1) Livestream Speakers TED Style – Pick several topics that either impact your organization or community and invite subject matter experts to participate in a live virtual presentation. The first subject matter expert could be you or some others in your organization to talk about how the Coronavirus is impacting your mission or programs. With this being a virtual presentation make it clear to your experts that they can make their presentation from the comfort of their home. You will want to make sure that you tie each speaker to a specific call to action or donation opportunity for your organization.

2) Virtual Discussion / Town Hall – A good follow up to the speaker series would be to host a virtual town hall where you can take questions from people participating virtually. This is an excellent opportunity to be a valuable resource, talk about issues that are important to your organization or community and engage with people that can either be donors or advocates for your cause. This is a great way to create exposure for your organization and be a trusted community resource. 

3) Small-Group Fundraising – Compile a list of trusted donors, supporters, board members, influencers and volunteers and invite them to attend a virtual small group fundraising session. During the sessions talk about your organization’s current needs and take the opportunity to activate the participants into donating or using their network to encourage others to donate. This is also an excellent opportunity to create a specific campaign and utilize Peer to Peer fundraising to create a competition among your small group participants to see who can raise the most money.

4) Host A Virtual Happy Hour – COVID-19 has put a major cramp in just about everybody’s social life and people are craving any kind of social engagement. You can come to the rescue by hosting a virtual happy hour/networking event that can get people out of the social distancing rut. Give your Happy Hour a theme and invite people to dress up and have a drink in the comfort of their own home. Open the event by talking about your organization and then close it out by asking for a hosting tip.

Coming up with ideas can sometimes be the easy part. Implementing technology is a different story. We got you covered on the fundraising piece as Reason Funding can handle your donate pages and peer to peer campaign pages.

Zoom Meeting is your best option for setting up the speaker series and small groups. People can register. Your presenter can easily present their presentation and it can be recorded so others can view it later. Zoom does offer a Free version that allows for 100 participants and 40-minute meetings.

Other Livestream technologies include Facebook live, Vimeo and YouTube.

Back to recap our first paragraph. All of your fundraising events are canceled. The Coronavirus calendar is uncertain. If you don’t go online your organization will begin to flatline. You need to pivot from in-person to virtual.

The time to start is now.