Events

Fundraising events do have their place, especially if your goals include raising awareness, engaging news media, and engaging volunteers. But how do you effectively grow donor relationships and giving? Should you try to engage them in a way that “converts” them to annual fund donors and then try to get them to give more? I say no.

At Run Walk Ride Fundraising Conference in Atlanta, nonprofit event fundraising consulting firm Event 360 released an inforgraphic on the nation's largest event fundraising programs by revenue.

A radiothon allows you to engage sponsors, board members, community leaders and prospects in the life of the organization. You cannot place a price on this unpaid advertising. The ultimate key to success is to keep the organizational focus simple and easy to comprehend.

If one running shirt brought that much joy to one child, what would happen if I could come up with a campaign to obtain running shirts on a much bigger scale for Youth Villages?

Unfortunately, there isn’t one sure-fire event promotion vehicle or channel — it’s about finding the winning mix of communications for your audience. So if your organization has traditionally focused solely on a printed program sent by mail, maybe it’s time to shake things up a bit. Try a multi-touch approach by adding some new communications tools to your event promotion toolbox. There's a wide range of online and offline event promotion channels you can consider, including: direct mail, e-mail, social media, websites, PR, event calendars, paid promotions and so on.

In the May 2007 issue, former FS Managing Editor Abny Santicola highlighted the effectiveness of charity golf tournament fundraisers — still an extremely popular fundraising event strategy — in the feature "Fairway to Fundraising: Charity Golf Tournaments."

As we're gearing up forf the FundRaising Success 2013 Engage Conference, our first-ever face-to-face event, we thought it would be good to rerun this feature, "Suit Up," from the January 2008 issue. It talks about how to make the best of the conferences you attend.

The FundRaising Success Engage Conference, our first-ever live, in-person event, focuses on nonprofits that made the leap to powerhouse organizations, have proven themselves to be flawless stewards, and earned the trust and hearts of their donors.

In a recent whitepaper, "Fundraising With Facebook," online fundraising solutions provider Artez Interactive examined how peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns were affected when event participants using the Artez platform were given the option to share their fundraising pages on Facebook or register for event with Facebook.

Since you're still here doing all that great work, it seems safe to go ahead an announce our brand-new live event — the Engage Conference. It takes place in Philadelphia on May 9 (with a separate pre-conference workshop the day before).