How do you run the successful fundraising Walk or Run for a cause during the pandemic

If you can’t bring everyone together at a single place to run for a cause, you can bring everyone from anywhere to join any time.

We have been helping out the fundraising activities such as Virtual Run and Walk for charity causes during the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, the virtual run had started prior to the pandemic but it has become the trend (or rather the only choice) during the pandemic. It will definitely continue beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

There are some pro factors with the virtual runs. First off, the participants can run at their own flexible timing at their preferred places. Secondly, the participants can be from anywhere across the border and anyone from anywhere can participate for a cause they want to support. Thirdly, it doesn’t have major logistics issues in terms of requiring a large public space, emergency medical team, applying the permit to allow the road blocking, etc. during the race. More importantly, anyone or a small team can initiate it for a greater cause that can have an impact as big as a large scale physical event!

Of course, there are also a lot of great points with the physical run and the great experience and inspiration we can get from the physical events cannot be replaced.

So, how do you kick start the virtual run? And what tools do you need to run the event?

We would like to share how you can successfully run a virtual run or walk from the experience we have learned from helping our organizers.

We will be sharing the following 6 steps that are essentials.

1. Start with the goal
2. An Engaging Event Title, Tagline and #Hashtag
3. Poster Design
4. Recognition
5. Event Website and Registration
6. Payment Collection

1. Start with the Goal

Start with the goal – what is the objective? Is it for fundraising? Or raising awareness for a cause?

The clarity of the goal gives your team to create an effective marketing campaign and strategy to reach out to the demographic of the participants who will be interested to join your cause.

Here is an example of the goal from one of our clients – Kidney Dialysis Foundation, Singapore which has run the well engaged Virtual Walk successfully.

‘Got To Walk’ is a virtual walkathon that was first initiated in 2020, with the aim of creating awareness for the importance of kidney health, and to raise funds to sustain KDF’s efforts to provide subsidised dialysis for the poor. The event saw more than 1,200 sign-ups and raised a total of $100,000 over a span of two weeks.

2. Have an Engaging Title, Tagline, #HashTag

An engaging title, tagline and design really matters to attract the people to sign up and motivate them to join your cause for a purpose!

We are the #HashTag social media generation and it’s where everyone’s eyeballs are.

3. Poster Design

You can easily create a great poster design by using the simple and easy tools like

• Canva https://www.canva.com/
• Adobe Spark https://spark.adobe.com/
• Design Bold https://www.designbold.com/
• Or Apple Keynote or PowerPoint

If you require some images to be used in the design, you can also get the loyalty free images from online website like unsplash. [To know more about searching free images, read here]

4. Recognition

Recognition for participant is super important. For a lot of people, it may be the first-time participation in the run or walk event. They would definitely like to collect something for memories of good deed.

Everyone likes to be proud of completing the run. You can consider a couple of things below for the recognition of their participation in your cause.

1. Finisher medal
2. Finisher Teeshirt
3. Certificate or e-Certificate [EventNook registration platform can help you to design the personalized e-certificate and sending e-certificate to all participants via mass email]

5. Event Website and Registration

The online registration will be a critical component to manage the participants with series of activities throughout the event during pre-event, on the event days and post-event.

And it’s also the easiest task as there are comprehensive online event registration software like us – EventNook that can provide you to easily create the event registration and website within minutes if you already have the event information ready to publish.

For registration form, you will need to consider a few things below:

1. What details of the participant do you require to collect? Name, Email, etc?
2. Do you need to collect the shipping address? – Yes, if you are sending a Finisher Medal to the participants who completed the run.
3. Do you need to collect additional information for event planning such as How do they know about your event?

6. Payment Collection

If you need to collect payment for accepting donation or participation fee, EventNook online event registration platform has integrated online payment which you can easily plugin. EventNook payment integration with major payment gateways such as Stripe and PayPal offers a variety of payment options such as Visa, Master, Amex, JCB, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Grab Pay, AliPay, etc. The payment will directly proceed to your payment gateway account in real-time.

If you are planning to host a virtual or physical run, our EventNook team will be happy to share more on how to make your event registration management seamless for the whole end-to-end process and provide a free consultation to kick start your event registration.

Just drop us an email to hello@eventnook.com.

about eventnook

EventNook is based in sunny Singapore and we have empowered events from 21 countries and counting. We have been supporting a range of events from various organizations – small non-profit organisations to top brands such as Google, IBM, EY, Deloitte, etc.

If you are planning to organize events and looking for the right event registration management solution, please contact us [EventNook – Contact Us] for a free trial and consultation.