Hosting Virtual Fundraising Events

65% of event planners are seeing FLAT or DECLINING registrations. We’ve been lied to. 3 years of projects. Research. 100s of websites reviewed. I think we’ve been lied about event reg. I am sure courses out there teach great things about events. But not reg. And without reg, you have no event. It’s funny to see that 40% of the whole EVENTTTECH spend goes towards reg, and yet there is so little education on how to use it. Here are some learnings:  1. 6/7 pages will inevitably lead to 80/90% drop off  2. Not using attendee referral platforms is giving away free money  3. High CAC means you have no data strategy  4. Selling through email and organic social only is unsustainable  5. 54% say that email sells more reg, but most don’t know what happened before  6. Alumni are the most important segment  7. Segment your database or forget about traction  8. 60 touchpoints are needed from cold to sale  9. Registration cannot be closed for months. Always register  10. Your website is not a place to share your life’s work  11. Remarketing is essential  12. No urgency, no sale.  13. Messaging needs to align with audience objectives  14. Fight for every abandoned cart like there is no tomorrow  15. Custom landing pages for custom audiences  16. Get rid of committees, let the data speak  17. Reg open, agenda live and price cliffs still drive the most sales  18. The email you send the week before these milestones matters the most P.S. On Wednesday, I’ll share a FREE highly converting website template. Get it first in my newsletter, find it next to my name

Google just changed the game for event marketing. The big winner? Publications and associations. I’ll explain. But first. How are events discovered? Whether you want to admit it or not. It’s word of mouth. You hear about an event. You google it. Well ‘googling it’ is changing. On Monday, google released “AI Mode”. It hasn’t replaced the default search…yet. But it will. Showing up in AI Mode isn’t the same as ranking on google. Here’s what you need to do: 1. Get event page schema right Crawling a site is expensive. It uses token. The easier an event site is to crawl, the sooner it will get picked up. Add schema. org/Event, FAQ, and How-To markup to your reg page. Feed it clear dates, speakers, prices, and “Get tickets” actions. No markup = no mention. Event platforms like Accelevents do this automatically. 2. Earn citations, not backlinks AI Mode loves credibility. Niche trade publications & associations matter again. Land guest posts, podcast, speaker quotes. Visibility first, referral traffic second. 3. Keep Content Updated Stale pages will be punished. Update schedules, seat availability, and pricing in real time. AI Mode surfaces up-to-the-minute info. 4. Drive user-generated content Get attendees to share “One thing I learned at YourEvent” posts. AI Mode loves human content from social, reddit, quora, etc. The volume of brand mentions matters. 5. Tighten the trust signals Keep speak bios consistent. Link to verified social handles & get mentions from them. Credibility & authority are huge ranking factors. 6. Answer the long tail & hard questions Create an event FAQ (using schema markup) E.g. “Is XYZ Summit worth it?” “What’s the ROI of attending?” Publish cost-breakdowns, who your event is and isn’t for, etc Control the narrative. Better you than someone on Reddit. Simply put. When people hear about your event. Make it easy for them to find it. How are you adjusting your event discovery strategy?

Too many marketers treat webinars like one-off lead gen plays. Run the event, send the recording, plan the next one. But the teams getting the most out of webinars treat them like content engines, using multiple touchpoints to promote them and creating multiple assets from each one. Here’s how: 🔹 Before: plan & promote. Design the webinar around what you want the final content to generate. Think about how you can pre-plan the moments to clip later. Start outlining that blog recap now. And when it comes to promotion, don't stop at email invitations. Find ways to embed the registration link into existing content channels — a new or popular blog post on an adjacent topic, the bios of all your social channels, etc. (At SparkToro, I can consistently add 100-200 extra registrants by embedding the registration link in a new blog post.) 🔹 During: reward active engagement. Having live attendees is nice; having active chat participants is even better. Invite people to engage directly in the live chat. Ask open-ended but simple questions that are easy for people to respond to. Make sure you're also using that chat in real-time — drop notes, reactions, answer quick questions that don't need to be verbally addressed during the presentation. 🔹 After: remix & reassign. One recap email isn't enough. A single well-run webinar should become multiple LinkedIn posts, a blog post, YouTube clips, and sales talking points — assets that serve social media, content marketing, and sales. Give each content asset a new job. This mindset has mattered a lot for SparkToro Office Hours, which typically gets ~1,200 signups. It’s also very aligned with how Goldcast talks about online events too — not just hosting webinars, but turning video into clips, blogs, social posts, and more. Link below in the comments to learn more. #GoldcastPartner

I’ve been having lots of conversations about LinkedIn for events from organisers wanting to drive visibility and engagement, to exhibitors heading to upcoming tradeshows, and everyone in between. Whether you’re hosting, exhibiting, or attending LinkedIn can help you get more out of every event: ✨ More visibility 🤝 More connections 📈 More business outcomes Yet LinkedIn is often underused in the event space. A one-and-done post. A quick thank you. A flurry of activity... then silence. But here’s the thing: the event isn’t the beginning and it shouldn’t be the end. To get the most value, LinkedIn should be part of your strategy before, during and after the event. Here’s how to make the most of it: 🌠 1. Be LinkedIn Event Ready Your profile and company page shape your first impression often before anyone meets you. They should tell a clear, credible story that aligns with your event involvement. Organiser Tip: Create a LinkedIn Brand Kit for your speakers, exhibitors, and team – banners, hashtags, talking points, and example posts. Exhibitor Tip: Use an event-themed banner to show your stand details or branding. 🌠 2. Build Relationships Before the Event The most valuable connections rarely start cold on event day. The lead-up to the event is prime time to increase visibility, build familiarity, and position yourself as someone worth connecting with or visiting at the stand. Organiser Tip: Spotlight speakers, exhibitors, and sessions early and use tags to amplify. Exhibitor Tip: Shortlist people you want to meet - clients, prospects, collaborators, media and start connecting early. 🌠 3. Maximise the Event Experience Use LinkedIn to take people behind the scenes, amplify moments as they happen, and make your presence visible to those who couldn’t attend. Organiser Tip: Have someone live post from the floor, tagging participants and sharing session soundbites. Exhibitor Tip: Make it easy for people to connect with you it creates immediate pathways to keep the conversation going. 🌠 4. Keep the Momentum Going This is the stage where most people go quiet, but this is when the real relationship-building begins. Use LinkedIn to keep the conversation going. Share your takeaways. Follow up with new connections. Repurpose content into future posts. Organiser Tip: Share a highlight post and set the stage for what’s next even a “Save the Date” works. Exhibitor Tip: Send a personalised follow-up message referencing your chat. 🌟 Key Takeaways LinkedIn is one of the most powerful tools you have to extend your event beyond the room. It allows you to build relationships before the first handshake, stay visible throughout the event and strengthen credibility and connection long after the banners are packed away. And if you'd like support to develop your own LinkedIn event strategy that's more than one and done, I’d love to help. Because showing up is just the beginning. #linkedin #events #eventmarketing

Welcome Emily Groccia, VP of Customer Success at Givzey to talk about AI at Version2.ai on this episode of 🔥 The Lantern 🔥 What is Version2? Version2 is the world’s first autonomous fundraiser. Announced less than a year ago, this product directly addresses the labor shortage in non-profit fundraising. Their team creates trusted digital labor that can be applied to donors who are not managed by humans in non-profit donor portfolios. In September of 2024 they launched their first cohort of 13 innovation partners. Each partner assigns a portfolio of 1,000 donors to a virtual engagement officer responsible for executing a series of 8-12 touchpoints throughout the course of a year to lead those donors to a gift. Just like an institutional giving officer! 👀 How is that impacting the donor experience? 👀 Only 1-5% of the top donors are usually managed by a human gift officer so most of the donors served by Version 2 lie outside of a major gift portfolio. Every organization would love to manage every individual donor in a 1:1 relationship, but it’s just not possible. Version 2 is allowing organizations to reach that other 95% with a much more personalized experience. 📈 What are some of the highlights from Version2 thus far? 📈 Version2 publishes a dashboard of autonomous fundraising 2x per week. VEOs (virtual engagement officers) have raised >$500k in gifts, 3k+ engagements, and 45k+ donor activities. Their opt out rate is only 0.13%! Donors want to hear from these organizations more, in a deeper way, with the ability to reply. They value personal engagement. 🤔 Why is autonomous fundraising working? 🤔 San Diego State is a customer using Version2 for their planned giving portfolio, serving older donors. This portfolio has the highest engagement of any partner because personalized interactions that connect to donors resonate with their customers. 🔍 What is the roadmap ahead for Version 2? 🔎 Now that they’ve proven autonomous fundraising works, they are leveraging their learnings to further define use cases and apply digital labor to more aspects of advancement in the non-profit space. More to come!! The Lantern is brought to you by Givzey & MGMT Boston this March

AI can give you back time to focus on the things that actually matter in your charity ✨ If you work in a #nonprofit, chances are your day is filled with: ✉️ Endless emails 📅 Back-and-forth scheduling 📝 Meetings that generate more notes than actions 📊 Reports that take hours to pull together Here’s where #AI can actually help you right now - no hype, just real tools charities are already using to make the day to day less painful: Emails 📫 Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini or ChatGPT can draft supporter updates, thank-you notes, or funding bid cover letters. You still keep the human touch, but the first draft is done in seconds. Scheduling 📆 Tools like #Copilot in Outlook or #Gemini in Workspace can scan calendars and suggest meeting times across multiple agencies, then auto-generate an agenda. Note taking 📝 Meeting assistants like Sembly AI will transcribe your board meeting, pull out action points, and email a neat summary to your team. Reports 👩💻 Instead of staring at a blank Word doc, Copilot can turn monitoring notes into a structured funder report, which you edit and polish. Been working in the open? Feed all those blog posts and LinkedIn updates into Perplexity or Claude. Data analysis 📊 Excel with Copilot or Gemin in Sheets will look at your housing, service, or fundraising data and spit out trends and charts. No pivot tables required. Content 🤳 Whether it’s social media posts or training slides, AI tools like Gamma or Canva can turn text into polished materials quickly. This isn’t about chasing shiny tech. It’s about reducing repetitive admin so your team can spend more time with service users, volunteers, and communities. If you’re not sure where to start, pilot one small use case. Draft an email. Summarise a meeting. Generate a chart. Build confidence step by step. 👉 The charities already using AI day-to-day aren’t waiting for “the perfect moment.” They’re experimenting, learning, and saving hours every week. Where could AI save you time this month? ❓ PS Any tools, approaches or pitfalls I missed? Leave your comments 👇

Welcome to the Future of Fundraising. It’s been said that fundraising is not complicated but it is complex, a sentiment I understand as a former major gift officer. So much needs to go right with each donor for the natural outcome of engagement to be a gift. The right message. The right time. The right ask for each donor. These require experience, time and resources. Virtual Engagement Officers (VEOs) constantly train alongside Innovation Partners to make these complex engagements right. This week, VEOs mastered many rights of fundraising with impressive results. The Right Ask Personalizing asks ensure donor trust and demonstrates you know them as individuals. Whether upgrading gifts, identifying matching opportunities, or guiding them through estate planning, VEOs recognize patterns in donors’ past giving and learn from two-way conversations, adapting to each donor’s preferences. As a result, the VEO projects to raise $200,000 by the end of the year. The Right Message Engaging in conversation is the first step to securing future support. Messages need to resonate with donors to start this journey. Like traditional fundraisers, VEOs source information from an organization’s knowledgebases and fundraising best practices, supplementing this information with context from websites and social media and a high level of personalization. Most importantly, it has a memory of past conversations with the donor. Finding the right message empowers the VEO to communicate with different donors at the same organization about different topics - homecoming, campus departments, institutional research, regional events, philanthropic interests and annual giving all in the same week, just like a traditional fundraiser but faster and at scale. That’s precisely what Scarlet, Illinois Tech’s VEO did this week by thanking a donor for a gift to the women’s soccer team and providing a real-time update on a tournament win and progression to the Sweet 16. The Right Language Fundraising can be limited by language barriers, leaving entire constituencies underserved. Multilingual traditional fundraisers are special resources that can be rare to come by. VEOs don’t have this same barrier. With advanced AI VEOs can engage in Spanish, French, Vietnamese, even Swahili. Donors can finally communicate how they prefer and organizations can bring non-native speakers closer to their missions. This was beautifully executed in a two-way engagement that Texas State University’s Emma initiated with a donor this week. It started in English but the donor responded with preference for Spanish. For the first time ever, Emma autonomously switched languages and the conversation continued seamlessly in Spanish. It’s impossible to do something that’s never been done and get everything right the first time. Autonomous Fundraising is no exception. The magical moments donors are experiencing emphasize that we’re headed in the right direction. Happy Thanksgiving and season of gratitude.

AI is eating the world… but nonprofits are still serving sandwiches. While startups sprint ahead with AI, most nonprofits are stuck debating if ChatGPT is “ethical.” AI is NOT optional. It’s the single biggest force multiplier in history. Yet, most nonprofits are: Drowning in admin work Burning out on low-impact tasks Struggling with donor engagement Meanwhile, AI-driven orgs are: Automating back-office work Personalizing donor outreach Running impact programs with 10X efficiency Let’s talk about what nobody tells nonprofits about AI (with real evidence). 1. AI can 10X donor engagement. Most nonprofits still send generic mass emails. AI changes that. Harvard research shows personalized donor messaging increases retention by 80%. How? AI tools like Rasa and Drift tailor responses in real time. ChatGPT-style assistants craft hyper-personalized donation asks. AI sentiment analysis ensures every message hits the right emotional tone. Nonprofits using AI in fundraising see a 44% increase in donor conversion. 2. AI slashes admin work (so teams can focus on impact). Nonprofits waste 40% of their time on admin. AI eliminates that. AI automation can: Process tax receipts Automate grant applications Manage volunteer scheduling Example? GiveDirectly uses AI to verify beneficiaries, cutting admin costs by 70%. 3. AI predicts & prevents crises. Most nonprofits react after disasters strike. AI-driven analytics change that. Example? Red Cross uses AI to predict hurricanes and deploy aid faster. AI processes satellite data, social media, and weather reports. Early warnings improve response times by 50%. More lives saved, less money wasted. 4. AI makes small teams operate like big ones. Think AI is only for giant NGOs? Think again. Mama Hope used AI chatbots to handle donor FAQs, freeing 30% of staff time. Charity: Water automates donor follow-ups to boost retention. Team Rubicon uses AI logistics to deploy volunteers faster than FEMA. AI levels the playing field. 5. AI doesn’t replace humans, it amplifies them. Biggest fear? “AI will take our jobs.” Reality? AI eliminates low-impact tasks so teams can focus on real mission work. AI writes reports—humans build relationships. AI analyzes data—humans make decisions. AI sends emails—humans inspire action. The question isn’t “Will AI replace us?” The question is “How fast will we fall behind if we ignore it?” Nonprofits that adopt AI now will dominate the next decade. The biggest threat to nonprofits isn’t funding, it’s irrelevance. Want to get started? Pick ONE thing to automate this month: AI-powered donor messaging? (Try ChatGPT or Jasper) AI-driven grant writing? (Check out Grantable) AI for impact measurement? (Look into DataRobot) The nonprofits that embrace AI will scale 10X. The ones that don’t? They’ll keep serving sandwiches. With purpose and impact, Mario

My kids' school sent me 10 reminders about early dismissal because keeping my children alive is my most important job. Your nonprofit sent your donors 2 emails this year and wonder why they're not engaged. If I need 10 touchpoints for the most important thing in my life, what does that tell you about donor communication? Let me walk you through what those 10 school touchpoints actually looked like: Three emails over two weeks. Two text messages the day before. One automated voice call that morning. Another text message two hours before pickup. A final email one hour before dismissal. For a three-hour schedule change. Meanwhile, here's your donor communication strategy: One appeal letter in November. One "final reminder" email in December. Radio silence for the other 10 months of the year. Then you wonder why only 15% of your donors give again. You're afraid to "bother" your donors with regular communication. But if my county school system knows I need constant reminders for my most important responsibility, what makes you think your donors - for whom your nonprofit is one of many priorities - will remember you with two annual touchpoints? Your donors aren't thinking about you every day. That's your job, not theirs. The organizations with 70%+ retention rates don't just send better appeals (even though they might). They send consistent communication that builds trust over time. Monthly impact updates. Quarterly leadership insights. Personal stories that show donor investment at work. They understand that staying connected isn't bothering people - it's serving them by keeping your mission front of mind when they're ready to give. You're not competing with other nonprofits for donor attention. You're competing with their mortgage payment, their kids' college tuition, and their vacation plans. Stop apologizing for regular communication. Start providing value through consistent connection. Because in fundraising, donors give to organizations they hear from regularly, not organizations they hear from desperately. See comments for full show