Events are great forums for networking and raising money for your school. But are you keeping track of everything that happens at them?
You or another member of your staff may have made key contacts with potential donors. Your staff may have collected contact and other data about the people who attended. Volunteers may have engaged in the event.
You can probably track all of these interactions via a spreadsheet or word processing document, but that’s passive data. It just sits there, waiting to be referenced. And it must be ported to other applications to make it genuinely useful from a digital perspective.
A customer relationship management platform such as Salesforce can turn all of the data you collect into actionable information. Contact data, donations made, events attended and more can be accessible at a single glance via a single click. In addition, you can use the Salesforce platform to perform and record all of your email marketing and phone calls before and after the event.
Using a system such as our specialized EventLynk software, you can automate all aspects of the event, from promotion to selling tickets to collecting data.
In the 21st century, running an event successfully is still important: Making sure you have the right speakers, food and drink, and registering attendees. But digital data collection and information dissemination around the event is now not just vital, but possible. As a result, you have information that is useful far beyond the event itself, which can better inform your development efforts.
If you haven’t taken the digital plunge, it’s time. Make the impact of your events extend far beyond the specific one-shot times they take place. Make them part of the ongoing, trackable effort to raise money year-round.
Want to know how to make your events more valuable than ever before? Contact us and we’ll tell you how.
Joe Paone is a content strategist at DonorLynk who loves informing nonprofits.