Marketing a Virtual Fundraising Event: 4 Essential Elements
Amid all the challenges of 2020, effectively pivoting your fundraising events to take place virtually was likely a top priority for your organization. Virtual events were uncharted waters for many nonprofits, requiring nonprofits to rethink how they execute their fundraising and giving experiences online.
Thankfully, a combination of nonprofit tech, advice from industry leaders, and the support of loyal donors has facilitated a surprisingly smooth transition for many organizations.
Even if you needed to cancel your gala, rework your event plans, or wrestle with new technology, your nonprofit is likely in a much better position to make the most of virtual events now than you were in the earliest days of the pandemic. It’s been a process of learning and experimentation for everyone, but we need to now look ahead to 2021’s virtual events and leverage our learned best practices.
Which of your new virtual fundraising ideas have worked well to generate support and engage donors? Where have you fallen short? Chances are your digital marketing strategies are both a win and opportunity for continued improvement. Marketing plays a critical role in today’s virtual environment for a few key reasons:
With other organizations and businesses adapting to the virtual era, competition for your donors’ attention online has gotten fierce. Your campaigns and events must stand out to catch the eyes of busy supporters.
Engaging donors from home and over longer time frames means sustained engagement, more so than at an in-person event; your marketing must get donors to sign up and stay excited from start to finish.
Virtual events have the massive benefit of being able to reach wide online audiences. To maximize your events’ ROI, your marketing needs to help you actively expand your audience over time.
The bottom line? To make the most of your virtual events in 2021, you should pay extra attention to revamping your digital marketing strategies.
At OneCause, we’ve seen the difference that effective digital marketing can have on the ultimate results of events, especially when it comes to large-scale undertakings like virtual auctions and galas. Here are 4 essential elements that we believe should play roles in any virtual event’s marketing strategy:
Ambassador techniques
Segmentation strategies
A multichannel approach
Gamification and social media contests
By understanding each of these elements and mixing and matching to find the perfect plan for your own event and audience, you’ll build a much stronger foundation for promoting whatever new engagement opportunities you roll out in the coming year. Let’s dive in.
Ambassador Techniques
Ambassador campaigns are one of our favorite marketing strategies for virtual events. This tactic allows you to take a much more targeted approach to peer-to-peer fundraising and laser-focus your efforts on a central goal like boosting event registrations.
You’ll recruit a small team of well-connected volunteers, orient them to your goals, empower them with fundraising pages and other resources, and then periodically check-in leading up to your event. This approach is a smart choice for promoting virtual events for a number of reasons:
Ambassador campaigns are extremely flexible and can be adapted for all kinds of audiences and events.
Focusing on a smaller group of volunteers (rather than a large group of P2P fundraisers) makes it much easier to keep your efforts focused and actively support your ambassadors in reaching their goals.
Your ambassadors can generate registrations for your event and secure additional online donations from any of their friends or colleagues who won’t be able to attend.
The personal connections of your ambassadors help you reach wider online audiences and can be a powerful motivator for new supporters to get involved.
Ambassadors play active roles in the event itself during award or recognition ceremonies, helping you create a more engaging program.
Recruiting and empowering ambassadors to promote your virtual events can deliver substantial long-term value, too. By deepening your relationships with these key supporters, it’s easier to steward and grow their support over time. These are extremely valuable partners to have on your side, so building out a new ambassador program can be a way to supercharge your virtual events from the get-go.
Segmentation Strategies
Your nonprofit likely already makes use of this best practice, especially when it comes to prospecting and development. But are your segmentation strategies delivering maximum value for your virtual events? Have you updated your segmentation approach since your pivot to virtual fundraising?
Remember that segmentation is an ongoing process, not a one-time task. With each new event, campaign, or marketing push, it’s important to revisit your donor segments. The general segments you’ve relied on in the past can be narrowed to support specific goals or types of virtual events. For instance, when promoting a virtual event, use your CRM to generate new, more targeted segments like:
New donors who gave for the first time during your year-end fundraising campaign
Attendees who regularly attended in-person events but haven’t yet attended a virtual one
Supporters who have been especially engaged with your new virtual offerings
Donors who upped their giving or set up recurring donations at the onset of the pandemic
Each of the categories listed above should be contacted with different messages that encourage engagement specific to their motivators. For instance, when contacting supporters who haven’t yet joined a virtual event, explain exactly how your event will work and reiterate that your mission is just as important as ever before. More specific segments like these can give your digital marketing strategies a new level of focus to drive stronger results.
As you refresh your approach to donor segmentation based on current goals, you’ll also lay the groundwork for long-term value. For example:
Ensuring that your segmentation tactics accurately reflect your virtual-era goals will guide your future strategies more effectively. For instance, which segments and strategies saw the most activity in your virtual year-end efforts? Where can you improve? If you know to look for markers that are specifically relevant to your current strategies, you’ll be able to more easily outline a roadmap for the new year.
Tracking and sorting engagement data in more relevant, up-to-date ways can boost your prospecting efforts over time. While a high level of online engagement has always been a useful indicator to measure, you might weigh it much more heavily now as a marker of affinity considering the broader contexts of today’s challenges. Ensuring your CRM is effectively catching this virtual engagement data will be a worthwhile exercise.
Of course, the segmentation process shouldn’t eat up an inordinate amount of your team’s time. An integrated system that ensures all incoming data is properly tagged and reported to your CRM should make it easy to quickly filter and sort by relevant markers as you outline a marketing strategy for your next event.
Gamification and Social Media Contests
This essential element of marketing a virtual fundraising is to proactively generate and maintain engagement.
So what’s the easiest way to boost energy leading up to an event? Let supporters feel involved and directly connect with them along the way. Gamification and social media are invaluable tools for accomplishing these tasks and boosting engagement before and during your event. For instance:
Create digital leaderboards to give ambassadors extra motivation and encourage your audience to help their friend or colleague take the top spot.
During your event, use your real-time leaderboards and fundraising thermometers to give attendees a visual representation of your progress as you make live fundraising appeals.
Develop engaging challenges like a special matching gift period fulfilled by an event sponsor or entertaining challenges for your ambassadors to complete once they reach a certain fundraising goal. Examples might include doing a funny dance, cracking an egg on their head, or any other creative challenge that people will be excited to see their friend complete.
During your event, have your ambassadors complete their challenges live (or show their pre-recorded videos) as part of your live-streamed program.
Launch a quick social media contest for followers to submit their own funny photos or meaningful stories using an event-specific hashtag.
During your event, pick one or more winners and share their photos or stories as part of your program. Consider offering a prize to generate more entries!
Each of these strategies is a relatively low-effort way to boost excitement leading up to your event and give supporters personal ways to engage with your organization. Amid fierce competition for your donors’ attention in a virtual world, even small gamification and social media tactics can give you an edge and help maximize engagement once your event begins.
As you outline your marketing strategy for your next virtual event, get creative to mix and match these 4 essential elements in ways that best suit your audience and goals. Start with a solid multichannel approach targeted to highly relevant segments of your donor base. Then, think about how ambassador or peer-to-peer techniques and gamification elements can help you further expand your reach and tap into supporters’ attachment to your mission.
Virtual events are here to stay for the foreseeable future, so now is the perfect time to continue strengthening your marketing strategies. This will help you maximize the results of your virtual efforts in 2021 and set you up for success no matter what the future brings for the nonprofit sector. Happy fundraising!
Author: Kelly Velasquez-Hague
Kelly Velasquez-Hague brings over 20 years of fundraising, nonprofit management, and sales/marketing experience to her role as the Director of Content Marketing for OneCause. As a member of the OneCause sales and marketing team, Kelly manages all of the company’s content strategy and execution. She is passionate about empowering great missions and loves that her current role allows her to continue to help nonprofits reach new donors raise more funds for their cause.