How To Track Your Nonprofit Event Attendance
Nonprofit Event Attendance Tracking
The first impression, when it comes to nonprofit event attendance, is that tracking, monitoring, or recording attendance is undertaken as a matter of facilitating the efficient organizing of your event.
Nonprofit event attendance tracking can seem like a necessary nuisance for merely accurate counts of supplies and chairs. Attendance may seem like just another management task to a nonprofit event planner. It might also be thought that your nonprofit measures success according to attendance.
While these are certainly valid reasons to track attendance at your nonprofit event, thinking that they are the only reasons could not be farther from the truth.
Event attendance tracking is an avenue to the success of your nonprofit event and of your cause itself.
Success begins with getting to know your attendees. What motivates them? What causes them to engage, or even disengage?
With 10 Strategic Ways to Engage Major Donors in Donor Events, you can strengthen your donor relationships.
Attendees’ Experience At Nonprofit Events Is Important
It is important to understand that the success of any event hinges on the attendee experience.
Many nonprofit fundraising ideas will help you create an event with good experiences for your attendees.
Equally important though, knowing your attendees helps you to create event experiences that have a positive impact on those attendees, and in turn your nonprofit.
When you get to know your attendees, you can design an event that creates meaningful, personal connections that will ultimately translate to success for your nonprofit.
By knowing who attends your event, you can work to develop and strengthen relationships that are the backbone of your nonprofit. Tracking your nonprofit event attendance is the beginning of getting to know your attendees.
You don't want your nonprofit to just survive, you want it to thrive.
When your nonprofit thrives, it has a positive impact on the community and changes the lives of those it touches for the better.
Peter F. Drucker, often called the Father of Management Thinking, was one of the most widely-known and influential thinkers on management. He is quoted as having said, "The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their 'product' is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult: a changed human life altogether."
There are few callings higher than that, and using everything at your disposal for positive change will help your nonprofit thrive. It is a good idea to look at other success stories, and know that nonprofits can learn from modern marketing. At your disposal, which so many miss, is an attendance software program for your event that tracks attendees.
Ways To Track Event Attendees
Tracking event attendance can be a real headache.
There are various methods that nonprofits use to accomplish this task, and the result ranges in the level of effectiveness.
Social media can be used to take attendance when you get your supporters to be advocates for your event and indicate they are attending the event on social media.
This method can also be inaccurate.
There will always be some of your supporters who, despite the best of intentions, forget or just simply don't follow through.
Having to manually track that can add up to valuable hours that could have been spent on more urgent tasks. Furthermore, that manually-entered information can be lost.
Your nonprofit could also resort to using a database program like Excel. With a program like this, you can create a database that allows you to maintain attendance in a single source program. While this is better than pencil and paper for tracking, an Excel database is still heavy on the amount of time required to create and process. Not to mention, this format covers just ONE aspect of event management. It does not cover registration or check-in.
Use An Effective And Efficient Software Program To Manage Event Attendees
When planning a nonprofit event, it is too easy to get bogged down in the details which take up time that could be better spent.
Using a software tool, like Attendance by FundEasy, offers your nonprofit the ability to expertly and professionally handle the complete event management for in-person and virtual events.
Attendance was designed by the nonprofit event planners who knew what was needed in nonprofit management software.
Using its set-up wizard, you’ll be able to set up your event in just minutes.
This software program allows you to have a customized registration where you collect all the information you need for your nonprofit event and follow-up.
A table chart wizard lays out your room and assigns guests to a table in seconds.
Attendance by FundEasy also includes, for every event, an event webpage that you can link to your nonprofit's website and any emails you send. All the information anyone would need to know about your event, including the ability to register, is located here, including a clickable map and an "add to calendar" button.
Utilizing the "social media '' aspect of enlisting supporters, Attendance takes that idea and makes it work in a streamlined and efficient way with Table Host and Team Captain options, depending on your style of event.
This allows your supporters to manage their guest list, send invitation emails, and register guests themselves. Plus, FundEasy’s Attendance is the only event management software designed for table-host style events, equipping hosts with unique capabilities to manage their guest lists online.
This aspect of Attendance is a real game changer in freeing up hours of the event planner's time.
There are so many more tools that Attendance offers the nonprofit event planner, and you can check them out here: Attendance Demo.
Final Thoughts
The impact for good that your nonprofit has can be life-changing for those individuals it reaches.
That is one of the reasons why it is so important that your nonprofit uses effective and efficient tools when executing an event.
“If your nonprofit can’t efficiently track attendees, those attendees will also think that you will not be able to handle donations efficiently.”
Attendees at an event will perceive the manner in which that event functions as a direct measure of how your nonprofit functions.
If your nonprofit can't efficiently track attendees, those attendees will also think that you will not be able to handle donations efficiently.
This may be the farthest thing from the truth, but it will be a perception that will be difficult to dispel.
Using a software program that makes tracking attendees efficient is also good P.R. for your nonprofit.
In addition, the information reported by a software program to measure attendance allows you to know your nonprofit engagement level and analyze what is working and what is not.
It will be easy to see what type of events have the best attendance, the highest revenue, and the best rate of acquiring new donors.
Tracking attendance is not just a mundane task associated with event planning, it is an essential and strategic tool that can strengthen your nonprofit's reach.
If you'd like to learn more about our Peer-to-Peer, Attendance, or Crowdfunding products, please reach out! We'd love to chat.
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Crystal Hoag
This article was inspired by our customers and written to encourage your fundraising efforts. Although we work with nonprofits and events daily, our team members are not Event Consultants. We encourage you to consult with your event consultant, executive team, and/or affiliate organization before making any major changes to your events.
