The Return of Events and Peer-to-Peer Fundraising

After a few years of adapting to virtual events, zoom calls and working from home, many of us are returning to in-person interactions and events. In-person activities, whether it be volunteering or fundraising, have been a mainstay of charitable work and critical for many charities.

With a return to in-person events, we wanted to take this opportunity to highlight some of the ways CanadaHelps Events and Peer-to-Peer Fundraising tools make managing these events easier! While some events are returning to in-person, the lessons we’ve learned from pivoting to digital platforms can still serve us well and digital tools can make the whole task of organizing an event less daunting.

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How Does the CanadaHelps Ticketed Events Tool make running your charity event easier?

If you’d like more guidance on running your charity event, from beginning to end, try reading our whitepaper, “Raise the bar & Raise more money with your next event.” This whitepaper covers everything from brainstorming creative event ideas, setting a budget and finding event sponsors and partners, to a checklist for planning, how to execute your plan and some final top tips on reaching your fundraising goals. If you’ve got that set, then read on to learn how CanadaHelps Events Tool can help you.

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1. Easily Make a Slick, Mobile-Optimized Signup Page

First things first, once you have your event nailed down, you’ll want a way for attendees to sign up! The Events tool makes it easy to create an attractive event signup portal even if your design or website skills are limited. Creating your event sign-up through CanadaHelps also ensures the page will be mobile-optimized, which accounts for a large portion of internet traffic.

Much like our popular donation forms, you can set up your Event directly from your Charity Account. You will be prompted for some basic information such as the event title, overview, time and location. More importantly, for the aesthetic aspect, you will be able to upload images, and videos, and customize the colour palette of your signup page. If this is a recurring event, you’ll definitely want to showcase some of the pictures and videos that were taken at the event in previous years. Once you’re done with your masterpiece, you can either link to it from a URL, or even better, embed it directly into your website with the snippet of HTML code provided, so users never have to leave your site.

Check out this example made for a charity speaker series. 

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2. All The Features You Need for Your Event

Our events tool has all the features you would need for running an event, from defining your ticket types and collecting extra information such as attendee preferences for meals to some options you may not even have thought of.

• Set Ticket Sales Period and Sold Out Messaging - unlike perennial donation campaigns, events typically have a set time and date of promotion as well as a maximum number of attendees. Selling out and garnering a lot of interest is a great problem to have but a problem nonetheless. Set it and forget it by putting in your Ticket Sales Period and some Sold Out Messaging to redirect people to support in other meaningful ways.
• Add a Promotion Code - you might want to add a promo code to attract more supporters and give people the extra push they might need to join your event. With the events tool, you can do just that and set how much, which tickets they apply to, how many time the code can be used and an optional availability window.

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• Communicate with all attendees - You can communicate directly with attendees by sending an email from the events tool or choose to export the data and reach out to them through other forms. 

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3. Additional Charity-Specific Features

You may be wondering what the benefits of using a charity-specific events tool are over a more generic and perhaps popular events management tool. Our tools are always built with charities in mind which means there are features that charities may specifically need.

• Display Event Goals and Progress - While all events may have goals, your charity event likely has a very specific fundraising goal. You can choose to display your progress bar, number of attendees and attendee list, if this makes sense for your charity and help spur other potential attendees to join.
• Choose from various tax receipt options - Whether there’s no tax receipt for the event because the value of the benefits provided do not pass the intention to give threshold, or they need a split-receipt for a smaller eligible amount than the total cost of the ticket, there’s a way to address each of these scenarios. You can also choose between automatic receipts for your chosen scenario or managing your receipting post-event.
• Add an additional donation option - sometimes supporters are not able to make it or they’d like to add an additional donation on top of their ticket purchase. Easily provide them with the opportunity to do so. Providing donors with easy options to donate, is key to increasing your conversion rates.
• Add a join as a volunteer option - Volunteers are the backbone of many charitable organizations, and it’s no different when it comes to running events. If you’re looking for volunteers at the same time as promoting your event, fulfil two objectives in one with your event sign-up.

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4. Manage Online and Offline Ticket Sales - the Best of Both Worlds

There’s no reason you can’t have the best of both worlds. If your charity is looking to sell event tickets both online and offline, you can easily input your offline purchases so that your event’s fundraising progress bar and data match. There’s nothing more frustrating than selling a number of offline tickets and not having a way to manage them or see the success reflected in your overall goal. 

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Bonus Tip:

Our Ticketed Events tool is made to manage all types of charity events, from gala dinners to golf tournaments. However, because of the ability to customize almost every aspect of this form, it can also be used as a way to collect memberships! Instead of listing various ticket types, simply list membership types. 

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How Does the CanadaHelps Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Tool make running your P2P Events easier?

P2P events are another type of event commonly run by charities. Essentially, P2P events tap into the networks of a charity’s supporters to fundraise. Some common types of P2P fundraisers include various “thons”, from marathons to bake-a-thons, scavenger hunts or social media campaigns.

P2Ps can be helpful in raising both funds and awareness and when done correctly, can have a further reach than traditional methods. They are also often more popular among a younger demographic - think of one of the most viral moments in 2015. Many people had fun filming their attempt at the Ice Bucket Challenge, which ultimately raised greater awareness for ALS and raised $115 million for the cause internationally.

If you need more guidance on planning and executing your peer-to-peer fundraising event, check out our detailed whitepaper, “Launching Your First P2P Social Fundraising Event”, which covers everything from getting started to post-event wrap-up and debrief. 

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Without further ado, here are all the ways the CanadaHelps P2P Tool can support your next P2P event. 

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1. Easy to Create Your Sign-Up, Participant and Team pages

Running a P2P event can be slightly more complex than a straightforward event. We make it easy to manage all the various pages and types of sign-up you need and make it aesthetically pleasing with images and colours that match your brand. As always, with CanadaHelps technology, these pages are mobile-friendly!

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2. All The Features You Would Need for P2P

Our P2P tool has all the features so you can make your P2P event successful. P2P events are quite specific to charities so not every provider gets this right or could miss out on needed features.

• Control Access Status - You have full control over people joining your campaign, whether you’d like to leave it open to everyone, approve requests to join or send invitations to a specific list.
• Give options for teams and individuals - Teamwork makes the dream work! Let people join teams and get their friends involved in helping you to raise more.
• Give options for third-party fundraisers - Manage corporate organizations or individual fundraisers in the same cohesive platform. 

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3. Automatic Dynamic Content to Engage Participants

Our P2P tool makes it easy to keep your supporters, individuals and teams, engaged in the campaign. 

• Create a leadership board - Encourage friendly competition between fundraisers by displaying a leadership board of your top fundraising teams or individual fundraisers. While you’re all working towards the same cause, you may be able to raise more by displaying this prominently on your P2P page.
• Fundraising Progress Bars - Choose to display your charity’s fundraising goal progress so that everyone can see how close you’re getting to the collective goal
• Supporter’s Walls - Showcase supporter engagement and messages with a supporter’s wall. Sometimes recognition is what donors are looking for and seeing others’ donations can also encourage more donations!
• Share Tips and Messages with Fundraisers - Easily send messages to your fundraisers (you can choose between messaging everyone or team captains only) and keep them engaged with your campaign 

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4. Stress-Free Tax Receipting

Tax receipting can be the most stressful part of running your P2P. Rest assured, the CanadaHelps P2P tool supports all types of receipting scenarios such as split-receipting, instant receipts or post-event receipts.

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Conclusion

Our fundraising tools combine eCommerce best practices with the features that charities need. Our Events and P2P tools may even offer features that you have not thought about for your campaign. We encourage you to jump in and start exploring straight from your Charity Account. If you don’t have an account yet, it’s simple to Get Started. Best of all, there are no upfront fees or contracts to use these tools. 

If you’d like to speak to someone first and get a guided tour of how these tools could work for your charity, don’t hesitate to reach out to our Charity Engagement Specialists for a free fundraising consultation.  

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