The right online ticketing platform can take the guesswork out of creating your fundraising event website. Ticketstripe knows what a fundraising event needs to be successful because we’ve been helping nonprofits host fundraising events for over 15 years. That’s why we not only invite you to create your fundraising event on our platform for free but also break down the essentials of an effective fundraising event website.
Make Giving Easy for Your Donors
Since the dawn of time, the number one rule of marketing and promotion has been to make the buying process easy for the customer. As a fundraising event organizer, you want to eliminate obstacles between your potential supporters and the donation or ticket purchase. They need to be able to:
- Find your fundraising event website
- Be moved by your message
- Easily purchase tickets and/or donate
- Effortlessly retrieve those tickets when it comes time to attend
Friction in any of the above processes will impact your conversion rate (the number of potential donors who buy tickets to your event) negatively.
Easy to Find
The number one hurdle you’ll have to overcome when selling tickets to your fundraising event online is getting your event page in front of the right people. You want to reach people who are willing and pre-disposed to donate, though not every visit will result in a purchase. In fact, average conversion rates for digital sales run around 2%.
To attract the right audience, there are several things you need to do.
First, you need to add search-engine-optimized content to your fundraising event website. That will help search engines index and rank your page.
- Find and use the right keyword phrases
- Assist search engines to correctly categorize your landing pages
- Organize your sales “funnel” in a logical way
Ticketstripe handles steps 2 and 3 for you. Our landing pages include built-in SEO so you’ll start seeing Google and other search engines quickly prioritizing your content based on your specific keywords or content.
But what about social marketing?
Social Marketing Helps You Target and Attract the Right Audience
Years ago, search engines were key drivers for fundraising event website traffic. While they are still a major player in the game, social platforms now take up a significant portion of the burden. Social platforms could potentially be your most effective marketing tools. Why? When potential donors see links to your fundraising event website promoted by trusted family members and friends, they’re much more likely to donate themselves. That’s a pre-qualified lead and potential donor who is highly likely to buy tickets to your event.
This is why your fundraising event website—your main point of contact with donors—needs to be socially shareable. You want to make it easy for your donors and potential promoters to share that landing page with their audience. Ticketstripe features built-in social linking that’s nearly automatic.
But social media does much more than expand your reach. Tools like Facebook pixel tracking help you see what percentage of traffic is coming to your fundraising event website, how they got there, and what action they take. Use these powerful insights to retool social marketing campaigns and make them more effective!
Create Buzz with Promotional Tickets
With Ticketstripe, you can create an unlimited variety of tickets to promote your event and generate buzz:
- Discount codes
- Early bird specials
- VIP packages for the all-important upsell
- Giveaway tickets to promote customer engagement
- BOGO tickets
Your marketing imagination is the limit.
Easy to Give
Once your potential donors find your fundraising event website, you have to entice them to part with their cash. To do that, you need two things:
- A strong, reliable, and trusted brand image
- A checkout system that’s simple to use
Your Ticketing Event Page is Your Brand
Many online ticketing platforms promote their own brand image over yours. Sure, your event name and maybe even your organization’s logo are there but most of the branding you’ll see in the banners, the advertisements, and other on-page media actually promotes the platform (and potentially other vendor events). All of this clutter and confusion reduce the number of people who follow through with the buying process. Potential donors may become distracted on an event website that advertises similar events to yours.
Ticketstripe allows you to easily create branded event pages that splash your name all over the event. There will be no doubt about what organization is promoting this fundraising event website or where your donor’s hard-earned money is going. That powerful image branding can increase ticket purchases dramatically. In fact, good branding combined with pre-qualifying your audience (attracting people who are ready, willing, and able to donate) can boost your conversion rate to as high as 60%.
Frictionless Checkout is Essential
After a potential donor has made the decision to buy tickets to your online event, they need to checkout. According to at least one report, the contents of online shopping carts are abandoned 75% of the time. The key to reducing shopping cart abandonment is to make the checkout process so simple it becomes almost automatic.
Ticketstripe helps you do that by optimizing your checkout page for mobile devices and making it simple for you to accept payment in almost any currency.
Why is mobile optimization important? It’s estimated that up to 60% of fundraising donations are now made online and the majority of people in The United States (58%) access the internet on a mobile device rather than a traditional desktop or laptop.
Why is ease of payment important? According to market analysts, 90% of all online sales in recent years were made by either credit/debit card transactions (76%) or PayPal transactions (14%). If you don’t give potential donors the payment options they prefer, most will simply abandon the purchase altogether.
Ticketstripe allows you to quickly and easily accept credit card transactions with your own merchant account, Stripe or PayPal. Funds are in your merchant account immediately after every sale ensuring you are in complete control.
Easy to Receive
The last hurdle you have to overcome happens after the purchase. How do your donors get the tickets they bought from your fundraising event website? Do you mail them? Do you hold them at a will-call window? What do you do about lost tickets? How do packaged ticket purchasers or sponsors share tickets?
The best fundraising event website will make all of the above an absolute breeze. With Ticketstripe, all of the following options are possible:
- Automatic delivery of e-tickets (via email)
- Option to print and mail tickets
- Option for will-call
- Instant recovery option
- Secure ticket wallets allow for digital ticket sharing and tracking
Our ticketing platform even lets you keep in touch with ticket holders so you can notify them of last-minute changes, prompt for an upsell, or promote your next fundraising event. And our mobile app lets you check in attendees in seconds, reducing lines at the door, so everyone has a great experience from the very start.
Make it Easy for Your Organizers
Trusted by nonprofits and fundraisers worldwide, our streamlined ticketing and donation platform lets you create a fundraising event website in minutes. Watch those funds start rolling in the very same day.
We give you as much back-end data as you need (or as little as you want) so you can keep your finger on the pulse of your promotion. See real-time:
- Traffic with sources
- Sales statistics
- Affiliate marketer performance
And so much more.
But we wouldn’t be a trusted marketing partner for so many fundraising events if we didn’t have a heart too. That’s why Ticketstripe offers reduced fees for non-profit organizations. That means Ticketstripe is free for organizers, while your valued buyers and donors pay reduced and transparent nonprofit service fees.
Let's Team Up
Need help creating an effective fundraising event page? Contact us today and see how easy it can really be.