Americans donated $471.44 billion to charities in the year 2020, up 5.1% from last year. Over 55% of the surveyed audience attended charity events or volunteered at their local charities.
There are a lot of components that make a successful charity event, including:
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Finding the right people
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Setting up the ticketing system
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Promoting the charity event to attract maximum donors
Today, we’ll discuss the essential component — selling charity event tickets.
Hosting a raffle? Check out these tips to sell more raffle tickets.
Setting up ticketing for your charity event
The first step to selling charity event tickets is setting up the ticketing system. There are three ways you can do so:
1. Your Website
Hosting your charity event ticketing system on your website is the fastest way to future-proof your marketing efforts. Here’s why:
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Grow email lists: Every charity event attendee becomes part of your email list. No matter how the search and social media change, this list can be marketed when hosting new charity events.
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More data: You get access to user journeys and preferences by diving into the analytics data. This also allows you to improve the navigation and experience on your site for a seamless ticketing experience.
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Lower costs: Allowing people to purchase charity event tickets directly on your website can lead to lower costs than third-party ticketing systems.
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Full customizability: It’s easy to customize your charity event landing pages to match the cause or theme of the event.
If you have a Shopify website, you can also use Evey to create customized tickets for your charity events.
Here’s how you do it:
1. After you install the app on your Shopify store, Evey presents you with a screen to create a new event.
2. Click Create event and set up the charity event details including the name, the dates, the ticket pricing, and the number of tickets available. Add the location so it’s added to the website. Once done, Save event.
3. Next, click on the Tickets tab and go to Customize.
4. Start designing your ticket with the simple drag-and-drop template designer. Edit the colors and the layout of the tickets as you prefer. You can also add a QR code that can be scanned at the charity event to confirm attendance. Evey offers free Android and iOS apps to scan tickets on site.
5. Once you’re done, click Save at the top right corner and then hit Exit.
Your ticket template is now created and it will be automatically sent to customers who purchase the charity event tickets.
Customizing your tickets gives an overall exclusive feel to your charity event which is difficult to achieve with a third-party ticketing platform. However, these platforms cannot be completely disregarded.
2. Ticketing platforms
Ticketing platforms have a major advantage — audience. Their strong presence in the ticketing space gives you access to people who are browsing the site for new events.
Listing your charity event on these platforms helps your charity event get discovered and builds up the initial traction. Some of the major ticketing platforms include:
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Eventbrite
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Ticketmaster
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RSVPify
These platforms boast substantial organic traffic. That gives you an opportunity to test different charity event images, titles, and ticket prices to see what converts best. You can then use the data to optimize your website.
3. Social media
Facebook events is the perfect platform for discovering new charity events happening around. While Facebook does not let you directly sell the tickets, redirecting traffic from here to your ticketing page can be a good way to tap into a larger audience.
Go to the Facebook events page and create an event that links back to your ticket purchase page. But simply listing the charity event here will not result in traffic. Facebook events is only a discovery platform so you still need to promote your charity event.
10 ways to sell more charity event tickets
Once the ticketing platform is set up, it’s time to move to the final phase of selling your charity event tickets — promotion. Charity events have smaller, niche audiences depending on the cause or theme of the event. And since these events are generally on a smaller budget, you need to make the most of every dollar spent.
1. Share on social media
Charity events or fundraisers are usually based on a cause which makes it easier to find people on social media to attend your event. Start with sharing details about the event and encourage people to share it with their friends.
You can begin promoting your charity event two to three weeks in advance and create a theme around the event. Spend the time finding groups or communities on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter who would not see you share details about your event.
2. Use social validation
Few people are interested in being the first to try something new. So, displaying the number of people who have already donated to the charity and the amount of money raised can increase trust and get more people to attend the event and contribute.
Kate Darke regularly shares updates as the one above to keep people in the loop of how much amount has bee donated. Try something similar to get more people to sell tickets to your charity events.
3. Make the event fun
Hosting a simple charity event may get people who are really interested in donating. But to give your event a mass appeal, try something different.
In Mumbles, they hosted a raft race to collect money for the lifeboat. The event was exciting and had a purpose that went beyond just the race itself — improving sea safety for the citizens.
Such events gather a larger crowd than you could with a simple charity event helping you raise more funds while making people feel part of the community and the cause.
4. Run ads for specific locations
Since the charity event will happen at a particular location, it’s more profitable to run ads around those locations or time zones. This ensures that you are not wasting ad dollars on audiences who may be unable to attend the event.
Facebook, Instagram, Google, and most ad networks will allow you to run the ad for specific locations and time zones. To get the most out of your advertisements, find platforms where your audience tends to be active and spend the majority of your ad dollars on those platforms.
5. Collaborate with influencers
An influencer or community admin talking about your charity event will convert at least 1% of the followers to buy your charity event tickets.
If an admin with 10,000 group members promotes your charity event, you can expect at least 100 people to buy the ticket.
Get the same promotions from 5 communities or influencers, and you now have 500 potential customers for your event.
This becomes a numbers game and you can continue to niche down to more locally relevant influencers and communities to gather more attendees to your fundraising event.
6. Promote over emails
If you have an email list, send regular emails leading up to the charity event. You can send out a variety of promotional emails here.
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Introduction emails: These introduce the charity event and make your email list aware of it.
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Agenda: You send out an email with the artists performing at the charity event or the agenda
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Talk about the cause: Talk about why the cause needs funding and how your attendees will help the world. Discuss the positive impact that the event will have on the people.
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Speaker list: If you’re bringing speakers onboard, send an email out to introduce them.
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Nurture sequences: After someone buys tickets for your charity event, run an email series that thanks them for helping with the cause, shares details of the event and the impact they had by purchasing the single ticket and encourages them to purchase more tickets. You can use Evey to create fully custom tickets with QR codes for attendee tracking at the venue
If you don’t already have an email list to promote your charity event, you can run sponsored ads in other email newsletters.
7. Affiliate marketers
Getting affiliates to promote your charity event is a win-win-win situation where:
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the affiliates get a small commission for every fundraising event ticket sold
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you get additional people to attend your event
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interested donors find a cause they wish to donate to
Affiliates are paid out based on ticket sales, so you will not spend money unless someone purchases the ticket. This is another reason why you should onboard as many good affiliates as possible.
You can recruit affiliates by searching the influencer marketing hub for the top influencers who your audience already follows. Alternatively, you can directly connect with them over DM.
It also makes sense to have an affiliate page on your website that will allow interested affiliates to reach out to you and you can then assess and decide to take this further.
8. Create unique and memorable hashtags
A unique hashtag lets you tap into the audience of your speakers and attendees. When they talk about your charity event using the hashtag, people who follow them will take notice, which, in turn, helps you get better visibility.
Here’s how the #SaveSoil hashtag has been used by thousands of people supporting the cause bringing great attention to it.
Get creative with your hashtag as the purpose is to make it memorable. Create short hashtags that people can easily type out with their phone keyboards.
9. Encourage active participation
Your hashtag and charity event page needs to be shared around and one way to do this is by engaging the community in some sort of activity. This can be done in the form of a competition, a challenge, or some activity that gets like-minded people together.
For instance, #SaveSoil encourages members to actively travel to across the state or country borders to promote the cause. Sadhguru, the person who initiated the cause, rode his bike from the United Kingdom to India, over a 30,000km journey.
This encouraged many bikers and travel enthusiasts to actively participate in the cause and start promoting the cause.
You too can find similarly relevant ways to get people actively participating and sharing the progress along with spreading the message of your cause with the world.
10. Bring in noteworthy speakers
When people you care about speak at an event, you are likely to participate or at least spend the time to listen to them. That’s the same with charity or fundraising events. If you can invite a celebrity (even if it’s someone popular within a small community), the word spreads fast within the community and a lot of their fans and followers will want to join the event too.
The above is an excellent example of how people are willing to shell out money when the charity fundraising event not only helps those in need but also offers immense value back.
If you bring a celebrity to your event, it’s likely that fans will donate higher amounts to get noticed or to talk to the person after the event.
Sell out tickets to your charity fundraiser events fast
Promoting and selling charity event tickets requires effort. The marketing budget is lower while the funds you need to raise can be large. At such times, leveraging existing communities and influencers to help spread your word can be an extremely cost-effective way to sell more charity event tickets.
You can also make the event feel more inclusive by creating custom banners, designs, and tickets. To create fully customized tickets and manage the members, try out Evey, the event ticketing and attendee management app for Shopify websites.
It helps you create a seamless ticketing experience for a smooth purchase. Simply install the app, customize the tickets per your charity event, and set up your event page to start selling tickets.
Whichever platform you use, remember this: Keep it easy for yourself and your audience to purchase and manage tickets.