30 MINS

Rebuilding Relationships With Events: Marketing Tips and Tools to Increase Registrations

DonorPerfect Community Conference 2023 session with speaker Justin Cook at Qgiv

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And I’m going to do an introduction here for our next session. With over seven years of experience Qgiv’s director of demand generation. Justin Cook is a passionate marketer dedicated to connecting fundraisers with technology that helps them raise more, you’ll Read More

And I’m going to do an introduction here for our next session. With over seven years of experience Qgiv’s director of demand generation. Justin Cook is a passionate marketer dedicated to connecting fundraisers with technology that helps them raise more, you’ll often find Justin leading Qgiv’s product webinars, reading about the latest nonprofit technology trends and creating multi channel marketing experiences leveraging the power of marketing automation. Without further ado, I give to you, Justin cook.

Thanks for that introduction, Shawn. Hey, everyone. My name is Justin Cooke. As John said, John, Sean Sean said, Excuse me, and I am the director of demand generation at cube. And I appreciate everyone here that is joining our session today. And you know what, enough about me because we all know why you’re here. Today, we’re here to talk about our great topic of how we can market our fundraising events. And we’re going to give you some tips and tools today to help you increase registrations for your next event that you have coming up. So I’d like to set the stage a little bit for everyone. As with all things, event, fundraising, there was always a lot to unpack. And we can’t dive into everything on this session. But what we are going to look at are ways that you can promote your fundraising event to increase registrations, and we’ll show you some best practices on how you can do this. And there is nothing that’s one size fits all. And the best advice that I can give to you is to take the key elements we talked about today, and think about how you can apply these for your organization and mission. So we have a few critical questions that we are going to need to answer to get us to our end goal of increased Event registrations. And those include how to use storytelling in your event promotions to engage donors, how to segment your donors based on their communication preferences, how often you should send promotions about your event, and then what you should add to your event register registration page and your event registration form. So let’s start with the first step in our process, using storytelling in event promotions, fundraising events, put donors in an environment in which they are living and breathing our mission. It’s a time when donors are absolutely engaged. And it’s a great way to build meaningful long term relationships. The problem though, is how do we get them there. To inspire action, we need to build on emotion, putting the donor into the shoes of our mission, and show them their impact. So the secrets promotions, people forget what you say, but not how you made them feel. And I’ll say that one more time. People forget what you say, but not how you made them feel. We are all emotional beings. It’s how we build connections, and how we create chord memories of the experiences in our lives. That’s why storytelling can be so powerful. It well crafted story is centered around emotion, it puts donors in the shoes of those that are in need, and connects them with our mission. So through storytelling, we can make that personal connection and inspire them to register. In order to begin crafting our story, though, we need to start with why? Why are we hosting an event? What is the main goal? And obviously, the main answer that you’re going to have is to raise money. But I encourage you to dig deeper. An event can accomplish many things, it can spread our mission, it can build deeper relationships with our donors, our volunteers, and our sponsors, and, and so on, we have so much that we can accomplish with an event. So we need to go beyond just raising money to get our donors to register. What’s the value of your event to your donors, put yourself in their shoes. When a donor gives? It’s often for an intangible, the feeling of doing something good. But an event provides something in return an experience. What do you think your donors will value the most? What experience can you build for your donor base that will make them say, Wow, that was incredible. I unfortunately cannot answer this for you. But I can give you some questions to think of. The first one is, what are we celebrating? Are we creating an event to think our donors? Did we just finished a large project that we want to show off and think everyone there for their participation? Are we highlighting any of the major accomplishments that we had throughout the year? So I encourage you to think about what you want to celebrate. Then we want to think about how we’re tying everything back to our mission. Think about how you’re going to do this in your promotions during your event. And after your event when you’re sending out your thank yous. How do you plan on bringing all of this back to what you do and the things that you accomplish? Why is the building block of our entire event? It’ll help us choose our theme identify which stories to tell what activities will be going on throughout the event and overall be the centerpiece of our event script and the messaging that we have. And a very important piece of our storytelling is the visual aspect. One of the easiest ways to build connections to something is to see ourselves using it. That’s why you often see ads or other marketing materials have smiling people use their product. If we envision ourselves using what they’re selling, we are more likely to connect with that message and then buy that product. It’s the same thing for our event promotions. The only difference is we aren’t looking to make donors see themselves using something. Rather, we want them to see their impact. This is an integral part in year round appeals. And it shouldn’t be in our event promotions as well. The key addition, on top of what we have for a year round for events is that experience that we can provide. You’ll want to communicate with donors about what to expect at your event to get them excited to join. And we can do this. By using some of our beneficiaries. We can ask our beneficiaries if we can share their story and add it to our communications like so. Julie lost her job and could no longer afford her rent. She needs help getting back on her feet so you can provide so she can provide a stable home, see how you can help by joining us at our annual rally. So here, instead of asking for a donation, we’re building the suspense with the story through Julie losing her job. And then we prompt donors to come learn more about registering for our event. This message does have a bit of a negative overtone, which can be really effective in driving registrations as it depicts someone in need. Another example that we have is that Julie was living on the streets, but was able to get back on her feet with your support. Learn more about Julie’s story, and how you can help 1000s more in need. In this instance, we’re switching that theme to be how previous support helped Julie. But there’s plenty more like Julie and we invite donors to come and learn more. So this has the opposite tone of the one before we’re bringing in more of a positive overtone to show what the actual accomplishment was, and then how our donors can help 1000s more that are also in need. The major change in our storytelling between our year round appeals and our event invites is how we communicate that action to donors. Normally, we ask donors to provide a donation to our cause to solve the issue that we have that we see going on. So for event, invite the narrative switches, we build suspense through our communications, and then the action is them attending the event. Both of these are great examples of how this can be done in event invites. It’s important to remember to ask beneficiaries if we can use their story. Beneficiary centric stories are inherently personal. And not everyone wants to share that story. So if you can’t find a beneficiary willing to share their story, you can focus on the overall benefits that your nonprofit is providing to the community. Or you can ask one of your executive directors or your board members to speak on behalf of your organization to show that the impact that your organization is having and what the outcome is. So now that we’ve built our story, we need to send it out. And to do this, we want to explore what our donors preferences are when it comes to their communications. And data is one of my favorite topics. It’s a fairly broad topic, but it’s one of the key elements within data is personalizing communications based on that individual individuals preferences. And I love improving the experience as Sean mentioned earlier, so for anyone that is reading or interacting with our communications, I love trying to improve that process for everyone through the personalization that we can provide. And there are a few common segmentation best practices that you can look into to do this as well.

So when you have the necessary tools in place to track and collect your donor data, you can unlock valuable insights into their giving preferences, and then use that to build deeper relationships and connect with your donors. Common segmentation Best Practices includes donors and sponsors and volunteers. So you have multiple audiences that you’re going to be reaching out to for your event to get support. So make sure that you’re segmenting each of these audiences to make sure that you’re sending the right communications to the right person. You can further segment these audiences based on their previous history with your organization. So nothing and I mean, Nothing is more frustrating than not being recognized for previous support. Make sure to segment your lists based on a previous event attendance for your donors. If someone has previously volunteered to help with one of your events, or if you had a sponsor that donated to your organization and sponsored a previous event. So make sure that you are of segmenting those lists and thanking them for their previous support and inviting them to do it again. Another major audience are those that have previously raised funds on behalf of your organization. We call these peer to peer fundraising participants, if you’ve ever run a peer to peer event, or if you just had maybe a DIY or something like that, where one of your donors has actually raised funds on behalf of your organization, that is a huge lift for individuals. And it takes a lot to fundraise. So as you all know, so if they have ever done that, make sure that you will recognize them for that previous support. You can also check out the different donors that you have in your database between small mid level and major donors. So small to mid level, donors will most likely just end up in that regular event communication cadence that we have going on. But I do suggest having a more hands on approach with those major donors and convince them to join into your event. The overall goal here is to get into the mindset of your audiences, you want to walk through how they will interact with your organization through each of the steps that we have here below. We’ve already talked about one, what are the benefits of attending or sponsoring or volunteering at your event? So this is your story? What is the impact that the donors are going to make? Or your volunteers or your sponsors? Then how can you show them that impact. But now we want to look about look at what is the best channel for each of these audiences. And then how can we encourage them to register or sponsor or volunteer is the process as easy as it can be for them to get signed up or registered. So let’s dive into these a little bit further. We have a ton of different communication channels that we can explore. Those include email, social blog posts, paid advertising, direct mail, phone calls, text messages, news outlets, and so on and so forth. There were so many different communication channels. And that’s where the multi channel marketing approach comes into play. But it is up to you to identify and choose which channels to use to send out your communications. So one way that you can do this is to look into your DonorPerfect account and see how donors typically give to your organization. Those that give digitally, as in through an email online through your online donation form, they clicked on one of your blog posts, or they interacted with a text message, right? Those are, they are more willing to give through the digital channels as well. So you want to segment your communications to those donors based on that. But we also have other donors that prefer to give over the phone, or they want to give by physical check. And most likely, these individuals will prefer the Trish traditional media like direct mail or the phone calls. Outside of that outside of using your internal donor data. You can also use research studies to help identify which channels are best for your donors. And we actually have done a generational giving study here at cube, we did a break. Here’s a breakdown of what we were looking at when we surveyed over 1300 people to ask about their giving preferences. So in this chart, you can see that Gen Z prefers the online channels, but they actually do prefer that personal touch of the phone call. So make sure to think about how you can engage those Gen Z donors after they give to thank them personally through a phone call. Millennials prefer to give digitally with the majority saying that they prefer text fundraising, and social media as well. As you can see here, too, Gen X had a lot to say about their preferences. And we do see a mix of digital and offline communications with this group. So when your your donor data becomes very important in this in the Gen X group, because they have shown that they prefer pretty much all of these channels, but they will tell you which channel they prefer within your donor data. And boomers overwhelmingly chose direct mail. But there is a little bit of the online donations and phone calls as well in this group. So make sure to think about all of these different types of segmentations for your donors. And I’ll provide a link to the generational giving study that we did at the end of this presentation. So overall, what we just went through are great Guidestones to help your organization decide which channels to use. As you can tell, there are a ton of ways to create and segment your donors and how you communicate with them. So ultimately, you’ll want to match this data based on the donor preferences that you see and what fits best for your organization. This segmentation is especially important for communication channels that have what we call a cost per send, or they have some type of cap on the number of communications that you can send out. So for example, with direct mail, every time that you send a piece of direct mail, there is a direct cost for that piece of mail. And for text message or email platforms, they will often have a cap on the number of communications that you can send per month. Or they will charge you more if you get over that cap. So my suggestion here is to make sure that you’re looking at those segmented audiences so that you can save money, and that you’re not overspending on a communication channel that a donor is just gonna end up throwing in the trash, right? A great example is me, I prefer email, when I get a direct mail piece, I’ll look at it for a second, and then I’ll toss it. So that doesn’t do what you want it to do. So make sure that you’re looking into those different segmentations. A pro tip that I have, always include the marketing channel that prefer performs the best for your organization. So this means that it’s a preferred channel for a major portion of your donor base, you can always add or remove other channels as they come and test them for future communications. But make sure that you’re you know what your preferred marketing channel is, and that you’re always sending communications through that channel. The next step is to then ask yourself how your nonprofit tools can help you accomplish this, you do need a few things from each platform to make sure that you can do this effectively. So for example, you’ll want to use email marketing tools that have the ability to pull in those donor lists that you’ve created, and have it separated out within the platform. In addition, it’s also very helpful if they allow you to generate different content to a segmented donor list without creating separate emails. So for example, we use HubSpot for our communications here at Q give. And they allowed us to do what’s called Smart Content where we can add multiple lists to a content block. And then based on the individuals membership on those lists, it’ll actually switch that content. So we only have to create one email, and we can send it out to three different audiences very helpful to use. Also, I suggest looking into your donor, perfect account to look at the giving history that’s tied to your donors to monitor how they’ve they’re giving to your organization and what the preferred channel is for the majority of your base. And then use fundraising tools that can collect this donor data during the registration or donation process, and that it’s integrated with your CRM as well. So make sure that you’re looking at all of those when you’re monitoring your nonprofit tools.

Now that we’ve worked through our messaging, and how we’re going to target our donor base, it is time to start creating a communication plan, and a calendar with timelines, so we know what information we’re sending out. While it’s important to get the word out about your event. It’s also important not to spam your donors and have them disengage with you. With a multi channel marketing approach, we have a lot of options available to us on how we’re going to get the word out. And we’re going to take a look at a couple of best practices for the event communication timelines. And as again, as with all things events, we have a couple of if then scenarios that we need to discuss, to make sure that we are communicating effectively. So the first communication that we always want to send out is a save the date. And depending on the size of your event, and the correlation with other events that you have planned throughout the year. This, the timing of this first one will definitely vary. You don’t want to overlap your communications for one event over another with the new event that you’re planning. So just make sure that you readjust timelines based on other events that you have planned. However, you’ll likely have a deadline from your vendors on when you need to provide a headcount for your larger events that you have. So the earlier that you start your communications and start accepting those registrations, the more likely you’ll have a closer headcount, but to the vendor by the deadline that they have. And again, this deadline varies based on vendor. So just make sure that you’re asking them what that deadline is, and when you need to get them that final headcount. So for larger scale events, so we’re expecting are aiming for over 500 attendees, you should start communication, preferably six to eight months ahead of your event, we need to get our event on everyone’s radars so that they can start planning accordingly. And it doesn’t need to be overcomplicated. Just something with something simple with a date, time a city. And if you’re going to do a virtual side of things, or you’re going to do hybrid, make sure that you communicate those different virtues where they can attend virtually versus where they need to attend in person. So this gives our audiences and understanding of how they can attend slash participate. And it can help in person attendees start planning and which is super helpful for parents, or any of those Avataan attendees that need to make arrangements in order to attend your event. Just a simple nice postcard sent their direct mail and an invite sent through email with the option for everyone to add like their event to their calendars is perfect for this first communication. And then we’ll want to send a second save the date about two to three months ahead of your event with more details. as they’re coming, so for smaller events, this is most likely going to be your first communication. With this, save the date, I recommend including all of the above, plus venue, location, any entertainment that’s coming, what are the few food options that you have, and anything else that will get your donors excited for your event. You can also you can send these through direct mail as well email social posts, and I even suggest making some type of digital event on platform on any social platform, Facebook is a good one, you can just create a digital event. And then you can invite people to attend that event through Facebook. And if you already do have a registration page set up at this point, I highly encourage directing donors to start registering for your event. All communication should drive to that registration page if it’s available. And there are a couple of ways that you can do this and various communications that you have. So if you’re just sending out a digital version, you can just create a link that sends back to your registration page. And in direct mail, I would encourage to include what that link is, but then do a QR code as well. So all all they have to do is scan what is on the direct mail piece, and then get in there and registered as well. If you don’t have your registration page set up at this point, I highly suggest you get moving on that. But if you don’t, you can still send them to your website page that you’ve created for your event, you can make a simple one, it doesn’t have to be anything crazy, it can just include the same information about save the date, but you want to give them some type of action to save for your event. So maybe an Add to Calendar on that would be very helpful to so that they can make sure that they remember when we’re leading up to the event, we’re now starting more frequent communications to donors, and we want to encourage them to start registering for the event. So during this time, you’ll want to create a communication calendar so you can easily monitor everything going on. And that you can make adjustments easily that everyone will see. This will help all of your team stay coordinated with all the different moving parts that go in with event communications, and events in general. As you all know, one of my suggestions is to create a digital calendar that everyone can view in one single place. This is especially helpful when you don’t want to make updates in several different places every time a little thing changes. If everyone anyone has ever used Excel to coordinate any of their email, calendar calendars for your communications, you’ll understand the pain point of how that comes. So make sure that you’re looking at something that automatically updates when you make a change about one to two months ahead of your event. So we sent the save the day about about one to one to two months ahead of that, we’re going to start ramping up our communications. And in order not to over communicate with our audiences. There are some suggestions that I have for your frequencies. So for email, I suggest about every other week. social posts, you can post about every few days, paid advertising will be pretty steady. But you want to ramp up the spend about a month out so that you can encourage more people to join. Direct Mail, I would say about one month before reminder, you don’t really if you can send out another one to just depending on what your audience prefers. Phone calls really depends on your donor base, it does add that personal touch. And this is a great strategy for acquiring those major donors. So really just use it based on your best judgment. And if you are going to use text message fundraising, I suggest once every two weeks, it can be very overwhelming to send multiple text messages in a short period of time, and people will most likely disengage. So make sure that you are being mindful about the communications that you’re sending. Ultimately, you know your audience best so adjust your communication frequency as necessary. Some major milestones that you do want to communicate when they’re there. One is registration open and include any early bird discounts to encourage early registration. When any of your discounts are about to expire. This can lead to the last minute people when that discount is about Aspire so they don’t miss out when you have your commitments for entertainment, or any guest speakers that can get individuals excited. And you can also tease auction items. If you’re doing a gala. You can even do for peer to peer you can see some of the fundraising awards that people can get and maybe even an extra raffle ticket if they sign up. Once we have donors registered, it’s still important to keep them in the loop about major event pieces and continue to build excitement for your event. So about the first communication is right after the register that should be your thank you it should be an automated should be customized confirmation page that continues your story and show has a video of the impact that you create. I would include special that extra special details about your event to continue to drive drum up that excitement. Then also include a contact person for any questions that your attendees may have. And then about two weeks ahead, you’ll want to start sending instructions to your registrants about the flow of your event. So for example, if you have an incentive for getting attendees checked in early, maybe that’s an extra raffle ticket or a free drink in line, make sure that you communicate this and encourage your attendees to get set up for checking in a pro tip here as well. resend those instructions to those that haven’t opened the email. And those that haven’t taken the action that you need them to, because you want to make sure that they see it, but not be confused when they get to your event. You can do this a week before three days before and the day of your event. Now the final step in our registration journey is our event landing page and registration form. So let’s go ahead and talk about those. On your event page.

It’s important, just chiming in real quick, we got four minutes left, Justin,

I saw that chart speed up here, you’re good. At important event details about your about what to expect on site. Obviously include date, time, venue location, but you want to continue telling your story with any images and videos to help your attendees understand the impact that they’re making. Make sure to add details about your mission, add a donate button, just in case someone doesn’t want to register. But they still want to give to your organization, make sure that you have that on there. And if it’s available, add an interactive map and an Add to Calendar because that will help attendees understand where they need to go and what to expect. And remember, you’re where you are. And then finally, for your event registration form, I suggest trying to make ticket packages and then organizing them based on what the attendee type is. So if they’re a regular attendee, or the sponsor or they volunteer, make sure that you’re organizing these different sections, making it easy to understand how to participate in your event. And include any promo codes or early bird discounts on the form itself. So they can see what they can get a discount on and incentivize more ticket sales. And then finally, my last piece of advice here is limit the number of fields that you have on your form. Less is more, because once you just need to add those, ask those critical questions, what are your favorite dinner options, you can do anything else for asking additional questions and a follow up email. So make sure that you’re limiting those forms. But here are the links that I was talking about before. So I have a generational giving report that we talked about earlier, you can scan that QR code here, the hybrid event planner. So as I mentioned, events are a huge topic, I cannot cover everything. But that hybrid event planner will have similar things that we’ll be talking about today. But they’re able to dive in more. It’s just a downloadable, downloadable PDF that you can check out. And if you want to learn more about cougars, fundraising tools, you can scan the QR code on the right. I was hoping to have more time for questions. But as with everything with events, it is a very long topic. And I tried to shove it all in there for you. Sean, do you want to we can maybe get one?

Oh, yeah, real quick. So So thank you, sorry to interrupt you there while you’re in the flow. A lot of the questions that we’re getting is how can I get this recording, and relay this information to the rest of my team. So this recording is going to be available on Hulu, Julio, and also on DonorPerfect.com. Once it is finished processing. Also next to live chat, you can go to details and you’ll get a handout of Justin’s presentation as well as the QR codes that are being represented. Now. Additionally, there’s the poll option where if you click yes, you want to find out more information. Information will be sent to you about today’s presentation. And as most of the questions were revolving around how can I share this, I only have one question for you, which is about events. So as a training specialist, I get to talk to people all the time. And tangentially I get to hear about these events and I never get to go in go to any of them. Have you ever like come across or found a cool question, a cool event that you never got a chance to go to any favorites that stick out in minds.

I think one of my favorite ones that it was more it was a virtual event. But I found out afterwards, we had an actual acugraph client host a virtual gala online. And they did such a fantastic job with bringing the virtual experience like the in person experience to the virtual experience. And when I found out afterwards, I was able to like watch the recording and be like super excited for being in there. But unfortunately, you’re not there for the live side of things. So but they did a fantastic job and being able to bring all that together. But yeah, I mean, that would be one of my favorite. Other than the ones that I’ve I’ve attended where I was helping out with so

that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Yeah, it’s really interesting to see how people have adapted to the pandemic and how we can use our internet resources for me One of my clients was doing a Duck Race where people would put money towards the duck that they thought was going to get to the bread first. And that one was in Montana and I’m in Philadelphia. I was like, I really wanted to go to that one. But unfortunately, couldn’t make it but thank you for all of this. This has been great and very informative. And thank you everybody for stopping by our next session starts at 1230. Take care. Thank you, Justin. Have a great day, everybody. Thanks.

Take care.

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