Better organization awareness
Having a website for your specific event helps potential participants and donors learn more about how they can get involved in the event. While listing your events in a calendar on your website is a good first step to gain awareness, having a dedicated site for an event allows you to drive more people to your website and highlight the event in the community
Creating a website in which people can register for the event helps to build a larger database of potential donors and volunteers. Providing your participants with an opportunity to fundraise on your behalf allows the opportunity for more individuals to learn about your organization and get engaged in the event in future years. The average percent of total donations from first time donors is 38.53%.
Better engagement
Having a website allows you to track donors and participants in a far better way. This will lead to better data about your constituents and an opportunity to engage them in different ways. The data provided from a website can have the following tangible benefits:
- You can discover which participants are fundraising the most on your behalf and invite them to help volunteer for your organization
- You can see where some of your participants work and engage those folks for potential sponsorship or increased matching gifts contributions
- You can segment future email communications by participants and donors and help personalize content that will be relevant to them
- You can increase the overall number of volunteers receiving all of your other email and mail communications so that they can learn more about the work you’re doing
More monetary donations
Having a website allows you to raise significantly more funds and increase your donor pool.
One of the best advantages to creating a website in which people can fundraise on your behalf, is that it greatly expands your potential donor pool. For team fundraising events, 65% of donations come in from sources that an organization has no control over – unsolicited web giving and peer referrals.
Another key factor in the increase of funds is that the average event-solicited online gift was is larger than the average event-solicited offline gift. There have been multiple studies that have looked into this and the average increase is 50%. Additionally, the average donation for a team event is $62.41.
It’s important to note that the data we’re using isn’t just from large organizations. In fact, online giving does grow fastest for smaller organizations. Organizations with 10,000 or fewer email addresses grew in 2011 by 26 .7 percent in online revenue.
This helps offset the fact that smaller organizations struggle more with individual donor renewals – adding a website creates a new donor pool to help offset any issues in retention that most small organizations face on a year-to-year basis.
Justin (he, him) is a Principal and Co-Founder of Social Change Consulting. He has over fifteen years of nonprofit experience, with expertise in online fundraising, digital communications, and data management. Justin helps organizations connect their communication strategy to their income development needs. When he’s not on the clock, Justin is exploring Berlin, running, listening to too many podcasts, and drinking too much coffee.