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Avoid These Issues that Defeat Your Nonprofit Efforts Featured

Avoid These Issues that Defeat Your Nonprofit Efforts Photos Hobby

Nonprofit organizations spend millions of dollars in marketing their activities and registering participants of various causes. For many years, events have served as the main way for nonprofits to drive their fundraising objectives, engage donors and spread awareness to potential and existing donors. Although most registrations have succeeded in the past, the truth is that a lot can go wrong during the process, and you cannot see it coming. Without understanding every possible problem, there is a possibility that you can create a negative experience for the attendees of your event. Furthermore, your costs can go higher than anticipated.

If you are planning an event, here are some issues that you need to avoid if you are to succeed.

  • Messing up the mobile experience

As the mobile technologies continue improving, many participants are now using various mobile platforms to register themselves. According to statistics, about 20% of participants attempt to register themselves using smartphones and tablets. Although there is an increase in the number of mobile registrations, the user experience still leaves a lot to be desired. One of the challenges is the mobile responsiveness in the registration forms, which makes it hard to select events, that is always the first step in the process of registration.

  • Unexpected high costs

Although budgetary planning is always a concern for event planners, it is easy to get confused in the middle and fail to adhere to the existing budgetary plans. Although the history of your expenditure can be the right starting point to budgeting, it is not an effective way of developing a spending strategy. While working on a limited budget is a good thing, thorough pricing research is needed to solve problems surrounding budgeting. It is, however, a challenge for many nonprofits to create and stick to their own budgets.

  • Un-optimized registration forms

Many nonprofits just decide to offer online registration forms. This is never enough. While moving your campaigns online is a good thing, supporters need comfortable forms that can be filled with ease. For your online forms to be comfortable and attractive to supporters, apply some of the key best practices that includes ensuring that they are mobile-friendly, using high-quality images, limiting the number of fields in the form and branding them.

  • Managing many events simultaneously

Managing a single event can be complicated, but planning many of them at the same time presents many challenges and can be a real headache. As problematic as it can get, many nonprofits often make the mistake of running many events at once without allocating resources properly. This ends up creating many problems than availing funds for a specified cause. Always try as much as possible to keep events separate and prioritize the urgent ones. Failing to assign different teams and resources to specific events always cause challenges. Consider using event management software to manage guests, catalog vendors, manage venues and costs.

  • Failing to involve past attendees

One of the ways of ensuring that your fundraising efforts are a success is involving past event attendees. Most nonprofit leaders fail to take into account the views of attendees of past events concerning the strategies that worked and what needed improvement. Always get the input of the past attendees on the registration process ranging from registration forms, challenges encountered, and areas that were not good enough. Doing this will make the process inclusive and will make your supporters feel appreciated.

In a nutshell, while hosting a fundraising event can be hard sometimes, it does not have to be intimidating. Proper preparation is the key to success. Therefore, take your time and anticipate every detail.

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Scott Koegler

Scott Koegler is Executive Editor for PMG360. He is a technology writer and editor with 20+ years experience delivering high value content to readers and publishers. 

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