Hosting an event is a great opportunity to find and retain donors. Why? The hope is that the event attendees will see the good work you’re doing and be inspired to give before, during, and after the event.
Popular nonprofit events include galas, golf tournaments, 5K races, and wine tastings. The event that you host will be informed by factors like the type of event that your community and constituents would like to attend, how much money you have to allocate for the event, and other resources you’ll use to plan for and host the event and steward your donors in the future.
In this post, we’ll get into how you can focus on donor retention before your event.
Why should you focus on retaining your donors?
First, let’s get into why you should focus on retaining your donors. Fundraising professionals and members of the nonprofit community realized years ago that they need to spend their time retaining peer-to-peer event participants who create the pages and recruit their friends and family members to donate. This is because it’s usually easier and less expensive to retain donors than it is to acquire new ones.
How do you retain your donors?
The more you show a donor how appreciative you are of their support and what their donation is helping your nonprofit do, the more likely they are to support you in the future. They may even encourage people in their networks to support your mission, which will bring in even more revenue.
In order to start thanking your donors, you need to have the right data on hand. This data should help you identify the people who have made your events successful in the past. For example, look at which attendees registered ahead of time; these are your power attendees. You should also pay attention to who is inviting more guests, reserving bigger tables, and buying more tickets.
In our next post, we’ll cover how you can use this information to inform what happens during your event.
Ps. Make sure to register for Bloomerang’s upcoming demo, and learn why they are The Donor Database Trusted By Thousands of Nonprofits.
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Valerie
It just seems like it is very difficult right now to get donors in specific areas of nonprofit work. When you are working in areas that people are unfamiliar with . How do you reach those donors ? When you don’t even have money for the people that are trying to eat and you are needing to spend it on advertising. Yet most of the time you have of time and money needs to go to helping your cause . This is not about poor business management . It is about how we view the nonprofit world . We think because we are helping people we should not make money or advertise then how are we going to keep helping people . How are we going to be able to hire top people to help us ?