While some people in your fundraising group will head out knocking on doors, you can supercharge your sales by referring everyone you know – and everyone they know – to your website (click here to see how to do this) where you can show full-color brochures of all the products along with your heart-felt message about how they will help your cause by buying these products from you, etc.
Not only will you reach more people this way, but you also can showcase more items. Why just sell cookie dough, for example, when you can also sell candy, magazines, etc.
And while your visitors are on your site, they’ll see your affiliate links and other advertising, which will generate even more income. You can also sell other merchandise from your website – from wholesale drop-shippers, for example.
In case your visitors don’t want to buy anything, give them the option to make a cash donation. You can make it easy for them to do that with a link to PayPal .
What’s more
With a website you’ll be able to overcome one of the biggest problems with most fundraisers: time. As you know, most fundraising events, whether it’s selling products or even big events like auctions or dances, only happen one time. Once it’s over, it’s over. Your group only gets to collect the money once. With a website, you can earn money all year long, 24/7.
Now, you may ask, “How do we get people back to the site after they’ve already purchased once?”
Good question.
The answer is…you tell them to. Not directly of course, but rather, with periodic reminders through a newsletter.
“What would we write about?” you ask?
Lots of things. Send your subscribers your schedule of events and reminders of upcoming meetings and events, fundraising goals as they’re met, profiles of new students or team members, player stats, special announcements, recap of meetings, changes to the site (pages added, new features, etc.), photos taken at the last event, special discounts on products available through your affiliate links (that alone will keep your newsletter full), survey and poll results, etc., etc.
I’m sure you can think of a lot more.
The point is to keep your customers aware of your site by teasing them with information regularly.
Click here to see a directory of traditional fundraising product.
Next: website fundraiser idea – Google and the money machine
Or jump to another page in the series:
- Wholesale products drop-shipped to your customers
- Fundraising with affiliate programs
- Turbo-charging sales of traditional fundraising products
- Google Adsense – one of the coolest ideas ever
- Where’s the best place to start?
Resources
Goal Thermometer Donation Booster – displays an attractive meter on your site, which helps convert visitors into donations. The thermometer-style meter shows the progress of your fundraising campaign by increasing with each donation.
