How to Engage and Delight Donors Before, During, and After Your Event.

No matter how long you spend planning or preparing for your event, your donors’ experience will make or break your success. To ensure a positive donor experience before, during, and after your fundraising event, your nonprofit will no doubt aim to exceed donor expectations. The first step is to understand current donor motivations for giving.

According to the OneCause Giving Experience Study, today’s donors have unique motivators that attract them to nonprofits and influence their giving behaviors. An easy giving experience, knowing the impact of their gift, feeling connected to the mission, and trusting the organization are today’s donors’ top motivators.

So, to engage and delight today’s donors, your nonprofit needs to:

  • Simplify the donation process.
  • Educate donors on the purpose, results, and impact of the mission.
  • Showcase social proof throughout the entire donor journey.

With the right fundraising tools, your nonprofit can leverage key donor motivators and drive more donations for your cause.

Enter the OneCause Fundraising Platform.

The OneCause Fundraising Platform delivers a seamless giving experience for your supporters, while making fundraising flexible and less burdensome for your nonprofit. From in-person events to virtual and hybrid fundraisers, this all-in-one fundraising platform makes it easy to connect your supporters to your cause anytime, anywhere, on any device.

We will dive into the built-in tools and features that were designed to help your cause continuously delight donors at every touchpoint before, during, and after your event.

Let’s dive in!

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Foundations to Delight Your Donor: Before Your Event

A donor’s journey with your mission begins well before event day. Take advantage of the time leading up to your event to get your attendees excited and ready to fundraise with you.

Event Site Creation

Your event site provides everything your donors need to learn about, engage with, and support your mission – all in one place.

Customizable to match your organization’s branding, your event site allows attendees to easily:

  • Find details about your event.
  • Purchase and manage tickets.
  • Set up a guest profile and manage credit cards.
  • Make a donation.
  • Begin bidding on items.
  • Donate to different targeted achievement or impact levels.
  • Engage with sponsors.

With your event site, attendees can immediately start engaging and driving revenue without waiting until event day.

These features can help engage your donors even before they arrive at your event, maximizing the connection with your attendees. Finally, the platform was designed with ADA compliance in mind, so every supporter can engage and give without barriers.

OneCause offers unique ways to not only showcase your sponsor logos, but foster sponsor engagement with features like the Sponsor Game. This competitive matching game is a great way to keep guests engaged on your site while providing visibility and direct engagement with sponsorship logos.

Ticketing

The OneCause Fundraising Platform provides an integrated ticket experience directly from your event site. This means your organization and donors don’t have to use multiple platforms to manage and engage with your event.

With integrated ticketing, you can:

  • Create and sell multiple ticket types.
  • Deliver customized attendee experiences based on ticket type (e.g., in-person, virtual).
  • Generate custom questions needed prior to the event (e.g., meal choice).
  • Add optionality to purchase additional items with the ticket (e.g., valet parking).
  • Enable attendees to manage and assign their own tickets.

Through integrated ticketing, your organization is able to collect important attendee information while empowering your guests to enjoy managing their own event experience.

During Your Event

Let’s dive into how the OneCause Fundraising Platform enables engagement through event day experiences.

Express Check-in

Let’s face it – no one enjoys waiting in line. With Express Check-in, guests can skip the line and immediately start enjoying themselves at your event. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3!

  1. Guests receive a text before your event to enter missing information (e.g., phone numbers, credit cards, email).
  2. They can even answer a pre-event questionnaire (e.g., vaccination status, special requests).
  3. Attendees receive a QR code ticket, allowing them to quickly move through check-in and get into your event faster.

Express Check-in saves guests time, reduces bottlenecks at registration, and gives your attendees a seamless experience as they enter your event!

The OneCause Fundraising Platform provides you the flexibility to still offer a traditional check-in should you still want or need to. Enhanced features in the platform that make traditional registration easier include:

  • Ticket transfer: A guest’s plans changed? The check-in tool allows your staff and volunteers to easily transfer the guest’s ticket to a new attendee in seconds.
  • Walk-up ticket sales: Sell tickets at check-in to guests who arrived without one.
  • Non-ticketed bidder: Enable supporters to bid on your auction by adding them as a bidder in your event without having to sell a ticket.

The check-in process was designed to be intuitive and quick so that your guests can more quickly enjoy your event, engage your staff, and spend more time giving with less time waiting in line.

Chat

Need a way to drive deeper engagement with attendees, both in-person and remote? Leverage the chat function within the OneCause Fundraising Platform.

This tool allows for real-time communication during your event, including:

  • Event announcements.
  • Concierge assistance to attendees.
  • Org to guest communications.
  • Guest to guest communication to foster fun!

These make Chat the perfect way to keep your attendees interacting with your event, your cause, and each other. And it helps keep them engaged throughout your event.

Raffle and Fixed Price Items

Raffles are an easy way to get guests involved and donating without requiring a large donation. The platform makes it simple and seamless to configure multiple raffles so that guests can simply purchase raffle tickets anytime, anywhere.

The platform was also built for raffle law compliance and ensures your raffle follows the necessary local and state regulations.

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From games to a wine pull, the platform also allows you to sell multiple fixed-price items that guests can quickly purchase on their phones.

And, if your raffles and fixed-price items are meant for only your in-person guests, your event site can show items only to guests who are attending onsite.

Live appeal

During your fundraiser, your big event appeal can be a make-or-break moment. You’ll want to set it up to attract and engage as many donors as possible.

The OneCause Fundraising Platform helps inspire people to give with these built-in tools:

  • Use a thermometer to report real-time fundraising results and progress towards your goal.
  • Add seed donations to your thermometer to increase and show giving momentum.
  • Include impact levels to be attributed to your goal.
  • Provide optionality to recognize donors’ names or remain anonymous on screen and in real-time.

Live Auction

Another main portion of the live appeal is your live auction. The live auction is a moment your nonprofit is waiting for to bring in big donations. Leveraging the OneCause Platform for your live auction allows you to engage and excite your attendees further with:

  • Auction lot descriptions that can be previewed on your event site.
  • Dynamic slides that provide item details and images.
  • Winner spotlights after each lot is sold.

With bidding ready to begin, this slide converts into a bidding tracker, which displays the current bidder and asking bid. The OneCause Fundraising Platform allows for your live auction to engage both in-person and remote attendees via:

  • Mobile bids: Bids made by guests directly from their mobile devices.
  • Paddle raise: Bids made in the room by guests who raise their paddle.
  • Floor bids: Bids made directly in the system during the live auction with attendee name or paddle number.
  • Proxy bids: Bids made on behalf of a donor who is attending virtually.

Through the platform, your nonprofit can engage all types of donors during your big donation moments and increase mission moment proceeds dramatically.

After Your Event: Item Pick-Up & Check-Out

For your volunteers running item pick-up, the item pick-up tool in the OneCause Fundraising Platform provides a seamless and efficient process. Volunteers can:

  • Easily look up attendees and find their purchased or won items.
  • Stage the item to be ready for pick-up.
  • Send a text message to the attendee when their items are ready.

This ensures that your volunteers are ready to check out your guests at the end of the night and minimizes the frantic rush that can come during this stage of the event.

If your attendee wishes to not pick up their item on event night, they are able to select the option to pick their item up at a later date to avoid any end of the night confusion or no-shows.

This item pick-up process makes closing out your auction a breeze for you and your guests!

Wrapping Up!

The OneCause Fundraising Platform equips your nonprofit with new and innovative engagement strategies through a modern, flexible giving experience that unlocks donor generosity.

Ready to learn more about how the OneCause Fundraising Platform can drive deeper supporter engagement and make fundraising easier for your team? Schedule a tour with one of our product experts!

TAKE A ONECAUSE TOUR

If you’re a current customer, reach out to your Customer Success Manager to chat about using the new Platform at your next event.

More fundraising resources are just a click away.

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