New Classy Events: More Power and Flexibility for Your Fundraising

When you host a nonprofit event, it needs to successfully engage your audience, bring them in to support your initiative, generate revenue, and retain supporters for future events. Today, we’re proud to introduce the new Classy Events so you can ensure every event meets these goals.

Whether you’re planning a dinner, organizing a race, or hosting an annual gala, Classy Events will help you create beautiful events in minutes. From first click to event wrap-up, prepare to engage supporters, drive donations, sell tickets, and let your mission shine through.

Below, we unpack Classy Events and show you what’s included in the release, the different features that can level up your event, and how to start creating events today.

Take a Peek Inside

Classy Events is broken down into two main event types that any organization can use for their specific fundraising efforts: Registration with Fundraising and Ticketed Events. Depending on what the goals are for your specific event, each option has its own strength to support your organization.

Regardless of registrations or ticket purchases, each event type comes equipped with a prominent “Donate” button in case audiences want to support without attending or participating in the event.

Registration with Fundraising

Registration with Fundraising allows you to incorporate peer-to-peer fundraising directly into your event so attendees can raise money leading up to its start date. Mixing in this fundraising component with event registrations can not only help you meet your revenue goals, but go well beyond them.

While it works well with any event type, Registration with Fundraising is a great option for something that has people participate in an activity, such as a run/walk or polar plunge. They can ask their networks to show support for their involvement in this activity by donating to their personal fundraising pages.

Also, if a supporter can’t make the physical event, Registration with Fundraising can give them an option to virtually attend by fundraising wherever they are. For example, look at this dog adoption and raffle gala:

Ticketed Events

Ticketed Events operate as another way to engage your supporters beyond just asking for money. You have the power to orchestrate a free event, or charge for tickets if you choose. Either way, it’s a fresh way for them to get involved. Our online ticket sales for nonprofits feature makes it easy to sell tickets to supporters.

Like Registration with Fundraising, Ticketed Events can work well with any creative idea but is a good choice for something that people would attend, like this Sunday Brunch Bake-off:

Exploring What’s New

Both Registration with Fundraising and Ticketed Events have a robust lineup of features to help you level up your event. Chief among these features is an improved mobile experience that touches every area of an event from landing page through checkout.

Add Fundraising to Any Event

Blow through your revenue ceiling by adding a fundraising component to any event. You can customize a host of options that help you keep audiences engaged, drive donations, empower fundraisers, and generate serious income:

• Include donation appeals directly into the checkout flow
• Allow supporters to instantly create individual or team peer-to-peer fundraising pages
• Customize supporter touchpoints like milestone emails, social media, and text message sharing

Design Like a Pro

Engage your audiences with striking designs, and present your organization as modern, buttoned up, and polished. Take full advantage of the campaign designer features in Classy Events that allow for:

• Fully white-labeled event pages, fundraising pages, and emails that can be created in minutes
• Brand alignment across different campaign types and individual or team pages
• Advanced options for experienced designers

Ring ‘Em Up

We took a page from high-end ticketing checkout flows to provide you with a wide array of options to steward supporters to complete an order. On Classy Events, you can leverage these features to provide a better supporter experience with:

• A ticket reservation system that guarantees a user’s ticket once it’s added to the cart
• Group ticketing options
• Promotion or discount code options
• Apply promo codes to one, some, or all of your ticket types
• Add custom questions to your registration forms

Manage Everything

Classy Events helps you keep a 360-degree view on all aspects of your event, from attendee management to email follow-up. Keep the engine running smooth from start to finish with:

• Event marketing tools, like integrations with MailChimp, HubSpot, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud
• Real-time reporting of all transactions, attendees, side-by-side with fundraising pages and teams for registration with fundraising events
• Tools to edit attendee information
• The ability to seamlessly duplicate events and simultaneously host unlimited events
• Options to change ticket term from “tickets” to “entries” to “registrations” at any time

How to Use It

If you want to get in on the action and create a new Classy event today, it’s as easy as clicking a few buttons. Navigate to the fundraising tab in Classy, click the green “Create New” button, and then click either “Registration with Fundraising” or “Ticketed Event.”

Alternatively, you can create an event like this through the Classy Manager, which is still in beta. When you log into your Classy account, find the drop-down menu at the top right and select “Try the New Classy Manager.”

From there, it’s as easy as creating a new “Ticketed Event” or “Registration with Fundraising Event”:

Check out the video here that dives into a lot more of the details around Classy Events:

Otherwise, reach out to our in-house experts here at Classy to learn more.