How to Build Anticipation Around Your Events on Your Website

Reading Time: 5 minutes

 

Picture this: your nonprofit has a year-end auction right around the corner. You’ve procured appealing silent auction items, created your event agenda, and booked a venue to host all of your supporters. Now, it’s time to ramp up your registered attendees list and effectively build anticipation around your event. But, your supporters lead busy lives, and garnering their attention can be challenging. 

What can you do to reengage your audience and drum up some much-needed excitement? The answer is simple: step up your marketing strategy! 

While there are many marketing tools at your disposal, your website stands out as the most invaluable asset to your fundraising and outreach efforts. Your website is the foundational hub of your digital presence, so taking the time to generate high-quality web content related to your event can be just what you need to create hype and drive engagement. 

In this article, we’ll cover how you can strategically shape your website into a powerful marketing tool to build anticipation around your events: 

• Create a compelling event landing page
• Generate engaging blog content
• Integrate your website with your social media

Whether you’re hosting a live auction or a virtual walk-a-thon, your nonprofit website can help keep your fundraising events top of mind and encourage supporters to register, volunteer, and donate. Let’s dive in! 

Create a compelling event landing page

An event landing page serves as a one-stop shop for everything your supporters need to know about your fundraiser. Not only is your page an informational resource for supporters who are still considering whether they should attend, but it can also amp up your registered attendees and get them excited about the big event day. 

To develop a strong event landing page design, keep these tips in mind: 

• • Cover all the logistical details of your event, including the date and time, location or livestreaming link, and attire. You should also address how the registration process works and embed the sign-up form right into your event landing page for added convenience. 
  • Highlight fun perks to motivate supporters to register, such as food, entertainment, learning or networking opportunities, or any unique event theming. 
  • Include a countdown timer to your event to create a sense of urgency to register. 
  • Add a fundraising thermometer that shows how much you’ve raised so far and illuminates your progress towards hitting your fundraising goal. This can also be displayed at your event to keep motivation high and encourage supporters to push you past the fundraising finish line. 
• Feature fundraising leadership boards to help gamify giving and recognize the top donors or peer-to-peer fundraisers. This can be a great way to incentivize donations before your event day arrives, allowing you to make significant leeway toward your fundraising goal in advance. 

To help develop strong supporter relationships and encourage participation, be sure to also include high-impact visuals on our event landing page. This might include pictures of the beneficiaries your fundraising event will support or a video featuring appeals from your staff about why supporters should register and donate. 

You can even complement your visuals with storytelling to help connect your fundraising event back to your mission. For example, a medical organization hosting a fundraising gala to support leukemia research might include a photo of a patient named Bree with the following story: 

Meet Bree, a spirited 9-year-old who’s been bravely fighting leukemia. Despite her challenges, Bree’s infectious smile and determination inspire us daily. Join us at our fundraising gala to be a part of Bree’s journey and help us bring hope to countless more children like her.

Balancing your event landing page with meaningful visual elements and important information about the event itself will help inspire supporters to take action and effectively build anticipation around your fundraising. 

Generate engaging blog content on your nonprofit website

Along with designing a strong event landing page, another key web content strategy is building out your blog with posts about your upcoming fundraiser. By creating a variety of content around your event, you can stir up excitement and catch the eye of prospective supporters, turning them into registered guests and loyal donors. 

Consider sharing the following types of blog content to rally your community around your upcoming event: 

• Teaser content, such as a description of some of the items that will be up for auction, a sneak peek at the opening speech from one of your staff members, or a look at the badge designs that will be available for guests
• Profiles of guest speakers or notable attendees who will be at your event, including their background and accomplishments
• Detailed breakdown of your event programming to give prospective attendees a better idea of what they can expect if they join
• Overview of your fundraising needs and why you’re hosting this event
• Stories from volunteers helping to make this event possible, including how they’re preparing and why they chose to get involved with your nonprofit
• Spotlight on your corporate sponsorships and the companies that helped to make this event possible
• Highlights from your last fundraising event, including the number of attendees, the amount of revenue you raised, and any other details that made this event a success

Give your nonprofit’s team plenty of time in advance to create and publish these pieces. Develop a content calendar so you can plan out when blog posts will be published and consistently post several times before your event day rolls around. For instance, you might choose to publish a blog post about your event once a week, starting six weeks before the event. 

You can also step up your blog’s engagement by adding interactive elements, such as: 

• Polls and surveys, with questions asking supporters what they’re most looking forward to or what music they want to listen to at your event
• Videos, like testimonials from your beneficiaries or event planning team 
• Photo carousels from past events

This will help keep engagement levels high and encourage your supporters to interact with your content for longer. As a result, site visitors will feel more inclined to explore other parts of your website and take critical actions like registering if they haven’t already or donating. 

Integrate your website with your social media

While your website is the central hub of your digital presence, it isn’t the only tool you can leverage to drive extra engagement. Social media is another invaluable asset that can help expand your reach and direct traffic to your website (and vice versa) through integrating the two platforms. 

To integrate your website with your social media, leverage these best practices: 

• Feature your social media feed on your website so site visitors can see even more content related to your event and will feel compelled to follow your accounts. 
• Add social sharing buttons to your web pages that allow supporters to easily share your event landing page or blog posts with their network. 
• Repurpose content from your website on your social media and vice versa to save your nonprofit’s team time and resources that would otherwise go into generating new content. 

Rather than spending hours on unnecessary coding to try to smoothly integrate your social media with your website, Morweb’s guide to nonprofit website builders recommends looking for a solution with social media integrations built into their software. This way, your website builder will take care of all the heavy lifting, allowing you to easily feature event-related social media content on your website to foster excitement. 

Wrapping Up

Your nonprofit spends plenty of time and effort planning your fundraising events; now, you just need an effective plan to spotlight these giving opportunities and ignite interest in your fundraising. 

As you roll out these strategies, leverage your website builder to track metrics like time spent on your event landing page, click-through rates, and conversion rates. This way, you can find out where your website content is underperforming and make adjustments to better market your event and overall cause to supporters.