A Restaurant’s Ultimate Guide to Writing Fundraiser Pages
Partnering with GroupRaise is a great way to fill up tables during slower hours. Nonprofit organizers send scheduling requests your way and you decide to confirm, modify, or deny. One of the ways we send qualified event requests over to you is with our search engine optimized pages.
But what can you do to improve this traffic flow and drive more requests to your restaurant? Setup your own fundraiser page with a link or button to route traffic directly to your GroupRaise Brand Page.
This article gives you ideas on how to make an effective fundraiser page. In exchange, what will you get?
- Rank #1 for the keyword “[your brand name] fundraiser”
- More website traffic
- Reputation for having an effective give back program
- Higher percentage of traffic that turns into actual meal events
- More restaurant orders and revenue
The key takeaway from this blog post is: Not everyone who comes across your website’s fundraiser page will be a nonprofit organizer, let alone one who has a convenient date and time ready to go.
So you want whoever has influence with a nonprofit, even just a friend of the organizer, to walk away with the key details. To do that, you need to keep something in mind. Read on to learn what it is.
Sell Your Fundraising Program With Nonprofit Organizers In Mind
You should first appeal to your customers. With fundraiser pages, your customers can quickly turn into nonprofit organizers once they are aware of your give back program.
What are the benefits that motivate organizers to send event requests? We’ll list them in order of priority.
- Convenience of setup, as little time invested (cost and hassle)
- Supporters have a good time together (social experience)
- Amount of donations (money)
- Consistency with nonprofit mission (identity)
- Gaining reputation
A word on identity. If your restaurant does something that violates a principle of the nonprofit, they won’t work with you and you wouldn’t want to work with them anyway. The more your restaurant “fits” with a nonprofit, the more you’ll want to focus on them and them on you. A good example of this is a vegan restaurant and an animal rights group.
Pick Where The Eyes Go First
What’s a bad menu? There are many kinds. One type is cluttered. We’ve all seen menus that were hard to read because there was too much going on. A good menu focuses the guest on the most important items. Likewise, a good fundraiser page focuses the visitor on the most important details.
The truth about attention is this: You can structure where it goes, in advance of it coming to you. I’ll leave visual design to you, but here are the most important details, in order of importance:
- How easy and fast is it to set up a meal event?
- How much money will they make and how soon will they make it?
- How do they get started [Hint: it’s the link to your GroupRaise Brand Page!]
Finally, people don’t know as much about how restaurant fundraisers include online ordering, catering, delivery, take out, and pick up. If applicable to your brand, you should highlight this possibility for people.
Let’s dig into each piece.
Convenience
You may be surprised, the most important detail is not money, but convenience. People should know it takes under 5 minutes to review a restaurant partner’s calendar and send a request online. It can take as little as one minute. They’ll hear back on the request within a week.
Money
It can be tempting to bury important details to a scanning, distractible eye. For example: “You will receive 15% of all supporter-purchased orders!” I know that sentence is simple. But try this:
- “Get 15% of all orders!”
Or:
- “15% give back”
I did say I’d leave the web design to your team, but be generous with the space around the key details. All we want to do is focus the eyes of people with influence over nonprofits. We want them to see the core elements of your give back offer.
Finally, let people know they’ll get the check in as little as a month after the event happens. You can also say there’s a 20-attendee minimum and link them to the third key element, how you and GroupRaise help them promote the event to rack up RSVPs.
Easy promotion
Social media is intimidating to most people, including business professionals. Let people know they’ll receive tested promotional tools once a date and time is confirmed to take a load off their plate. The content is customized to the meal event. For a typical 20-person minimum, 4 nonprofit supporters would each need to secure 5 RSVPs. This can be done in person but especially well with social media.
Learn more about it here: How to promote your restaurant’s fundraising for more requests.
Dig in to donate without dining in
If you offer options other than dine in, let people know, with a link to more information below. Catering, take out, curbside pick up, and delivery–make all these options clear. The more orders, the better. Plenty of people want to help charity but may not be able to make it in person. That brings us to the next topic.
The Call To Action
Put several buttons and links on the fundraiser page that bring people to your GroupRaise brand page. Even when a deal is clearly beneficial, people really do need a visible action to move the ball forward.
Make your calls to action:
- Action oriented
- Beneficial
- Clear
For example:
- “Schedule an event in 5 minutes or less”
- “Reserve a date and time now”
A Word About Content Length And Knowledge
Fundraiser pages need to be:
- Easy to navigate
- Clear and concise
Concise does not mean short, it means length adjusted to quality of information. Fundraiser pages tend to be short, but not informative. Nonprofit organizers need more.
On the other hand, fundraiser pages tend to be non-concise in another way. This happens with guidelines–just dumping them in. Most fundraiser guidelines are like block quotes, no one reads them really. Make them easier on the eyes.
Bring fundraiser guidelines into one page and let good navigation handle the rest. Nonprofit organizers want more good information. Help them have it with fewer clicks.
You can also use this as an opportunity to be exclusive. Tell visitors what kind of guests you focus on. For example: Is your food for comfort or is it healthy? Let people know what types of nonprofits you work with and the method of proof (a W-9) that you accept. Tell them a blurb about why your restaurant supports nonprofits. Let people know that you don’t accept discounts at the event.
Speaking of more information, use past successful fundraisers to generate more. Show visitors that they’ll have fun if they set up a meal. Post a photo from a past fundraiser at the restaurant. It should have these elements:
- Plenty of people
- Who look happy
- Sitting next to food on the table
The photo should not have much empty space, it should really be zoomed in to the dine-in table experience.
Send readers to helpful places with links to informative pages, such as:
- A video showing how nonprofits can schedule a fundraiser in 1 minute or less.
- The blog post you commissioned with GroupRaise about what your fundraisers are like and how they work.
- An article to answer tax questions that nonprofits may have.
Make The Obvious Cost-Benefit Analysis Clear To Nonprofits
A nonprofit organizer decides to set up a meal event based on the benefits and costs. The benefits are various, but the main one is money. Low-cost fundraisers are convenient. Make it clear that your restaurant fundraisers provide ample donations as well as food, with easy scheduling and post-event payment processing.
Focus on the food
As a bonus on focusing eyes on what matters most, a restaurant is a restaurant. It’s pretty much about the food. Remind people how delicious your menu is wherever it is easy for you to do so. This is part of how supporters will have a good time at the event. The other part is about socializing, people like talking with people. Thread these two elements into your fundraiser page.
With a clear emphasis on what matters most to nonprofit organizers, you can attract them and supporters to your restaurant. Nonprofits want convenient scheduling, that’s a big part of why GroupRaise attracts so many partner restaurants and nonprofits. It is incredibly easy to book events and process payments.
Setup buttons and links to your GroupRaise brand page so nonprofits fill your tables fast!
