Charity Fundraising Made Easy

Sell Charity Fundraising Event Tickets Online

Ticketstripe has been working closely with charities for years, tailoring tools to help you sell more tickets—of all types—and earn more from your charity fundraising events.

Ticketstripe’s event management platform allows you to fully customize your event page with a logo, background colors, your own event image, and a custom message so it’s instantly recognizable to your donors and attendees.

Our platform also allows you to:

• Enjoy industry-low discounted service fees that can be passed on to the buyer or absorbed into your ticket price, saving you hundreds or thousands of dollars on each event.
• Create multiple and unlimited ticket types for free. This is an amazing way to raise money for charity because you can get creative with your fundraising, creating opportunities for a variety of attendees, including a pay-what-you-wish ticket.
  
  • Raffle tickets – People love raffles. They’re fun and exciting and give us a chance to win! Sometimes, it doesn’t even matter what we win. You can mix it up and do reverse raffles or silent raffles. Just keep in mind that local gambling laws and regulations may prohibit raffles, so check first.
  • VIP tickets – These pricier variants let you create a sense of expectation and exclusivity. Giving perks for purchasing higher-priced tickets will increase your bottom line. Note the VIP perks don’t even have to cost you a dime. It can include early access and an after-hours party.
  • Ticket Bundles – Allow sponsors or large donors to purchase in volume and share tickets with their employees, family, and friends while you effortlessly capture contact information for each ticket holder —essential for growing that list!
  • Mix-and-match donations – Create a variety of donation types to welcome all donors: flexible (pay-what-you-want), suggested, and tiered. You can even include admission with donations.

Appeal to Sponsors with a Tailored Event Experience

When you’re firing on all cylinders, and your social media team is pumping out that message 24/7, but it’s still not enough—that’s when it’s time to give your audience a reason to become emotionally invested in your cause. How?

Host a charity fundraising event that offers them a meaningful experience, one that taps into their wants, needs, and desires. One that makes them feel good about helping you.

• Offer incentives to recurring and prospective donors, such as freebies, upgrades, and VIP options.
• Allow your partners to promote their products, services, or business at your event. (This is a sure winner when you partner with food or beverage companies.)
• Partner with small, independently owned businesses to show you’re invested in the community.

Create emotional content that really pulls your audience in, tugs at their heartstrings, and makes them feel good about giving. Emotional content that strikes a chord with your readers will not only invite them to the conversation but also encourage them to stay, become loyal supporters, and share your story with their networks. And when your patrons share your story in their own words, that creates a web of new supporters willing to give and share.

Tie Your Nonprofit Event to a Season

Most people think the holiday season is the season of giving. But not only are November and December when your charity fundraising will face the most competition, you’re forgetting about the other 10 months of the year.

Instead, tie your fundraising efforts to other iconic days or weeks during the year. Plus, if you pick a different time of year to host your event and stick to it, people will look forward to it. Good “anchor days” for charity fundraising events include:

• Random Acts of Kindness Week in February
• International Day of Charity in September
• Human Rights Day in December
• Earth Day in April
• World Mental Health Day in October
• World Homeless Day in October
• Forest Week in July

Another way to use the seasons to your advantage is to schedule events each quarter, so your audience knows when to expect them and can plan ahead. With Ticketstripe, you can also create limited-time ticket tiers only available during specified times. This is a great way to raise money for your charity year- long as it creates urgency and entices donors to act now.

Spread the Word About Your Fundraiser

How can Ticketstripe help you reach your donors?

Use our custom URLs so people can find your event quickly. When you create flyers, postcards, or one-sheet handouts to mail, hand deliver, or post around town for your event, you can either slap on a QR code that creates a quick and easy interface to send viewers directly to your event URL, as well as include your personalized, easy-to-remember custom URL, i.e., Ticketstripe.com/AnimalRescue2024. Our customizable URLs are also easily shareable across all social media platforms to direct all of that digital traffic right to your event page.

Ticketstripe automatically collects email addresses of buyers when they purchase tickets or donate funds—and we don’t use that info for our own purposes, unlike our competitors. Your list is your own! You can even add the contact info of purchasers who pay cash for their tickets, so all your attendee contacts are in one place.

With Ticketstripe’s peer-to-peer fundraising options, you can invite your supporters to help you raise money. Every charity has a core group of people who believe in your cause. Offer incentives encouraging them to spread the word to their contacts and look for ways to support their endeavors. Ticketstripe’s Promoter tool lets you invite each supporter to help you sell tickets or raise money, straight from your dashboard. Multiply your reach and donations while tracking each promoter’s contribution.

5 Tips for Successful Charity Fundraising

1. Set Clear Fundraising Goals

Choosing the right approach to raising funds is easy if you have a clear end goal. Individual donations may be the best source of funding for your organization if you only need a few hundred dollars to fix some equipment or freshen up some property.  However, if your aspirations include a mission trip abroad or revamping a dilapidated community center, then appealing to major sponsors would help you reach your goal more quickly.

Ticketstripe facilitates both strategies, enabling you to list unlimited tickets and donation levels on your event page.

2. Identify Your Target Audience

Your most charitable audience will be determined by the type of nonprofit organization you represent. Churches find donors within the faithful. Charitable organizations depend on philanthropic neighbors. Community outreach programs often rely on businesses and other civic-minded organizations like schools, shelters, and food pantries.

These target groups will likely be some of your biggest supporters. But don’t think of them simply as marks to be milked. They’re also an extremely valuable resource. Meet with the leaders of these groups. Pick their brains. Ask them about fundraisers they’ve held, organizations they’ve relied upon, and who they’ve gotten solid donations from in the past.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have revolutionized how companies, organizations, and individuals interact. Take the time to learn how these tools can supercharge your charity fundraising efforts and connect you with resources you didn’t even know existed. You’ll open doors to new and vibrant artists, marketing teams, vendors, and others eager to collaborate with your charity fundraising efforts.

3. Share Your Charity’s Mission

An emotional connection is powerful. Our emotions dictate our experiences as we move through life. Creating a positive emotional connection is essential for the success of any charity fundraising event.

Collaborators and donors alike want to feel good about partnering with your organization and giving charitably to it. That’s why you need to put your nonprofit’s mission at the forefront of all your public-facing outlets. That means social media, marketing materials, event flyers, and especially face-to-face interactions.

The old adage that “people buy from people, not companies” applies to charity fundraising, too—if not even more so. People give to people, not organizations.

Don’t rely on “spray-and-pray” marketing. Get personal. Get interactive. Clear, straightforward, and visceral engagement can elicit a powerful reaction, contributing to a meaningful experience.

• Host open house events.
• Give guided tours.
• Get your team members into high-profile positions at events like local festivals or fairs, church services and events, business after-hours events, or other community networking opportunities.
• Respond quickly to any questions.

Most importantly, be thoughtful.

4. Create a Donor List

Your list is a database of contact information for people who have interacted with your organization. For nonprofits, maintaining such a list is crucial because those who have advocated, taken interest in, or given to your cause before are often inclined to contribute again.

Use this list to communicate with your audience about:

• The progress of ongoing projects
• Requests for donations
• Upcoming events

How do you get that email address?

• Ticketstripe automatically collects the email for every attendee who registers for your events online.
• Always request the donor’s email when accepting a donation online or in person.
• Offer a freebie in exchange for the email, i.e., a physical or digital product.
• Create a newsletter for your organization that interested individuals can sign up for.
• Ask for it. Yup. Really. Just ask.

Ticketstripe’s Ticket Bundles allow you to effortlessly collect emails from every ticket holder—not just the person or organization that buys the tickets! Easy individual ticket sharing for Sponsors means more contact information for the organization with every event.

5. Thank Everyone

Thanking a donor or event attendee after the fact is not only polite, it has a more important purpose.

First, genuinely thanking a person triggers very real emotional responses inside. It makes them feel good. They’re likely to remember that you took the time to recognize their contribution.

Second, it is an essential way to build on that new relationship. Don’t just thank them and forget about it. Thank them and ask what they loved about your event, how they would change things in the future, or what they would like to see from you in the days and weeks to come.

People love giving their opinions. People love it when other people ask for them. Make your audience feel valued for more than just their money.

Lastly, that interaction reinforces your organization in their mind. Our memory is finite. We tend to remember firsts and lasts and little in between—it’s called the primacy and recency effect in cognitive science. That “thank you” creates a recency event for your recipient to remember.

Maximize Your Charity Fundraising with Ticketstripe

With the powerful digital tools that Ticketstripe offers charities, you can easily reach more people, create incentives to spur more and larger donations, and streamline your donation process so it’s simple for everyone involved. And don’t forget, with Ticketstripe, nonprofits enjoy decreased service fees and the ability to pass all fees to ticket buyers—ensuring you collect 100% of your proceeds. Don’t wait. Get started today and use Ticketstripe as your primary way to charity fundraise!