YOUR CLUB CAN DO THIS TOO!
ONLINE TOOL PLATFORM
DETAILS TO HELP YOU SUCCEED
As a member of The Rotary Club of Aurora and co-Chair of our Fundraising Committee 2020 posed several challenges for us as a result of the Covid-19 Pandemic and CDC Guidelines for safe distancing and limits to the number of people allowed for social gatherings. Traditionally, our main fundraising mission is The Taste of The Western Reserve. Due to the aforementioned constraints we were forced to postpone the “Taste” and in lieu of this venue were faced with coming up with ideas for alternate venues for raising money for the causes that we support, locally, nationally and internationally. It was decided that we would research online fundraising platforms to take the place of “The Taste”. In our search we came up with two possibilities, Q- Give and e Tapestry. We decided on e Tapestry due to the versatility in tracking and reporting capabilities for metrics like donor profiles, real time fund tracking, transaction reporting downloadable as pdf, excel and other formats. Q- Give did not provide these capabilities.
E Tapestry is a platform designed by Blackbaud.com which requires subscribing to a minimum three year contract billable on a yearly basis. E Tap and Blackbaud have different menus of offerings, and we decided since this was our first venture into this type of event, we would go with the basic platform which included tracking and reporting, training and online credit card transaction and funds disbursements into designated accounts, (via e commerce and Blackbaud Merchant Services), our bank account is in the name Rotary Club of Aurora Foundation. In addition to the subscription bill of $99/month plus training there are also credit card processing fees and transaction fees which are fractional percentages of the ticket purchase price. Due to time constraints we decided to launch a Valentine’s Day 50/50 Raffle, whereby donors, (accounts) could buy tickets online by clicking on a QR code that we set up on an e-flier with a link to our website where we embedded a link to an order form that I designed through an e Tap template.
Initially the time involved to take the online training and get up to up to speed on the platform was fairly extensive, but being online you can do it from home on your own schedule which made things much more flexible. I also set up a daily running total of ticket purchases on our Club Runner website aurorarotaryclub.org. The Valentine’s Day 50/50 Raffle was launched at the end of December with the first ticket purchases logged in the first week of January. We set the timeline for the drawing to expire on February 13th at Midnight with the drawing on Sunday the 14th. Over approximately 6 weeks of online ticket purchases we sold 340 tickets, our half more than covered the cost of implementing the e Tapestry platform. Each ticket sale represented an individual transaction which logged the purchasers’ contact info including Name, Address, Phone # and e mail address. This information automatically gets uploaded into a data base which also included past donors from “The Taste” and Rotary Club members which were uploaded separately as an excel file.
I won’t say that this process was entirely seamless, as we did learn a lot along the way, including how to generate various reports which allow us to slice and dice data, maintaining best practices like not posting personal information on our Facebook page nor on our website due to privacy laws etc. and being able to reach out to past and prospective donors electronically to thank them for their past support and to encourage their continued patronage to our fundraising missions.
I would consider this new online fundraising mission a success, one which we will be utilizing on at least a quarterly basis going forward. Feel free to reach out to me directly should you have any questions. I would be remiss if I didn’t thank and mention fellow Rotary Club Members Cheryl Duraski Warren for her guidance and expertise in Club Runner functionality and Alex Jacobs for his desktop publishing skills in creating our flier and assistance in website maintenance.
Bests,
Charlie Fink
email: charliesafety@msn.com
