Event 360 Blog

Today we are swapping blog posts with our friends at Convio. To view our post on their site, visit Connection Café. Thanks to Robyn Mendez for this contribution:

Fundraising events are tremendous acquisition tools because they extend your reach into the social circles of your event participants. Think of your event like a party: you invite all your friends (event participants) and they invite all their friends (event donors). Hopefully, at the end of the party you get to walk away with some new friends you didn’t know. 

This morning’s announcement that Blackbaud has agreed to acquire Convio has certainly made the day more interesting. A surprise to me and most of my colleagues, clients, and partners, the press release has inspired more Twitter, email, and phone activity than I can remember in quite a while. Nearly everyone has asked the same questions: What will it mean? Is it a good thing, or a bad thing?

The 2011 Convio Summit earlier this month brought together the top individuals and companies in the nonprofit sector for discussions and seminars around innovative ideas on marketing, fundraising, and other nonprofit work. Here are some of the highlights from the conference:

Last week, Event 360 joined over 1,100 nonprofit fundraisers and marketers at the 5th Annual Convio Summitin Baltimore. The theme “No Boundries” was an apt description, as the sold-out event began with a keynote address from Stacey Allison, the first woman to climb Mount Everest.

Measuring the return on investment for online campaigns is no new concept.  But in a rapidly changing media landscape, it can be overwhelming for organizations to know how to properly measure the impact of social media efforts and analyze this data for meaningful takeaways.