How To Fundraise Online
Congratulations! You’ve made it and now with our 6 steps on how to fundraise online guide in hand, you’ll be sure to supercharge your business and market your brand with fundraising! This checklist is based on the success of our current partners using our platform – vendors just like you who are looking for new ways to market and grow their sales.
Our team further expanded this guide with inputs from our own experiences, experiments and trials running campaigns for growing our own business. The steps in this guide are 100% practical, coherent and results oriented.
Shop My Fundraising, an online fundraising platform, offers vendors the ability to go completely online and run many fundraising stores at the same time. As a business owner or marketing professional, you know that every business relies on efficient marketing for robust growth. Helping your community raise money is now part of the modern B2C marketing strategy. That’s why you’ll need a guide on how to fundraise online effectively and efficiently to achieve optimal results.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
What Can I Sell?
Vendors That Are Already Winning
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- Bakeries
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- Cheese Distributors
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- Chocolatiers
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- Coffee Roasters
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- Gardening
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- Product Distributors
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- Snack Companies
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- Food Distributors
How To Maximize Order Impact
Small orders don’t raise much money and don’t make you much profit. The answer is to set a minimum order price.
How To Set A Minimum Sale Price
We recommend selling larger pack sizes or grouping products together rather than selling a one only pizza for example.
DO THIS
INSTEAD OF THIS
How To Fundraise Online
Why You Need an Online Fundraising Platform
Most companies who don’t have an online platform to execute their fundraising find it to be a lot of work. Imagine getting a surprise order and not being prepared for it right in the middle of your busy season.
Then there’s the headaches of chasing down a cheque in the right amount. What if there’s a price increase that wasn’t communicated and yet they sold 100 cases? Or if all of a sudden, you’re shorted and can’t get a product? Then what happens? You and your team are always reacting instead of being proactive. We created Shop My Fundraising show that we can show small business owners how to fundraise online.
A General Overview on How To Fundraise Online
- Start the campaign whenever they want and run it for 2 – 3 weeks max., longer campaigns don’t necessarily result in more sales. A motivated team that is focused will result in more sales, more on that later on.
- End the campaign on a Monday or Tuesday, schools for example will always get more sales if you end the sales on a weekday. We have found that you can boost your sales by another 15 – 25%.
- Remember, you’re the wholesaler and your fundraising organization is the retailer, and just like a good wholesaler, you’re going to bulk ship all your products to a location of their choice or have them pickup at your place of business. See the quick overview section on this page “Why Start Fundraising” for more information on how to fundraise online.
- Our distribution reports will make it easy for the fundraising organization to execute the final delivery of their products to their supporters.
Example of What Your Store Will Look Like
We customize these stores to feature your brand, click here to find out more on how to fundraise online.
How We Make It Easy To Manage Your Fundraising Business
Our campaign management portal is designed to be your CRM for your fundraising business. Stay organized as you scale your fundraising business by logging in all the campaigns that your running.
You can sort the campaigns by start date, end date, delivery date or campaign timeline. Download all the data for future follow up campaigns. Learn more about the features of our campaign management portal and how to fundraise online.
Information You Need To Collect To Launch a Campaign
Collect all the campaign data upfront when they sign up and keep it organized in our campaign portal.
- Start and end date of the campaign
- Distribution date, time and location
- Fundraising coordinator and their contact information
- What their fundraising goals are and what they’re raising money for.
- Team logo
- Team member names for sales tracking
How To Collect Your Campaign Information
Your Website;
- Create a fundraising page on your website as well as a form asking for all
the campaign information for them to fill out. - Or they can simply download a pdf on your website, or you can send them a
pdf for them to fill out and send back.
Our Marketplace;
- Once you create a free marketplace listing, you’re prospects will be able to book new campaigns directly on your listing page.
- Click here to checkout our marketplace and how to fundraise online.
Why Shop My Fundraising Platform Is The Industry Leader
How We Track Sales By Team Member
We build you a pop-up store for each of your fundraising campaigns. No more technical headaches! No need for your supporters to have to login or enter in codes. That’s how to fundraise online! Learn more about the tracking features and how to fundraise online.
- We have the ability to track 2000 members.
- Easily add the names of each team member in our dashboard
- No need to login or enter codes to be able to track the sales of each team member.
- Tracking the sales of each team member makes distribution a breeze.
Every store has a “How It Works” section so your supporters know how easy it is to shop on your store. There’s a dropdown box on the checkout page for under 25 team members and it automatically converts to a search box when you have more than 25 members.
Fundraising Reporting
Our reporting helps you manage every aspect of your fundraising business; everything from distribution reports, automatic reports, production reports and campaign progress reports. With all these reports, we make the “how to fundraise online” really easy!
Check out the reporting features by clicking here and how to fundraise online.
- Stay in control over your inventory and forecast during the campaign so you
can be ready when the campaign closes with our inventory report. - We’ve built in automatic reporting to keep your fundraising coordinators up
to date with their progress. - Our distribution report shows each team member, their supporters and what
they sold. It’s also a great report to let the sellers know who to thank and who
they need to follow up with during the campaign.
How You Can Manage Your Stores
Since we build you a new store for every campaign you run, you have the ability to control your products, pricing and commission independently. That means that you can launch a new campaign with new pricing and commissions if there’s a price increase. Or turn off a product if there’s suddenly a supply issue. You have complete control over your products. That’s how to fundraise online!
Check out more details of how you can manage your products by clicking here.
- Manage your products independently on each of your stores.
- Set commissions per product in either $ or %.
- Turn off products in real time in case of a supply issue.
- Beautifully showcase your products on our store.
- List your upsells and cross sales to promote more sales.
How Payments Work Online
All sales are processed online and go directly into your Stripe account minus our platform fee. Once the campaign closes, you’ll have to pay the commissions to the fundraising organization, we recommend paying them at time of distribution by cheque or e-transfer. Click here to see our pay per transaction pricing and how to fundraise online.
- Shop My Fundraising charges a 4% processing fee per transaction. We don’t
get paid until you get paid. - Other than our onboarding fee there’s nothing you have to pay moving
forward except the processing fee per transaction. - We’ve partnered with Stripe, the world’s leader for providing secure online
transactions. - Stripe charges you a processing fee of 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.
Your total cost ranges from 7 – 7.5% per transaction including both fees. - Stripe is one of the best, most reliable and most popular payment processors in the world.
- Stripe accepts all major credit cards.
- We setup your account so that all payments minus our platform fee goes directly into your Stripe account.
- Stripe holds your payments for 3 – 7 days. You’ll start with 7 day terms for new accounts and it usually goes down to 3 days once you have 3 months of sales history with them.
- Your customers will see your company name on the credit card receipt.
Learn more about Stripe by clicking here.
Here what you can do to reduce your fees;
- We suggest passing along a processing fee of 4% per transaction to each of your customers to absorb some of those costs.
- Make a note in your FAQ section that you have those fees so that you can give more money back to the fundraising organization.
- 90% of our vendors are passing along this fee and haven’t had any issues.
- If you do end up passing along those fees, your total costs will be reduced to 3 – 3.5% on top line sales.
Next step is to plan for these fees and build it into your pricing and decide how much commissions you can give to the fundraising organization. See the next section for a breakdown of potential profits with and without the processing fees.
How Much Commissions Should We Give?
There isn’t a right answer as every business is different, however the more you can give and the more success your teams can have, the more they will want to work with you again. Best practice is to try and match or come close to retail pricing. People will purchase because they are supporting a cause, not because of the price.
- Our platform allows you to set the commissions per product in either $ or %
- You can make pricing and commission adjustments on each of your stores in one simple to use Adjustment page located on your dashboard.
- Changes to these prices or commissions will only be reflected on the store you’re working on, not all your stores at the same time.
What Is Your Wholesale Price?
You set the wholesale price and let your retailers, in this case, your fundraising organization sell at retail and make their margin.
Industry Average
Vendor charges 80% of retail price.
Fundraising Organization – Profits 20% of retail price.
Suggestion
Set a minimum overall commission and very your commissions on all your products. When you’re asked how much you give, you can say you give a range like 20 – 25% based on which products are purchased. This is how to fundraise online to maximize your sales.
Profit Breakdown #1 – Not Passing The 4% Fee To The Customer
Retail Price = $100
Actual Price = $55
Commission = 20% Margin
Platform Fee = 4%
Stripe Fee = 2.9% + $0.30
Profit = $17.80 or 17.8%
Profit Breakdown #2 – Passing The 4% Fee To The Customer
Retail Price = $100 + 4% = $104
Actual Price = $55
Commission = 20% Margin
Platform Fee = 4%
Stripe Fee = 2.9% + $0.30
Profit = $21.52 or 21.5%
Helping The Team Achieve Their Goal
The common misconception is that once you take your business online, you’ll be able to “set it and forget it” and it should just work on its own. The overall achievement of the fundraising group is going to come down to how motivated they are. Here’s where your communication will help them achieve their goal that they set.
SET A TEAM GOAL … THEN BREAK IT DOWN
TIP: Always have them focused on selling cases not dollar amounts.
Here’s an example of how to set a team goal.
- You can determine your average profit per case by adding all up all the profits for each case and then dividing by the number of total products.
- Asking them to focus on case sales eliminates the focus on money spent. It allows everyone the opportunity to support the campaign.
“A goal that is specific, measurable, realistic, and personally meaningful can help us keep on track and change (or maintain) our behaviors,” says Dr. Marina Milyavskaya, an associate professor of psychology at Carleton University and principal investigator of the university’s Goal Pursuit and Self-Regulation Lab. “Goals help keep us accountable, leading us to attain desired outcomes.”
Read more about the psychology around setting goals and how to achieve them by clicking here.
- Adding team member tracking links is a good way to keep people accountable.
- Our reporting will show the campaign progress along with the leaderboard of all the top sellers throughout the campaign.
How To Maximize Your Sales On Every Campaign
Our Platform Features That Help Grow Your Sales.
- Easy to share on social media, text and email
- Countdown timer to communicate urgency
- Automated reporting to the fundraising coordinator
- Sales tracking by team member to promote competition as well as accountability to the team goal
- Upsell your products to promote higher margin items
- Cross sell your products to add more cases
- We promote your business on our marketplace
Tips That We Recommend To Help Grow Your Sales.
- Always have them set a goal and have a purpose. Show them how they can achieve their goal with the goal setting example above.
- Regular communication tips to the fundraising coordinator to help support them. We do send them automatic reporting but its also a good idea to check in with them to see if they need any support or answer any questions.
- Assure them that over 50% of their sales will happen in the last 5-7 days so not to worry but just keep pushing.
- Have them share the link with their friends and family early on and let them know that simply sharing the link is not enough, they need to follow up and remind their supporters. The distribution report will show who purchased from them and who they still need to follow up with.
- Give product recommendations for them to share with their team. “Did you know that ___ is not currently available in retail?”
- Have the team create an internal competition
- You can do rewards for 1st, 2nd, 3rd or you could also do a
buy/sell 5 cases and be entered into a draw. - Have them come up with a reward
Final Steps To Complete Your Campaign
- Provide an additional distribution report and a commission check sent out with the driver.
- Follow up with the fundraising coordinator to confirm delivery details and volunteers required.
Opportunity to hand out additional coupons for those who purchased to re-purchase at your store. - Send out email reminders to all the supporters or have your fundraising coordinator to do that.
- Place or produce your order for delivery from our inventory final report that is automatically sent to
you after the campaign closes.
Ask For Feedback – Follow up 2-3 weeks after the delivery to get feedback and ask for a testimonial.
