What is it?
Online events are events that registrants can sign up and fundraise for. They can be in person, or virtual events.
What can I do with it?
You can set up online events to create virtual or in person challenges, sell tickets, manage third-party event places or bring your community together. For events where you don't need fundraising pages, check out our offline events article.
What are the benefits of it?
Online events are a great way to drive sign ups and fundraising in one simple registration flow.
Key terms:
Online event: An in person or virtual event that individuals and/or teams can register and fundraise for.
Online events are events you create as an administrator and which supporters can register and fundraise for.
Online events will take supporters through the Entry Forms you setup and ultimately end up with a fundraising page of their own, specific to the event they’re registering for. Online events are fundamentally different to a DIY event – an event which the fundraiser creates themselves.
After stepping through the wizard your default online event will be setup as Draft. You will be on the General Setup tab of your event and here can set the event fundraising goal, add a code for unique reporting, apply a category and much more.
Clicking on the Entries & Fees tab will take you to where you can set an event level entry fee (note: this entry fee can be overridden on an Entry Form level – allowing you to create multiple entry prices for the single event). You can also specify prefixes for registrations, donations and shop sales attributed to this specific event for your own reporting purposes. These prefixes will be applied to the relevant transactions and can be searched on from within your Stripe payment gateway too.
If you have applied an entry limit, you can also enter an Event Closed Message. This will be displayed on the first page of the registration flow if the limit has been reached.
You can also enter a specific event level waiver. For example, if you’re running an event physical in nature, you may want to add a specific waiver about the members health, etc.
And below the Entry Waiver you can set Entry Alerts to all or specific admins of your platform. This will send an automated email notification to the relevant admin each time that event receives a new registration.
An Online Event can have as many pages as you wish. The fundraiser accesses these pages via a sub nav that appears on the event Homepage.
Building up your event page content is exactly the same as you would normally do within the Pages module. All content is built up using rows where you can specify the elements to use in each row and style it according to your brand and the best layout aimed to convert people to register for your online event.
Here’s where you can set the fundraising defaults, specific to the event, and override the platform level Fundraising Defaults. Enter an individuals target and minimum fundraising amount, and team target and team minimum fundraising amount.
Add a default fundraising page masthead – this will be the default cover image that appears behind members fundraising pages. Depending on your sites design, we’d recommend using a relatively simply image in landscape format. You can also choose to resize the image if you wish to from the options in the Auto Resize drop down.
And below that you can enter the default fundraising message and profile pics for individuals and teams. Here’s an example of how this would look on a fundraisers public facing profile page.
If your event is a physical one and you’d like fundraisers to be able to track their distances from fitness apps including Fitbit, Strava, Garmin or Mapmyfitness, here’s where you can enable this. Tick the Enable Fitness box and then enter a Distance Target, minimum distances for individuals and teams. This will allow you to then setup triggered emails and/or SMS to fundraisers based on milestones they hit. We love a good trigger!
Check out our article on setting up Entry Forms, we go into a lot more detail about the options you have with Entry Forms there. Entry Forms are where you can turn on and off different registration steps, hide or show certain fields, and much more. The aim is to convert your member to register quickly and easily by taking them through the most relevant entry flow to their event registration needs.
Our article on Entry Forms also goes into detail about setting up Merchandise. Here’s where you can add a product that you’ve setup within your Shop module, to appear within the optional merchandise step of the entry form. The default product pricing will apply which has been setup on your Shop product level, however you can override this by applying a Special Price and even make the product free. For example, you could make the event have a $25 registration fee and simply give away a free cap, rather than making the entry free and charging for the cap.
You can also make the purchase of a product mandatory as part of the event registration by ticking the Make Mandatory option.
You can add assets and lock them off to specific events or make them global (to appear across all your online events). Simply upload the PDF, Word Doc, map, or whatever asset you need and that will appear to the logged in fundraiser who is part of that event, within their Dashboard.
A guide can contain a description, tags, and a thumbnail image.
You’re able to override Platform Level Automated Emails for a specific event. Let’s say you’d like a different registration confirmation email to be sent to members after registering that has a completely different design template, that’s where you would do that. Or if you have specific copy you want to include specific to the event that’s just not relevant across other events.
Click into Automated Email, then ‘Add New’. Give them email a name, add the subject, choose your design template and then select the Email to Override. Here you’ll see all the Platform Level emails to choose from. In our example of overriding the the registration confirmation email, you’d simply select the Registration Receipt from the drop down.
Then go to the Email Content tab below and begin typing your email content and you’re ready to go. Remember to use the personalisation tags too – it’s a great opportunity to be really relevant and personal to your fundraisers.
Who doesn’t love a good trigger. We sure do. So much so we wrote an article on it.
Give that a read as it covers off everything about Triggers.
Here’s where you can customise the social sharing options for the specific event. This will override the Platform Level social sharing. Customise the copy you’d like people to share through Facebook, Twitter, SMS and Email. You can also customise the copy for team invites (when a captain invites someone to join their team).
You’ll see the blue text link for Personalisation Tags. This will allow you to pull in things such as the member name, team name, and much more. We especially like the short URL options. Use these on email and SMS and you’ll start to build up a picture of the number of people converting to donation and even registration arising from clicking through on someones shared link. Now you can start to identify fundraisers who are influencers on your event.
Custom navigation allows you to turn off the platform wide primary nav and add your own event level navigation. This means you can essentially create microsites within your platform. Go nuts! But please be kind to the user experience?
Add your own event level sponsored donation amounts and personal donation amounts. This will override the Platform Level dollar handles.
When you’ve got an event up and running and are happy with the style, automated email, triggers and more, rather than having to set it up all over again for your next online event, you can simply clone the event. Head back to General Setup tab when editing your Event and from the little More Options in the top right, choose the Clone Event option. This will take a copy of the event excluding any donations and members associated to that event.
For further guidance, our Implementation Specialist Nicola has created a quick walk through guide to talk you through the steps.
