Soapbox Engage Blog

The fundraising world may be adapting but one strategy remains very effective: fundraising events. Whether it’s in-person, virtual, or hybrid, events are a great way to engage your community, inspire donors, and increase outreach.

Our digital world makes it easier than ever for your community members to attend an event. Nonprofits can use online ticket options and don’t have to worry about ticket design or printing. The Soapbox Engage Events app provides a variety of ticket options that make it easy for both you and your attendees.

But there’s a lot that goes into creating a successful event! Keep reading for an in depth guide to make sure you don’t miss any steps.

Table of Contents

• 8 Steps to Creating Your Fundraising Event
• 5 Types of Fundraising Tickets
• Self-Service Event Ticketing

8 Steps to Creating Your Fundraising Event

There is a lot involved when it comes to planning a successful event. With forethought, planning, and communication, you can be sure to meet your goals! Here are steps to help you out:

1. Organize an Event Committee

Although the event itself will likely need something from most, if not all, members of your organization, there should be specific people who are dedicated to bringing the event to fruition. This is an event committee. Your committee should consist of key staff members, and even volunteers, who are focused on the event.

Once your committee is gathered, you should assign different roles and duties for each person, so the work is well distributed. These roles can include leading the committee and keeping everyone else accountable to their responsibilities, marketing, event set up, contacting sponsors, and more.

2. Set Goals

You can only know if your event is a success if you have an idea of what “success” looks like. Everyone on the event committee should know what the ultimate goal of the event is. How much money do you want to raise? How many attendees do you want to have? When you set up the goals at the start, you can then plan in more detail to make sure you can reach each goal.

3. Establish a Budget

You have to spend money to make money! Unless it is fully virtual and completely handled by your in-house team, your event will cost money. Setting a budget will help you know what you have to work with, and ensure you aren’t spending more money than you’re going to raise. It can be helpful to look back at past events to get a sense of how much everything will likely cost. Here are some expenses you need to think of when setting a budget:

• Venue
• Online ticketing tool
• Online streaming tools, if applicable
• Entertainment
• Travel
• Branding and signs
• Catering
• Marketing
• AV and other equipment
• Ticket printing costs

4. Determining Date, Time, and Location

You can’t do anything else without knowing when and where your event will be. Do you have event space on site? Will you be renting a space? Are there any popular local events that may conflict with what your organization wants to do? Once you have answers to all these questions, you will be able to go forward with securing all you need for your event.

5. Finalize Entertainment

The goal may be to fundraise, but your audience will come to an event for fun and entertainment. You need to have something that will entice people to join and make sure they have a great time while they're there. Whoever your entertainment is, you’ll need to be as specific as possible about what their needs are. Communicating with entertainers and handling the logistics of their performance can be responsibilities of members on your event committee.

6. Choose the Right Online Tools

There are a lot of benefits to managing your event with online tools. It makes event registration simple for your staff and volunteers, which means your attendees can avoid a long wait before entering the event.

Selecting the appropriate tool for nonprofit event management is paramount. A well-suited tool simplifies marketing efforts, offering the flexibility of customizable email templates and automated confirmation emails, ensuring a seamless and professional communication process with attendees.

Additionally, the right tool will integrate with your CRM to provide access to valuable attendee data, enabling better insights for future planning and engagement strategies. Making the right choice in event management tools can significantly enhance operational efficiency and the overall success of your nonprofit events.

Here are some other features to consider when choosing an events management solution:

• Support for in-person, virtual, and hybrid events
• Multiple ticket types
• QR-code ticketing
• Mobile-friendly calendar and detail views
• Ability to set ticket capacity
• Self-service event ticketing via attendee/donor portal
• Email marketing support
• CRM integration

Check out the Soapbox Engage Events app to see these features and more in action.

7. Include Self-Service Ticketing for Attendees

The best online tools, like the Soapbox Engage Events app, will offer self-service ticket management, so your staff doesn’t have to chase down attendees for small details, and can focus on the larger details to ensure the event goes off without a hitch.

Having self-service event ticketing through a donor portal is crucial for efficient nonprofit management. It empowers donors and supporters by allowing them to take control of their event experiences. With the ability to purchase, manage, and even transfer tickets at their convenience, donors feel more engaged and connected to the organization's mission.

This not only enhances the donor's experience but also reduces the administrative burden on nonprofit staff, freeing up valuable time and resources to focus on other critical aspects of fundraising and event planning.

Additionally, the donor portal fosters transparency, enabling donors to access event details, track their reservations, and make necessary updates without the need for constant communication with the nonprofit's team. The Soapbox Engage Events app’s latest release features self-service ticketing management. You can view a demo of this incredible new feature here.

8. Market Your Event

The most important step is to market your event. It isn’t helpful if you create a beautiful and engaging fundraising event that hardly anyone shows up to!

Marketing should be the designated focus of someone on your committee. Your strategy should include sending email campaigns, posting on social media channels, reaching out to local businesses and media for advertising opportunities, and having volunteers and board members use the power of word-of-mouth marketing within the community.

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5 Types of Fundraising Tickets

How much money you raise depends on your types of tickets and the various pricing. Luckily, the Soapbox Engage Events app offers unlimited ticket types! The options are endless. Here are 5 ticket types to be thinking about:

1. General Admission

This is the most affordable of your ticket options. It should have the lowest price. This is the option for people who don’t want any frills or special benefits. You should always have an option like this, to make your event accessible to a wider audience!

2. Early Bird

Early Bird tickets are great for ensuring that you will have great attendance early on in the process. Offer a discounted price for people who buy their tickets before a certain date. Not only will you have a sense of how many people are interested in the event, but you’ll even get some revenue early! Offering early bird tickets means you need to have certain things in place early, but that should be no issue for your dedicated event committee.

3. Group Tickets

It’s great when people can attend events together. Not only will someone be more likely to attend if they have loved ones to join them, but if people decide to come as a group, that is an opportunity to introduce new people to your organization! Offer a group ticket option that gives a discount when a group of X people (whatever number you decide) buy their tickets together.

4. VIP Tickets

This is the ticket for the people who want the frills. You can create a dedicated special experience at your event, such as behind the scenes access, free parking, an intimate pre-show reception… There are so many options! This is a great way to raise more money and also provide your major donors a truly special night.

5. Virtual Tickets

You may host a virtual event, in which case all your tickets will be virtual. However, you can also host a hybrid event! Having an in-person event with an option for virtual attendance is a great way to broaden your reach and increase your impact. This ticket price should be lower, as they are not getting the benefits that people who attend in-person are getting.

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Including Self-Service Event Ticketing

When creating your tickets for your event, the most important thing is making it as simple as possible for your attendees, as well as yourself. Our self-service ticket management can help make that happen. This release provides event registrants and attendees self-service tools to view and manage their reservations. Therefore, they have all the information they need, and no one on your staff will be chasing them down to find out the name of their guests or their meal preferences.

Highlights of this new feature:

• Provide access to view event registration on the front-end of your Soapbox Engage site to logged in registrants or ticket holders
• Enable logged in users or ticket holders to add or edit attendee information for tickets after initial registration and before the event
• Collect preferences from registrants or ticket holders for items such as meal preference, shirt size, and more through custom questions after the initial registration and before the event
• Enable administrators to set what data is required prior to an event as opposed to at the time of registration and set a deadline for registrants to provide that information

If you’re interested in learning more about this new feature and how the Events app can be helpful to you, check out our recorded webinar, Attendee Self-Service with the Soapbox Engage Events app.

We wish you great success as you create your fundraising events and sell tickets. Here are a few more resources to support you!

• How to Create and Maintain a Nonprofit Fundraising Calendar: A successful event requires a lot of planning, which you can only do with lead time. This blog post shares how to create and maintain a fundraising calendar, so you can plan where your events will fall into your fiscal year in advance!
• How to Plan a Fundraising Event: The Complete Guide: Looking for more detail on how to plan a perfect event from start to finish? This blog post serves as a complete guide to every step of the process.
• Creating The Best Fundraising Event For Your Nonprofit: We’ve told you how to plan your event and sell tickets, but how do you choose what event is right for your organization? This blog post shares how you can choose the best type of event to help you meet your fundraising goals.