Boost Your Fundraising Events with Text-to-Give
Most nonprofits rely on events as an important part of their fundraising strategies. Events help strengthen your relationship with your donors, and also help raise additional funds. Text-to-give is a popular form of mobile giving that nonprofits can use to boost the success of fundraising events. In this post, we’ll share how you can increase the effectiveness of your events with text-to-give.
How Text-to-Give Works
Text-to-give is a fast, convenient method to make a donation. Your organization creates a unique text number and trigger word that you’ll share with supporters. When donors send a text message to that number, they’ll receive an automatic reply with a link to your mobile-friendly donation page. From there, the supporter completes their donation. Text-to-give is especially helpful at events, because it saves donors the trouble of having to manually type in your URL into a mobile browser.
Prepare Your Mobile-Friendly Donation Page
As part of your event planning, create a specific donation page for the event. Your event’s donation page needs to be designed in a way that provides a streamlined, fast process for supporters at your event to complete a donation. Since you’ll be sharing information about your organization and your program or project, you don’t need a lot of information on this page. But you do need to include several important features:
- Mobile-Friendliness—Your donation page must look good on all mobile devices. You don’t want supporters getting distracted by tiny images or text. Responsive design automatically resizes elements to show up clearly on small screens. The navigation menu should also be easily accessible on a smartphone or tablet.
- Simplicity and Ease—Making the donation process easy will increase the number of completed donations. Minimize the number of clicks required to go through the donation process, and only include essential form fields. Adding suggested donation amounts will make donating more convenient as well.
- Impact Labels—Along with suggested donation amounts, don’t forget impact labels. People are more likely to give if they know specifically how their money is going to help. You’ll be sharing this information at your event and through your storytelling, so include it on your donation page as well.
- Recurring Gift Option—Make recurring donations easy by including a way for donors to set up an automatic payment for recurring donations.
Be Clear About the Purpose of the Event
Be sure that supporters know which specific program or project your event is promoting. Tell stories, share photos and videos, and communicate the impact that donations will have on the work. The more specific and concrete you are, the more likely supporters will be to make a donation.
Minimize Distractions Around the Ask
There’s a lot going on at an event: music, food, volunteers assisting, etc. It typically takes about 15 minutes to go over the instructions for text-to-give and then for supporters to make their decisions and complete their donations. During these 15 minutes, it’s essential that supporters aren’t distracted. Plan the schedule so that no food is being served during that time, the music is turned down, and there are as few other distractions as possible.
Present the Giving Instructions in a Variety of Ways
People take in information in different ways. Some prefer auditory instructions, while others will prefer visual. In addition to going over the instructions in your presentation, place visual instruction cards on tables, and post placards with simple visual instructions around the room. Use your presentation to demonstrate the process to your donors.
Arrange for Matching Gifts
Gift-matching always jumpstarts donations. Identify a few of your loyal donors who are planning to make significantly-sized gifts and create a matching donation fund for each text-to-give donation made at the event. Announce the fund at the event to increase the urgency of giving.
Text-to-give is a great way to boost donations due to the convenience it provides supporters. It’s also a fun way to amp up the excitement about giving!
Download “The Ultimate Guide to Mobile Giving” to learn more about how mobile giving can boost your fundraising campaigns.
