FundRaiser Blog
Short take: Making Event Participants into Regular Donors
Your event was a smashing success and you raised a lot of money. After entering the participants into FundRaser, you might be wondering what the next steps are. How do you convert them to prospective, and hopefully future, donors?
First, make sure you’ve coded them as having been a participant at the event. This could be using the motivation code from their gift or ticket purchase to attend or even just a category code. If you have FundRaiser Professional, our Campaign Management Module is a great way to keep track of complex events and their participants.
Next, perhaps you’d like to send a follow up letter. Dropping these names into your normal sequence of appeal letters without some sort of segue way may seem abrupt. Even if you sent a thank you letter for the donation or ticket purchase, a follow up letter thanking them for attendance and letting them know what you were able to accomplish is a nice touch and makes the attendee feel as if they were a part of your excellent cause.
Now you’re ready to add them to your regular list, including any newsletters, in the hopes that they become donors. However, once you’ve done this, don’t stop there. I suggest running reports perhaps every four to six months to see who has given since the event and which attendees might need an additional nudge. In this way, you can curate the attendees by reminding them of the work they did and how much more they can help your organization.
The keys to converting event participants to regular donors is to know who came to the event and what their initial gifts are and regular reporting and follow up. In fact, you can say these are the keys to nurturing your entire donor database—one donor at a time.
If you’d like to learn more about following up with event participants with the support of FundRaiser, please sign up for our Coding & Spare Fields class, and our Reports class. You'll find times and days when these live webinar training classes are held on our Training Calendar.
About the author
I believe that when we join together to do good in our own ways that there’s no limit to what we can achieve, which makes my work at FundRaiser that much more special because I love helping so many organizations reach their goals.