Optimize Your Nonprofit’s Use of TeamRaiser with These Hidden Gems
If your nonprofit organization uses TeamRaiser from Blackbaud, you already know that it can be a powerful tool for peer-to-peer fundraising. But you might not know about some hidden gems in TeamRaiser that can help you optimize your nonprofit’s peer-to-peer fundraising efforts.
Hidden gems of functionality in TeamRaiser
Let’s look at some useful TeamRaiser capabilities that you might not know about:
- Discounts
The discounts functionality in TeamRaiser is a great way to engage your participants around things like special early-bird pricing or time-specific registration challenges. Using this capability, you can create discounts that offer reductions to registration fees that are a specific amount or a percentage discount off the standard fee.
- Follow-up emails
Follow-up emails are a powerful way to communicate with participants after they have registered. For example, you can send a series of emails that thanks participants for registering, helps them to feel a part of the larger event, and gives them useful information about their participation.
Follow-up email functionality can be found in the autoresponder area of TeamRaiser. It allows you to set up and schedule emails to be sent to participants at time intervals based on the registration date of the participant.
- Registration upsells
Using this capability is a great way to increase revenue for your peer-to-peer fundraising event. For example, if your organization has excess T-shirts, water bottles, or other giveaways just sitting around in your storage area, you can sell them as part of your TeamRaiser registration process.
Here’s how it works: Once you create the upsell item in TeamRaiser and then associate it with the event participant type, registrants will be given the opportunity to purchase items associated with their participant type.
TIP: Cathexis Partners can work with you to brainstorm ideas for using discounts, follow-up emails, and registration upsells as well as implement the ideas for your organization.
- Multi-language support
This capability requires a request into Blackbaud Support, but once it’s enabled, it’s easy to add languages to your TeamRaiser event or campaign. Essentially, it gives you the ability to use your nonprofit’s own translator app instead of leaving it to your participants to use an app like Google Translate.
More ways to optimize TeamRaiser events and campaigns
Beyond these often-overlooked TeamRaiser capabilities, there are additional ways to optimize your use of TeamRaiser. Here are some top ways our team here at Cathexis Partners helps our nonprofit clients boost their TeamRaiser results:
- Optimize the TeamRaiser Participant Center
Blackbaud makes periodic updates to the TeamRaiser Participant Center to add enhancements and fix bugs. Using the latest version is a simple way to make sure you’re optimizing your peer-to-peer fundraising efforts. It ensures you have the latest and greatest features, and allows you to do things like:
- Update your TeamRaiser site wrapper toinclude best practices, such as highlighted calls to action, a progress meter, and top participant/team lists.
- Update branding and make user experience updates to improve fundraising results.
- Add a Team Page donation pop-up to allow donors the option to select a team member, avoiding confusion about who (the member or the team) will receive credit for the gift.
- Update your TeamRaiser site wrapper toinclude best practices, such as highlighted calls to action, a progress meter, and top participant/team lists.
- Create virtual drives with TeamRaiser
You can use your TeamRaiser instance to expand your drives for food, goods, and services with the power of peer-to-peer. As you work to deliver on your mission by asking for specific types of in-kind donations, you can extend your reach further by asking your supporters to create their own drives on your behalf and asking their friends and family to contribute.
Learn how Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida uses TeamRaiser to go virtual with food drives.
Read the case study
- Take virtual drives to the next level with a shopping cart
Adding a virtual shopping cart to your virtual drive gives donors actual examples of how their donation can translate into food, goods, and services. Tying dollars to something real is much more compelling than asking for a specific amount of money.
For example, instead of asking for a $100 donation, Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida shows that $100 can purchase 450 loaves of multi-grain bread. Virtual shopping carts like these can make your mission come to life with vivid examples of what donations can do.
Learn more about how to optimize your use of TeamRaiser
Optimizing your use of TeamRaiser can help ensure you’re getting the most out of your software investment and your peer-to-peer fundraising efforts. If you’d like help implementing any of the approaches in this article, Cathexis Partners is ready to help. Contact us today to learn more and get started.
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by Laura Higgins, Strategic Consultant, Cathexis Partners
Laura specializes in fundraising and community-building events, and has worked with nonprofits for more than 15 years.
