Simplify Fundraising: Online Registration & Mobile Bidding

Learn how you can fully optimize your next fundraising event

Fundraisers across nonprofit and community benefit sectors are always looking for ways to increase efficiency and gain more time to cultivate the all-important donor relationships. New fundraising technology is proving to be a powerful way to optimize, simplify and streamline fundraising tasks to raise more money and waste less time.

Take advantage of innovations in the fundraising technology space in your next fundraising campaign. Consider implementing online registration and ticketing, as well as mobile bidding into your events-based fundraising tactics.

Event Fundraisers with Online Registration

We’ll start with online registration and ticketing first because, typically, you will need to plan a bit further ahead for this part of your fundraiser given the role that attendance estimates play in event planning. Shockingly, many fundraisers and nonprofits rely on manual or paper ticket sales, forcing them to resort to shuffling tickets just before your fundraising event. This also typically results in added graphic design and printing costs that can easily be eliminated by transitioning to online registration.

Online registration and ticketing platforms allow you to quickly and easily create a custom event page online, describing your fundraiser and what it is supporting. More importantly, your online ticketing page makes ticket purchase extremely convenient for your busy parents. Rather than having to seek out tickets, they can simply navigate to your online registration and ticketing page in order to purchase their tickets. Saving time for your parents means they’re more likely to continue donating throughout your event!

Another huge benefit of online registration and ticketing is that you will collect your guests’ information prior to your event. There are two major advantages here:

First, you’ll be able to offer pre-registration for additional fundraising opportunities at the event. In the next section, we will talk about the benefits of mobile fundraising. In case you do plan on having continued fundraising at your event (donations, silent auctions, raffles, etc.), having your guests pre-register online during ticket purchase will make the process very easy for your guests. You can reduce lines and wait times and increase engagement and personalization through a single platform, meaning the information will be integrated and will only need to be entered once. This development means a seamless ticket purchase and donation process for your guests, and it means higher proceeds for you!

Second, you’ll acquire easily accessible donor data. A more obvious benefit of online registration during ticket purchase is the value of the data that you will have collected from your guests. Not only will you have their contact information, but most platforms will also allow you to collect custom data that you may find valuable. This data can include:

Occupation
Age
Address
Number of children
And more!

Having rich data on your attendees will allow you to build an effective communication plan after your event, lasting throughout the year. These power demographic metrics are coveted pieces of information that let you target your audiences more efficiently. With this info in hand, you can use email and social updates to thank your donors, update them on new developments with the school, and develop a stronger relationship with your donors so that they keep coming back each year.

Raise More Money with Mobile Fundraising

Just as online ticketing and registration will help you raise more money leading up to your event, mobile fundraising will help you raise more during your event!

Many seasoned nonprofit event planners know the downfalls of traditional silent auctions and raffles all too well. These disadvantages include paper bid sheets and raffle tickets, little interaction, and long checkout lines. People also are unable to explore the rest of the event experience and engage with more important cause-related elements of your fundraiser.

With mobile fundraising, you can bypass all of these, and provide your audience with a more accessible, easy-to-use, and engaging way to donate! Mobile fundraising options include:

Mobile silent auctions
Mobile raffles
Fund-a-need campaigns
Donation pages and text-to-give campaigns

When used effectively, these can add major gains to your yearly proceeds. Some of the major advantages of mobile bidding include:

Accessibility

Because mobile bidding is online, anyone can participate anytime, including those unable to attend your event. Those who support your cause, but may be limited by time, other commitments, or geography can still bid on your silent auction items, buy raffle tickets, or donate to your cause! Additionally, this participation can happen anytime, not only during the hours of your event. With mobile fundraising, you can begin accepting bids and donations prior to your event. This means people can start participating while they are purchasing their tickets online, which allows you to create event-related buzz over a longer period of time.

Engagement

Mobile fundraising is also more engaging and fun. Rather than guests having to write down their bids or keep track of paper raffle tickets, they can simply bid online or via text message, and will receive instant notifications if they’ve been outbid or have won an item. This means your guests do not need to walk back and forth to your item table and can enjoy your actual event. People will love being informed in real time, and this will also result in higher participation and proceeds for your school.

Ease

Finally, mobile fundraising is simply easier. Your volunteers can work with a fully integrated, centralized system that tracks and keeps information in real time. Volunteer managers and donor records teams alike will appreciate this efficient and accurate system.

For event checkout, your guests will instantly be notified when they have won, and can make payment directly from their mobile devices. This easy-payment process means event checkout will be much quicker and easier for your staff – those of you who have managed the checkout table at an event will really appreciate this! It’s a win for donors and fundraisers that enhances the simplicity of the donor experience.

Sports and Recreation Software: 7 Must-Have Features

by Kate White

People of all ages benefit from community recreation programs. From the children excitedly heading to their little league practice to the adults blowing off steam at an after-work basketball game, recreational activities are fun for everyone.

But, with all of the activities that your community supports, you will need sports and recreation software to sort out all the details. After all, why worry about things you don’t need to?

With the right software, you can support a whole host of community activities without the hassle of manual registration, payment, team formation, or facility scheduling. The best software will have:

Online registration tools.
Memberships and passes.
Secure online payment processing.
Facility management and scheduling.
Effective league management.
Targeted marketing and messaging capabilities.
Prompted donation requests.

Of course, there are a lot of considerations to be made as you make your software selection but if you keep these 7 key features in mind, your sports and recreation community should be well on its way to running perfectly.

Let’s dive into the first must-have feature: online registration tools!

1. Online registration tools.

The beginning of any great team is reliant on the simple act of registration. Every team needs members, but it can be difficult to juggle the paper forms for every single activity you host.

An online registration tool will allow community members to register for a class or activity, purchase tickets to events, or register to volunteer with an uncomplicated, online process.

The software should automatically verify an individual’s eligibility for activities during the registration process so you don’t have to!

Customizable registration tools like the online forms in CommunityPass’ recreation software ensure you have all the information you need. This could include:

Medical information and allergy alerts
Waivers
Permission slips

This will let your staff keep its eye on the bigger picture while the software takes care of the tedious, administrative items on your checklist.

2. Memberships and passes.

People come to your center for a variety of reasons, so you should have a wide range of memberships and passes to accommodate their needs. Some people may only need a guest pass to accompany a friend to a single activity, while others may want to pack their schedule full with a variety of new, exciting programs and need a rolling membership.

Your software should incorporate a variety of passes and membership plans like:

Rolling or recurring memberships
Seasonal, day, guest, and free passes
Fixed duration passes
Family and multi-sibling discounts
Exclusive membership discounts and packages

These plans should allow for either auto or manual renewal, as well as expiration date reminders.

A clear, easy-to-use membership plan will encourage greater community involvement and increase participation in your center’s activities.

To see a comprehensive application of membership management to a community pool, click here.

3. Secure online payment processing.

In the world of digital payment scams, some people are skeptical of putting their payment information into a new system.

But people are too busy today to have the time to come down to the rec center or rec administrative office every time they want to make a transaction. It is possible that a community member would decide not to book an activity or program if they deemed the payment process too complicated or unsafe.

Your recreation management software should assure its users that its payment methods are absolutely secure while also providing a wide range of services.

Your software should come equipped with online payment processing that can:

Handle single- and multi- tender transactions.
Keep credit card information on file for ease of use.
Offer the option to automatically bill membership charges.
Provide the option to pay online by credit card, debit card or e-Check.

As community members check out or donate to community fundraising events, they should feel confident that their information is secure. The software you use must be PCI compliant, ensuring the transaction data meets the security standard.

A safe and straightforward payment system will cut down drastically on missed or overdue payments and enable more people an easier way to sign up and pay for your membership programs.

4. Facility management and scheduling.

Sports and recreation software does not only provide community members easier access to programs and activities, but it makes management of recreational facilities so much easier.

People use your sports and recreation centers and fields for so many programs throughout the entire year. As school gets out for the summer, you are probably flooded with programs to entertain the kids all day. After all, as more children register for summer camps, the more challenging it can be to accommodate all of your program needs.

Don’t get lost in the paperwork!

Instead of manually scheduling your programs in countless facilities, the software will allow you to have all of the data you need in one place. With a simple swipe of your finger, you should be able to switch between buildings, rooms, and fields to see availability and potential reasons for closures that will affect your community’s program schedule.

This information will allow you to facilitate online rental requests with ease but don’t forget to make sure your software has customizable permits for different types of rentals.

5. Effective league management.

Sports teams take a lot of planning and fundraising to execute without a hitch. Coaches put so much work into making sure their team lineup is just perfect and that they have practiced every potential scenario. So, why not make sure they have an efficient way to stay connected and manage their team?

League management software will allow your coaches to build and manage teams while also maintaining communication through a built-in, easy-to-use messaging system.

Once someone registers for a specific activity, the coaches will be able to get to work for the season with a centralized database with the team’s information.

6. Targeted marketing and messaging capabilities

When was the last time you opened up your email to see a mass email chain about something that has nothing to do with you? Arbitrary mass messaging happens all the time, but it doesn’t need to.

Of course, you need to be able to communicate with the people in your community about upcoming programs or building closures, or cancellations, but there has to be a more effective way than a mass email blast.

The best software will allow you to create and send targeted messages, and completely erase the need for sending a message to every person participating in your database.

Your software’s messaging should feature:

Eligibility and interest verification: The software will filter out users who are not eligible for programs you are marketing based on whatever criteria you set (e.g. program, age, grade, gender).
Open tracking: You can compile data regarding who opens your messages so you can more effectively target a specific audience.

Don’t underestimate the importance of quick, efficient, and effective communication for the success of your community’s recreation programs.

7. Prompted Donation Requests.

It’s impossible to get around the question of money when you think about how to run a community rec center. To host any number of programs, you need capital to make things happen.

There are so many ways you raise money for your community centers and as always, your software should handle this so you can worry less and plan more fun activities for your community.

The best software will incorporate online donation tools into the registration process so every member will be presented with the opportunity to give while they already have their wallets out.

While everyone has the opportunity to donate when registering for a program, this is not the only way your software can help you meet your fundraising goals. It should support stand-alone fundraising programs that people can access to regularly donate and encourage fundraising ideas that suit your community’s needs.

If you want even more ideas for raising money for your organization, check out Bonfire’s sports team fundraising ideas.

Sports and recreation software is made with this simple goal in mind: to make organizing, managing, and participating in community programs easier, faster, and better.

Now you know everything you need to know to choose which recreation management software is best for your community, so why wait? Get on your way to managing an efficient community recreation program!

Author Bio

Joseph Oriente is the President and Founder of Capturepoint, creator of CommunityPass. Joe established Capturepoint in 1999 and launched CommunityPass in 2003, which was initially created to provide online registration and payment for a local town sports council that was overwhelmed with an increasing number of paper registrations. Since then Joe has been responsible for expanding CommunityPass nationally to become one of America’s most well respected and complete online management solutions with registration, membership and facilities software serving the recreation and school markets.

Double the Donation-Fundly-choice for matching gifts-feature

Fundly Chooses Double the Donation for Matching Gifts

by Kate White

Palo Alto, CA (October 17, 2018) — NonProfitEasy’s Fundly CRM is excited to announce a new integration with Double the Donation, the industry-leading provider of matching gift search tools for nonprofits. Fundly users can now fully integrate matching gifts into their CRM, revolutionizing their fundraising programs.

By integrating Double the Donation’s 360MatchPro into the Fundly CRM, users will be able to fully automate the matching gift process, exponentially increasing their matching gift revenue. With this integration, Fundly users can turn on this functionality directly through their Fundly CRM account.

“In deciding which matching gift tools to offer our customers, we found Double the Donation’s 360MatchPro to be the most comprehensive and easy-to-use platform,” said Lomesh Shah, President and Co-Founder of NonProfitEasy. “We’re happy to offer our users the opportunity to double their donations with ease, efficiency, and accuracy.”

360MatchPro allows users to automatically track the match-eligibility of their donors, the status of those potential matches, and the revenue raised in matching gifts. Most importantly, 360MatchPro provides automated, customizable email follow-up, which vastly increases the amount of matching gift requests successfully driven to completion.

The biggest hindrance to matching gifts is lack of donor awareness. With 360MatchPro, Fundly CRM users are able to automatically identify match-eligible donors through email domain capture as well as self-identification directly on their donation forms.

“We are so excited to see that Fundly has integrated our matching gift tools into their CRM, offering all of their users a chance to enhance their matching gift programs,” said Adam Weinger, President of Double the Donation. “There are 15+ million people in America who are eligible for matching gifts, and we’re looking forward to helping Fundly CRM users connect with those donors.”

Double the Donation has the most extensive database of existing matching gift programs, including more than 20,000 companies, subsidiaries, and spelling variations. Use of this database affords organizations the opportunity to follow through on every possible corporate matching gift donation.

Match-eligible donors are presented with simple, streamlined information about the matching gift program that they qualify for. They are also presented with direct links to the appropriate online forms or downloadable PDFs required to submit their matching gift requests.

Find out more about Double the Donation at https://doublethedonation.com/. Learn more about 360MatchPro’s suite of features at https://www.360matchpro.com/features/.