The success of a fundraising event starts with marketing: raising awareness and maximizing ticket sales. This will help you increase donations. Traditional marketing techniques can be a hit or miss when trying to influence your ticket life cycle and encouraging more people to attend your event.
Leveraging social media platforms to help your non-profit’s fundraising event is absolutely critical in this day and age. However, it can be really hard to know how to maximize such platforms. Here are three tips that can help you maximize your non-profit events with Social Media:
1) Create a Calendar
Social Media is designed to be current news. During the hectic week before a fundraising event, however, it is imperative to be focused on making the event run as smoothly as possible. During this time, it can be taxing to continue updating this “in the moment” and ad hoc information on social media platforms. Being organized on and off paper is important for fundraising events – especially in your social media campaigns. Since you are planning the details of the event, plan your social media campaign backwards from the date of the event 6 to 8 weeks ahead of time. Capitalizing on your knowledge about where and when the event will take place, the name of your keynote speaker, and other key details through prescheduled messages lets you focus on other areas of event planning and marketing.
2) Keep the Conversation Going
During and after the event, keep the conversation going. Prominently incorporating your event’s hashtag and keeping a twitter conversation in real time (using free services like twitterfall.com) make your guests and their connections feel more apart of the event. Social Media can also keep an event alive and relevant to your community through posting videos, pictures, stories, and recaps of the event on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
3) Continue to Leverage Social Media Channels
Creating an online presence and growing an online community through Social Media is merely event-marketing specific. Non-profits make the mistake of only posting promotional content on their Social Media platforms. People are interested in interacting and finding out more information about a cause when they know what’s in it for them. Continually posting useful, beneficial, and educational content will produce a more knowledgeable and more invested community that will help propel your event, but more importantly, your non-profit and cause forward.
