Event Fundraising Blog

Multimedia content can transform the way your supporters interact with your nonprofit, and infographics organize a set of data in a visually appealing way. They allow your supporters to quickly obtain information about your cause and easily see why they should support your work.

“You have cancer.” Nearly 1,600,000 people in the US have or will hear these three words in 2011 alone. For this week’s Follow Friday, we’ve featured three inspirational survivors who are braving a cancer diagnosis without letting the disease take over. They’ve empowered themselves and others to fight the battle against the disease.

Nonprofits are increasingly turning to games to turn fundraising into a space for play. The gamification of event fundraising encourages participation in larger numbers. For this week’s Follow Friday, we’ve featured three organizations that have incorporated gaming in their fundraising efforts by hosting gamer marathons, creating trivia quizzes and developing online entertainment across multiple channels.

Telling individual stories is one of the most effective ways to fundraise, and who better to tell a story than the individuals affected by your cause? When potential donors see the face behind a statistic they can relate much more readily to your organization’s mission, which is why video is becoming an increasingly more popular way to broadcast your cause for several nonprofits. For this week’s Follow Friday, we’ve featured different groups that showcase excellent nonprofit videos. These organizations create interactive multimedia that engage users with a direct call to action.

Several nonprofits have come up with clever Twitter marketing strategies to advance their message across social media venues. Tweetathons can raise awareness about a particular campaign, and tweetchats allow anyone join a conversation. But for this week’s Follow Friday, we’ve featured two organizations that have taken this social media trend to the next level: into the hands of the people they affect. These two nonprofits have crowdsourced their causes by putting their brand and mission into the hands of the communities that support and benefit from their work.

Do you know who’s following your #nonprofit? Twitter can be a valuable platform for organizations that aim to be at the forefront of the larger social conversation, but how can you reach your targeted audiences? For this week’s Follow Friday, we’ve featured organizations and individuals that have developed a specific marketing strategy for Twitter.

Does your nonprofit have a strategy for mobile campaigns? Research shows that 83 percent of adults regularly use cell phones, and 35 percent of those adults own a smartphone. Mobile communications is a rapidly growing field, and nonprofits are increasingly taking advantage of these technologies. For this week’s Follow Friday, we’ve featured organizations that have successfully used three different kinds of mobile campaigns to raise funds for particular causes.

You wrote a great story that put a face to your cause, and now you have people interested in engaging with your nonprofit. What do you say to supporters to actually get them to take the next step and donate and participate in your event? A strong, clear call to action is essential to a nonprofit’s message: it’s the statement that tells people exactly what steps they should take to contribute to your cause. For this week’s Follow Friday, we’ve featured three organizations that have clear, strong calls to action that are visible to readers as soon as they land on the organization’s homepage.

Several nonprofits focus on the same cause, so how can you make your organization unique? Having a distinct voice that centers on a particular niche within your cause will help you stand out from the crowd. This idea can be applied even more specifically to event fundraising. Find your organization’s niche, and then focus on that as you message your events and connect with supporters: find your voice within your community. For this week’s Follow Friday, we’ve featured three organizations that all focus on living with arthritis, but each has a distinct way of approaching it. Whether centering on movement and prevention, pain relief and lifestyle, or upcoming news and research, each of these groups pinpoints their approach and creates their own distinct presence within the arthritis community.

Personal stories take a cause and humanize it – they put a face to a statistic and remind people why they advocate for a cause in the first place. Everyone affected by a cause, whether they are struggling with a particular condition or have lived through some sort of tragedy, has a different story to tell. For this week’s Follow Friday, we’ve featured three individuals who strongly advocate for Type 1 diabetes in children. These people are affected by diabetes in different ways, but all of them carry the same message.