Volunteer Fundraising is Powerful

Convio Newsletter
October, 2001 - Issue 7

An Effective, Proven Tool For Attracting and Retaining New Constituents

Online "viral" marketing is fast becoming a powerful tool that can help organizations raise awareness, funds and supporters. It is less likely that constituents will take a paper message sent by an organization, make copies and send these copies to their friends and families. This scenario is quite common, however, when it comes to email. Imagine the effect of one person sending 10 emails and then each friend forwarding another 10 and so on. If this happens five times, a single email would reach 100,000 people.

Consider Planned Parenthood Federation of America's 2001 Presidents Day "message" campaign - $600,000 raised in a matter of weeks. Austin Children's Museum raised over half of their financial goal in one weekend campaign - 75 percent of the donors to the campaign were new online donors to the museum.

Many organizations already run traditional volunteer fundraising events and campaigns such as walk-a-thons, class agent campaigns, and board member campaigns. While these events and campaigns may be successful in raising funds and reaching new supporters, the administration is typically difficult and expensive, with high up-front costs and an enormous amount of administrative work. The time involved in merely processing registrations and donations can take months - preventing an organization from focusing on the business of building relationships with new and existing supporters after the event is over.

Tools such as Convio TeamRaiserTM offer a better way to run team fundraising events and campaigns. Automatic processing of registrations and donations drastically reduces the administrative burden for the organization. Volunteers can be empowered to be more successful with access to a virtual toolkit of fundraising tools - including a personal page, specialized email tools and tracking reports - to make it easier to solicit friends and family and to effectively manage their personal campaigns. Also, by automatically capturing volunteer and donor information and sharing it across the organization, these tools help all appropriate departments communicate with and involve volunteers and donors in future activities.

Now, volunteer fundraising is for all organizations. The high up-front costs and heavy administrative burden associated with traditional team fundraising events, such as walk-a-thons, have prevented many organizations from taking advantage of team fundraising in the past. Tools such as Convio TeamRaiser open new doors for these organizations by enabling them to rally supporters around virtual events and campaigns, such as click-a-thons and contests, and by offering exciting and easy ways for supporters to get involved to further the organization's mission.