NCET Biz Tips: Case Study: Virtual Fundraising for Nonprofits
Cinammon Davies
by Cinammon Davies
COVID 19 has forced many nonprofit organizations to move their events – including major annual fundraisers – online. In this week’s NCET Biz Tips, we present a case study by Cinammon Davies exploring how “Soroptimist International of Truckee Meadows” very successfully moved its annual fundraiser online.
Soroptimist International of Truckee Meadows is a nonprofit in Northern Nevada and our mission is to improve the lives of women and girls in our community from a hyper local to global scale. We are women that enjoy socializing while rolling up our sleeves to perform philanthropic deeds. Like many nonprofits, we were forced to rethink how we would engage the community to inspire financial support to help us further our passion projects, while respecting the need for social distancing and meeting attendance limits. This is how we made the choice to engage in our first online auction, and this is our experience.
We had some challenges when it came to selecting the auction software platform. Our club’s Fundraising Committee and the Public Awareness Committee easily vetted over 30 different online auction vendors. Half were eliminated due to prohibitive barrier to entry costs. Others were eliminated because they still required us to have a separate payment processor, which meant more fees with a second party. We needed a company that understood how to work with nonprofits.
Qgiv earned our business because it provided the best suite of services for the best price. Qgiv not only provided payment processing services in conjunction with their auction software, but they also provide the option for the donators and bidders to cover the credit card processing fees! This is a HUGE advantage to nonprofits to help ensure that the full value of the donations and auction proceeds can go towards the passion projects they are meant to serve.
We established soft goals to frame the scope of our project. We hoped to gain 40 donated items at an average winning bid of $50 per item and $2,000 in pure donations, for a total of $4,000 in funds raised.
We held our auction February 4-7 in advance of Valentine’s Day and the theme was appropriately termed: “Whole Hearted.” We designed collateral for this project inviting people to bid and donate with their Whole Heart. We even put together a Facebook ad to help promote the auction to a wider audience.
I can’t say enough good things about Qgiv’s customer service and support teams. They truly helped us feel comfortable using their fundraising tools. Essentially, Qgiv allows you to build a customizable mobile friendly microwebsite to showcase your auction and items. When people register for the auction, they are directed to download the free Givi app by Qgiv to participate easily in the online auction.
I built the home page to explain more about our organization, with firm calls to action inviting people to register or donate immediately. It included a fun thermometer that showed our progress towards reaching our public facing goal of $15,000. (If you don’t ask, you don’t get!) We piped in our Facebook feed, and had the ability to add easy social sharing buttons for Facebook and Twitter. We created individual pages for specific purposes:
Page 2 accepted pure donations.
Page 3 showcased the auction items.
Page 4 was for auction registration.
Page 5 promoted our “Fund-A-Need” passion projects, with easy donate now buttons.
We were even able to pull in Soroptimist International videos easily from YouTube to make this page more dynamic! (As well as help our audience connect to the causes we are supporting.)
The hardest part was waiting for the auction to launch. There were so many fears and emotions leading up to launch. Would people want to bid? Would they like our 99 items? Would people show up for a 100% virtual event? Would our bidders be able to navigate the technology easily?
We were all blown away when we eclipsed our soft goal of $4,000 in the first five hours the online auction was live! (We were all quite addicted to watching the thermometer grow!) It was also solid confirmation that Qgiv’s technology was well received by our participants, as I watched people happily bid on items all weekend long. One hundred percent of the $100 gift cards received winning bids for more than their $100 facing value.
We were overwhelmed by the generosity of our amazing community in Northern Nevada when we were able to gather almost 100 items for our online auction. We were humbled and delighted to have raised a total of $8,865.80 gross to be put towards improving the lives of women and girls. (Which was more than double our soft goal!) Our total expenses related to the production and promotion of the online auction were less than $1,200.00.
Cinammon Davies is an Account Executive for LOCALiQ, Part of the USA Today Network (www.localiq.com/markets/nevada/), NCET’s VP of Social Media & Newsletters, and the Co-Coordinator for the Public Awareness Committee for Soroptimist International of Truckee Meadows.
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