7 Benefits of Utilizing Fundraising Event Software
Fundraising is the lifeline of every non-profit organization. It generally requires intensive amounts of effort, planning and teamwork to accomplish a fundraising goal. However, there is also another vital piece of the puzzle: utilizing the right tools. One of the most important tools to continue achieving and growing an organization’s fundraising goals is a multi-faceted fundraising event software platform. The right fundraising software offers certain benefits that improve your organization’s efficiency and effectiveness in event planning. Here are the features and benefits to keep an eye out for when shopping for event fundraising software to help your nonprofit organization succeed.
1. Consistent Event Branding
Your non-profit or event’s marketing and branding are important to your overall fundraising success. Good fundraising event software allows for customization of a color scheme, logos and graphics so that the event website looks like it was made for your organization. As you add event pages and information, ticket types, donation tiers or other types of fundraising options to your event, the appearance should always be clean and professional.
2. Professional Event Communication
Having the right fundraising event software package means being able to easily communicate with all of the parties involved in your event, without having to hassle with sifting through your email address book or forgetting to communicate with some of your attendees or volunteers. Does your event need more volunteers? No problem, send an email from right within the fundraising software platform to inquire if volunteers know anybody that may want to help with the cause. Are there any changes in the event details, like a rain date or delayed event start? Email all of your registrants the updates within seconds.
3. Tracking Donor and Attendee Activity
An important task of any fundraising committee is to review fundraising progress leading up to the event. Whether this is in the form of event sponsorship, donations, or event ticket sales, having all of this activity available within your non-profit’s fundraising event software platform makes tracking fundraising progress that much simpler. As the time gets closer to the event date, you can see how many tickets have been sold, how much sponsors have donated and how much more is needed to accomplish fundraising goals with a few clicks. Then print the reports and take them to your committee meetings, to be sure that everyone is on the same page with your fundraising progress.
4. Secure Credit Card Processing
Donors trust that when they donate funds to an organization, their sensitive information is protected with the highest regards. Trustworthy fundraising software assures that every transaction comes with the highest security standards in credit card processing. Secure fundraising software must use SSL certificates to ensure that data being transmitted over the internet is encrypted; this practice minimizes security breaches. Another important feature to look for is PCI compliance, which means that the software complies with leading security-industry standards for credit card processing. A security breach is the last thing your organization needs and would tarnish your organization’s reputation considerably.
5. Streamlining Volunteer Management
One of the vital steps of event planning is planning the logistics and tasks behind the actual event day. To keep costs low, many of these tasks require volunteers. With the help of fundraising event software, this means having a tool to register and communicate with your volunteers. Streamlining all of the fine details, such as volunteer contact information and task assignments means that the information is right at your fingertips for future events. This simplifies planning a recurring annual event, or reaching out to past volunteers for other fundraising efforts.
6. Support for Ancillary Sales
Oftentimes, there is more than just ticket and sponsorship sales that generate funds for an event. For a gala, this may mean having to track table assignments, raffle ticket sales or silent auction purchases. Whether these fundraising activities happen before or on the event day, you want a fundraising software platform that can track it all. Sales reporting allows for analysis of how much raffles, silent auctions, accessory sales or other sources of funds contributed to the overall fundraising goal. Other helpful analyses that this activity offers are for better planning of sponsorship acquisition and future event planning.
7. Simplified Reporting & Event Analysis
Utilizing robust fundraising event software means that you can generate reports that provide dynamic information on reaching your fundraising goal as well as effectively evaluate the success of your fundraising post-event. Since all of your ticket and product sales as well as sponsorship reports are streamlined in the software, they can help your team understand some important event information.Having access to reporting will help with growing the list of attendees, exceeding past fundraising goals and sustaining a healthy growth of donors from year to year. Even when your organization or team expands or changes, there won’t be any difficulty digging for past event financial and participant details.
No matter how big or small your organization is, if the goal is to grow your fundraising event efforts every year, fundraising event software is a critical tool to have under your organization’s belt. These seven benefits are a great starting point to understand how fundraising event software can be utilized to achieve your organization’s goals.
Author Bio
Lisa Bennett is the Director of Sales at DoJiggy. DoJiggy is a leading provider of affordable event fundraising software solutions for non-profits, schools and community organizations in the US and Canada.
