how to set up a fundraising site

Your fundraising site is the hub of your fundraising efforts. Not only will your site drive donations – and other fundraising transactions – but it is another extension of your organization’s brand and is a digital center for telling the story of your cause. While your fundraising site is one of the most important elements of any fundraising initiative, it can be harder than you’d think to effectively build a compelling site. Many fundraising platforms focus on DIY-style page building, which can offer both flexibility and complexity.That’s why we’ve put together our suggestions for building an effective fundraising site below.

Start with Appearance

When trying to capture the attention (and donations) of your supporters, a great place to start is your page’s appearance. As you begin to tell the story of your organization and cause, a visually appealing page will be the first way to draw your site viewers’ attention.When creating a visually appealing fundraising site, we recommend focusing on the following elements:

• Compelling imagery – Your supporters and donors love feeling involved and knowing what is going on with your organization. Including images of the work your nonprofit does on your website is an effective way to grab your donors’ attention and loop them in on the work that you are performing in the field. When adding compelling imagery, try to focus on high-quality images.
• Your branding – An effective fundraising site will also include the branding of your nonprofit organization. As you build your site or use a tool to do so, make sure you have the capability to add the following branding elements to your page:
• Organization logo
• Event logo (if applicable)
• Cover image (see above details on compelling imagery)
• Your organization’s color palette

Tell Your Story

Now that you’ve nailed the appearance of your page and drawn website visitors in, it’s time to impress and engage them with your amazing story. To start, we would recommend giving a thorough but concise overview of your nonprofit organization and the cause that you stand for. This is often referred to as your mission statement.Once your mission statement is covered, it’s time to talk about the specific initiative you are supporting. If you are running a fundraising event, talk about the event’s purpose, history, and why it is being organized. When it makes sense, tell the story of your personal connection and inspiration for supporting the cause as an effective way to draw empathy and support from your website viewers. Of course, effectively composing your mission statement is important for your event fundraising site, but you will also want to make sure that you have the proper capability to display this story as you build your website. Are you using a mobile fundraising provider to create a fundraising site? If so, make sure your branding, imagery, and story can be added and displayed front and center on your page.

Get to the Point – Raising Money

So far, we’ve established strategies for your team to effectively develop and tell your organization’s story, both visually and in text. Now it’s time to get to the point of why you are creating your event fundraising site in the first place...raising money! Once you’ve told your story, the main goal of your event fundraising site is to collect donations, sell event tickets, and increase your support. Making this process as engaging and simple as possible for your website visitors will result in increased support and funds raised every time. But how do you keep this process as straightforward as possible? Here are our favorite methods.

• Offer a variety of fundraising options – In today’s era of mobile and online technology, mobile fundraising providers offer efficient tools to build your fundraising event website in minutes. The most effective providers also combine different channels for raising funds. Providing a variety of giving methods for your supporters increases engagement and will ultimately help you raise additional funds. Furthermore, you are probably planning on using some of the fundraising methods in the list below for your event, anyway – mobile and online technology can take these to the next level!
• Mobile silent auctions
• Fund-a-need campaigns
• Ticket sales
• Straight donations

Incorporating more than one of these methods in the same place reduces the steps your supporters need to take in order to donate to your cause, improving their experience and opinion of your organization and cause.

• Create a clear call to action – No matter which fundraising techniques you include on your fundraising site, be sure to include a clear call to action for each. This means having donation, bid, and purchase buttons that are short and to the point. An examples is shown below:

• Simple registration and donation processing – Along the same lines as simple call to action buttons, we suggest using a website / platform that offers the simplest donation, bidding, or registration process possible. The fewer steps your donors need to take to support your cause, the more funds you will ultimately raise. A few examples of simplified pages are included below!

• Make sure your site is mobile friendly – More and more people are supporting their cause and donating on the fly...meaning donations are increasingly being made on mobile devices. In order to be part of this trend and gain as many donations as possible, make sure that your fundraising site is mobile-optimized.

Encourage Participation

It’s time for the fun part – drawing people to your website and encouraging as much participation as possible.

• Embrace social media – One of the best ways to get more people to your site is through social media. While your guests can share the link to your fundraising site on their social media pages and via email, platforms that offer social media integrations make this process seamless. For example, many platforms offer a capability that allows users to share their ticket purchase, silent auction bid, or donation directly on social media from within the platform at the point of purchase / donation.
• Use social proof – The idea of social proof is to incorporate signals onto your website to show your potential supporters that many others have already supported you. In terms of a fundraising page, this can take many forms, but our favorite methods are:
• Displaying sponsor logos on your page – This tells your audience that your organization and cause are supported by large sponsors, meaning they should support you, too!
• Showing the number of people that have supported you – The best mobile fundraising platforms will update in real time, displaying the number of bidders, donors, or ticket buyers at all times for the event. As new website visitors see that there are already many supporters for your cause, they will be convinced to join in on the movement, too!

Conclusion

After reading this guide, we hope you feel better prepared to create your most effective fundraising site yet! As you try different methods from this post, feel free to post about what has worked best for you in the comments below. Good luck!