Remember the days when we relied on handmade booths, printed raffle tickets, and a goldfish jar or paper mache box to promote fundraising events?
We’re happy to say, those days are over friends.
With the help of automated tools, you can create an automated, multi-channel strategy to grow your fundraising events — no handmade booths needed.
If you’re ready to take advantage of innovative, automated tools but you’re not sure how to go about it, we’re here to help.
Let's take a look at how automated tools work and how you can use them to grow your charitable events in 2024.
Ready to learn more?
Let’s begin!
How do automated tools work?
Automated tools use a pristine data processing approach called change data capture (CDC). With CDC, data gets transferred in real-time as changes happen.
Some automated tools require you to use “automation recipes” to trigger specific actions, while others are pre-programed with features you simply turn off or on.
In other words, automated tools create live changes and run on autopilot once they’re configured.
You can use automated tools to:
- Automate recurring giving
- Automate donation reminders
- Build donation pages
- Pull automated event bookkeeping reports
- Automate event ticketing
- Set up automated marketing campaigns
- And so much more
Now that we’ve cleared the air on how automated tools work, let’s take a look at how you can use them to grow your fundraising events.
Partnerships and automated donations
Cultivating strong partnerships is essential to jumpstarting event awareness and filling as many seats as quickly as possible.
Pair solid partnerships with automated donations and you have a real recipe for event growth.
For instance, let’s say you’re planning a financial education event for students and young adults.
In this case, consider setting up automated donations in partnership with student banks in your community.
Some financial institutions that offer student bank accounts collaborate with charities and fundraisers to spread financial education and encourage students to get involved with their local communities — a win-win, if you ask us.
Pro-tip: Use Tandem Pages on Anedot to raise money in partnership with others. A tandem page is a donation page where two or more organizations can work together to raise money on the same page. Anedot allows these funds to be conduited, or given directly.
→ Learn more about Tandem Pages here!
Getting event attendees involved
Use upscale API tools to help your team spend less time editing each photo after an event and instead allow attendees to upload images from their phone while the automated tool performs all of the adjustments you need.
You can also encourage event virality by asking attendees to upload images during the event and share them on social media in real time using a dedicated event hashtag.
Sweeten the deal by entering everyone who shares a photo into a contest to win a prize.
Targeting multiple audiences with segmented email campaigns
With the help of automated email marketing tools, you can spread the word about your events to a wider audience, faster.
Even better? You can segment your emails by target audience or action so each group receives their own personalized communication.
For instance, people that have registered for your charity event might be considered one audience segment and people that have attended one of your past events might be considered another.
By segmenting your audiences into defined groups, you can make sure they receive the right message at the right time — every time.
Automating event content, copy, and correspondence
From email correspondence to social media copy to blog content, event marketing and planning requires a lot of writing.
To make the best use of your time, you can automate the writing process with a tool called an AI writer.
An AI writer can help you write:
- Emails
- Event invitations
- Thank-you notes
- Social media posts
- Event descriptions
- Ads
- And anything event-related
To make the best of this tool, make sure you have a firm grip on grammar and basic copywriting rules, too.
While an AI writer is great for brainstorming new angles, you still need to do your part to make sure your writing sounds professional, clear, and correct.
Online giving tools
Use an online giving platform like Anedot to encourage and make it easy for event attendees to support your organization.
Here are a few quick examples of Anedot’s automated online giving tools you might consider taking advantage of:
- Recurring giving: Encourage supporters to set up recurring weekly, monthly, or yearly donations.
- Text to give: Send automated text messages prompting supporters to click and donate with ease. Text to give is completely free for every Anedot customer. No strings attached.
- High-conversion donation pages: Streamline donations and lead generation by building branded online donation pages on Anedot — no code required.
- Integrations: Use automation tools on other platforms like Hubspot, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and many more. We have a number of active integrations that you can use to instantly send your Anedot data to other technology platforms you utilize on a daily basis.
- Abandoned Actions: Automatically send a reminder email to supporters who don’t complete an Anedot form. You can choose to enable Abandoned Actions per page and choose the delay in time to send and modify the message sent.
- Upsells: Prompt your supporters to take a specific action after they make a donation. For example, you may present an automated message to ask a supporter to convert their one-time donation to a monthly donation.
Worried you’ll spend too much on processing costs when you implement online giving tools?
Some tools offer a “Donors Pay Costs” feature so you can allocate more money toward charity goals and less toward fees.
In fact, at Anedot, we’ve found that donors using our platform will pay the processing fee more than half of the time when asked to do so. In other words, this feature could save your organization a lot of money.
Wrap up
With so many different types of fundraising events to plan for, it can be difficult to find the time and resources to grow your team's fundraising efforts.
But with the help of automated tools, you can streamline your operations and make your events more successful.
From streamlining donation management to boosting event visibility, there are endless ways you can use automated tools to grow your fundraising events.
Are you ready to take the next step toward event and donation management automation?
We hope today’s article has inspired you to do just that.
For good measure, here’s a quick recap of the points we covered today:
- How do automated tools work?
- Partnerships and automated donations
- Getting event attendees involved
- Targeting multiple audiences with segmented email campaigns
- Automating event content, copy, and correspondence
- Online giving tools
And that’s it for today, friends!
Written by: Shane Barker, Content Solutions
Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant who specializes in influencer marketing, content marketing, and SEO. He is also the co-founder and CEO of Content Solutions, a digital marketing agency.
Psst: Need help automating your charitable events? We’ve got you covered. Save time and money with our powerful, automated giving tools.
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