Marketing your nonprofit’s fundraising event across multiple channels and touchpoints is crucial for its success. However, it also presents unique challenges, including maintaining consistent messaging, brand voice, and image style while successfully attracting participants. 

The good news for nonprofit event planners is that there are several methods of marketing your fundraising event, some of which may work better than others for your organization’s specific needs. So whether you’re hosting a charity golf tournament or a black-tie gala, omnichannel marketing helps you build brand loyalty and engagement from registration to post-event follow-ups. 

This guide will explore omnichannel marketing and how you can use it to secure RSVPs and supporters for your mission.

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing is a marketing approach that integrates and aligns content across different channels so audiences have a cohesive experience with a brand, no matter where they encounter it.

Tip #1: Create a Brand Guide

A brand guide is a key part of marketing campaigns and is especially important for omnichannel campaigns. According to Loop’s guide to nonprofit branding, nonprofit branding documents provide a source of truth for your organization and allow you to stay organized and on brand while creating marketing materials. If you don’t already have one, now’s the great time to create a brand guide! If such a guide does exist, ensure it’s up-to-date and accurate.

A thorough, complete nonprofit brand guide should include these key elements:

• Mission, vision, and values statements
• Multiple versions of your logo and corresponding use cases
• Color palette, with RGB and hex codes
• Typography (font names, font sizes, differentiating use cases for multiple fonts, etc.)
• Tone and voice examples
• Graphic elements and icons for different channels

It’s beneficial to create sub-brand guides for individual fundraising events to further flesh out and define elements that are used in event promotional campaigns. 

Tip #2: Leverage Each Channel’s Strengths

Each marketing channel has its own unique strengths, and nonprofit marketers should find ways to leverage them while executing an omnichannel strategy. For example, consider the following strengths of specific channels that might play a part in your omnichannel approach:

• Social media. Short-form content is king on social media. It enables you to convey a lot of information quickly through short videos and engaging infographics.
• Email. Email marketing allows you to provide longer and more detailed pieces of information, such as sponsorship opportunities and the fundraising event’s schedule or unique features.
• SMS. Short message service (SMS), or texting, is best for sending ultra-short information snippets. SMS is great for sending last-minute reminders before registration deadlines and updates as the event gets closer.

Tip #3: Track Relevant Engagement Data

Tracking relevant data across individual channels is extremely helpful in gauging which are the most successful, which are interconnected, and which need more support. Data like clickthrough rate, conversion rate, and channel effectiveness help you determine the strengths and weaknesses of your omnichannel strategy. Leverage this data to help you make improvements for future years or other fundraising events. 

Your nonprofit can track this data by: 

• Using the right tools for your specific type of event. GolfStatus recommends using event management software that’s specifically tailored to your event’s niche, such as a golf tournament. Ensure data is exportable to your CRM with marketing integrations. 
• Collecting insights across each channel and its effectiveness and comparing them to identify weak spots and successes. Is email more effective than social, or vice versa?
• Collecting qualitative data from your audience through surveys and informal conversations with sponsors, donors, supporters, and event participants. 

Once you have a holistic dataset, you can analyze the information in depth to gain insights that will help you improve your future fundraisers and marketing campaigns.

Omnichannel Marketing in Practice

As an example, let’s say your nonprofit is holding a charity golf tournament, and you want to specifically highlight a hole-in-one contest in your marketing materials to drum up excitement and attract golfers. An omnichannel marketing strategy could include:

• A dedicated event website with online registration and tournament information that features the contest prominently. 
• Pre-event social media posts featuring videos of last year’s contest and testimonials from participants and sponsors.
• Pre-tournament email campaigns highlighting the contest’s prizes and sponsors, with a CTA to register to play in the tournament. 
• SMS reminders will be sent during the event, with reminders about the hole where the contest is being held and whether or not anyone has made a hole-in-one. 
• Post-event follow-up emails thanking the contest sponsor and highlighting any winners.

Each of these campaign components should have the same branding to ensure a seamless experience, as well as be configured into your data collection processes. By ensuring consistent messaging across all these channels, participants, sponsors, and donors have multiple touchpoints to stay connected, maximizing reach and fundraising potential. 

Wrapping Up

These tips will help ensure that your fundraising event’s omnichannel strategy is cohesive, strategic, and effective. As you move forward with your fundraising event’s promotional campaigns, explore event-specific software platforms that aid in collecting and managing the data, fit into your brand guidelines, and help you leverage the strengths of your marketing channels.