boost Social Media Marketing For Nonprofit Organizations
F. Analyze the performance of your event
Raising funds in an act of trust. The trust that people lay in your NPO, hence, to satisfy them about their contribution, send them emails of appreciation.
If someone went out of the way to contribute, then make sure that you express your gratitude by mentioning them and the people who made your virtual event successful on your social media.
It would not only make them feel well-thought-of but also would encourage them to participate in further events.
Wrapping Up
In the future, virtual fundraising events will be an important part of the strategies formulated by non-profits. Whether they temporarily replace in-person events or be a part of modern, hybrid engagement opportunities, virtual strategies give organizations an unmatched level of flexibility.
But, don’t just stop here. Devise your best plan with us today!
