Branford Rotary

Branford Rotary is part of Rotary International which is a 1.2 million member service organization around the world. It does everything from fighting polio to helping families in need at the local level. 

I came across Eventgroove because our Rotary club was trying to figure out a way to help out restaurants during the early part of the pandemic. They have obviously been suffering a great deal. People weren’t able to go in, they were only doing takeout. And these are important small businesses–the heart of any community. 

Over time we realized we needed to do more. So we came up with the idea of doing a raffle. We had been in touch with 34 restaurants in town and we thought, “Well why don’t we leverage that connection we’ve made with them?” And so we came up with an idea of getting $100 gift cards from each restaurant and then combining those and raffling them off so the grand prize was $3400. I did a lot of research. I came across different companies that could do this sort of thing, and I basically landed on Eventgroove because I felt like they had the most features that I wanted to use. 

It was a simple platform–easy to understand, and the pricing model, as I understood it, was pretty good. My relationship with Eventgroove was actually positive from the beginning. They were very responsive, first of all. So, when I would call them with questions, they had a couple different people I would end up talking to. They were both great, and very friendly. They would get back to you right away. 

The things that Eventgroove allowed us to do, for instance, putting up our own logos and setting up our own landing page–and you don’t want to have to explain, “This is how you do it,”–I didn’t have to walk them through it. The interface that Eventgroove uses allowed them to walk through it. 

When we had Help Out Takeout running we raised about $70,000 or something for restaurants, and for people who lost their jobs. We would buy gift cards from restaurants, and turn those over to our community services and they would give them to people in need. By the summer, peoples’ enthusiasm to donate had waned because people thought, “It’s getting warmer, people will be going more to restaurants.” So it dried up a bit. So we had to come up with a new way to continue to raise money, because we knew restaurants weren’t healthy, and the winter would eventually be coming, and that it was going to get much worse. You couldn’t do what you traditionally do for a raffle–you can’t go sell them door to door. You had to sell them online, and Eventgroove allowed us to do that. 

Translating everything we do online was a challenge, I think, mentally for a lot of people. What Eventgroove allowed me to do was to interact in ways that almost replicated these in person interactions. 

One of the things that is really important for us is to find out how effective everything we’re doing in terms of marketing is. So we’re trying to find out if the posters we put up are effective, we’re trying to find out if the ads we put on Facebook are effective. Eventgroove allows you to use Google Analytics, it allows you to use Facebook pixel codes, it allows you to use QR codes–so we were allowed to use all that through Eventgroove and figure out which ads were working, which posters were better and so I could decide, ok, we’re selling more tickets when I run this ad on Facebook than we are with this one. So, Eventgroove did a lot to allow us to sell out in 10 days–we sold $40,000 in tickets in 10 days (most of them online). 

Based on what we learned the first time around, I would use Eventgroove again. There’s no reason not to, but I also would probably use them for the things that we did. We used them for printing our posters, we used them for the tickets. Eventgroove just gives you an easy way into that world, and you can, in a sense, compete with the larger organizations, the for-profit organizations now because they give you the ability to do that. 

I think every nonprofit should take a look at it. You may or may not choose to do it, but I think every nonprofit would be wise to look at Eventgroove because they can literally change the way any of your organizations raise money, and raise awareness.