Event Fundraising Blog

Seth Godin’s blog, particularly his insight into why people do what they do, is a good basis for determining how to better engage an event’s participants and donors. So when I came across this article outlining five visitor outcomes from a landing page, I was compelled to share (and paraphrase). According to Seth, a landing page (in fact, every page) can only cause one of five actions:

Have an upcoming event or an announcement to make? A splashy headline isn’t enough to get your press release exposure these days. With the evolution of the way news is distributed, SEO, or search engine optimization, plays a vital role in creating buzz and getting your news in front of the right people.

The term “organic search” refers to search results that display naturally rather than those that are paid for. In other words, if you were to go to google and type in “fundraiser event ideas” the organic results would be those that appeared in the main body of the page.

If your nonprofit organization wants to connect with your target participants online, incorporating search engine optimization (SEO) best practices in your website copy and blog writing is essential. For the uninitiated, SEO involves inserting particular types of text data into website copy and generating hyperlinks from other related website in order for the programs that create the search engine listings--called “crawlers”--to rank your website higher in search engine results for the terms and phrases your audience is researching.

Today we continue our series on thought leadership by shifting the focus to content marketing. Content marketing (you may also hear it referred to as thought leadership marketing or idea marketing), for those unfamiliar with the term, involves the creation and sharing of text articles, photos, videos, and audio recordings (podcasts) for the purpose of engaging your current or potential event participants, donors, volunteers, etc.. As the impact and the relevance of the content your organization produces increases, the value it creates for your constituents and its propensity to create action increase as well.

Hundreds (if not thousands) of other events are competing with yours for attention, especially online.  By incorporating competitive intelligence into your event's online marketing strategy, you can get the insights you need to stay on top of your competitors while enhancing your own event marketing efforts.

Convio is getting ready to release it's 4th annual Online Nonprofit Benchmark Study, which includes some bright spots for online fundraisers and marketers. The study looked at nearly 500 nonprofit organizations’ online marketing results and compiled a series of benchmarks for evaluating fundraising, email, advocacy and marketing success online.