5 Tips for Marketing Your Charity Golf Tournament Online

For nonprofits, building a strong online presence is a key part of effectively raising mission-critical funds and activating community support. When it comes to your charity golf tournament, a digital strategy is crucial for attracting golfers and selling sponsorships to make the event a success.

Online marketing is not only cost-effective, but it expands your organization’s reach beyond traditional mailed invitations and posted flyers. These five tips can help maximize your golf tournament’s online presence:

1. Use golf tournament management software.

Using a software platform built just for golf makes it simple to promote your tournament, especially when it includes a custom event registration website. This makes sharing the event with supporters as simple as sharing a link via email, social media, SMS, or push notifications.

GolfStatus recommends using golf event management software to:

• Reach avid golfers in your area looking for charity tournaments to play in
• Collect golfer and sponsor information for further donor stewardship and invitations to other fundraising events and subsequent golf tournaments

• Offer the option for people to make a donation, even if they can’t play in the tournament
• Allow supporters to follow along on live leaderboards
• Connect with your organization and learn more about your cause

The right tech tool makes organizing and marketing your golf tournament simple and efficient.

2. Optimize your organization’s website for accessibility and user-friendliness.

Your nonprofit’s website is the hub of your digital presence. And while you likely update content regularly, do you consider the user’s experience? When prospective golf tournament attendees and sponsors visit your website, can they easily navigate through the site to find what they’re looking for?

Accessibility and user-friendliness should be priorities for the best possible experience for all visitors, but also to increase your site’s SEO value, and ultimately, your organization’s reach for fundraising events like your golf tournament.

A powerful nonprofit website builder can help you implement these best practices so your website is as user-friendly as possible:

• Prioritize accessibility. Add alt text to images, avoid flashing colors and illegible text, and properly use headings to organize content. You can also use high-contrast colors in the site’s design, avoid abbreviations and misspellings that might cause screen readers to mispronounce words, and use captions for images with embedded text.
• Reduce load speeds.According to Double the Donation, laggy load speed is the driver behind a staggering 32% increase in website bounce rates. Speed your website up by reducing unnecessary code in the backend of your CMS and optimizing image sizes for the web.
• Ensure your site is mobile-friendly.Over 60% of all web traffic comes from mobile devices and 92% of web surfers access the internet using their smartphones. Your website should be responsive; that is, automatically resize and reformat for viewing on any size screen.

3. Leverage your social media presence.

Use your organization’s social channels to spread the word about your golf tournament and invite people to get involved. Prioritize the platforms where you have the strongest presence and can reach your target audience. If you have the resources available, consider running targeted ads to broaden your reach. You can focus your ad’s audience by demographics, interests, geographic location, age, and other factors to hone in on the folks most likely to play in or sponsor your charity golf tournament. Make sure any social media posts direct users back to your event’s registration website so they can get involved as soon as they hear about it.

Social media is also a great place to recognize sponsors of your golf tournament and publicly thank them for their support. This can prompt other businesses to get involved, so be sure to include the link to your event website where they can purchase a sponsorship, register a team, or make a donation in support of your cause.

4. Use Google Ad Grants.

Make the most out of this free resource: the Google Google Ad Grants program gives nonprofits up to $10,000 of premium real estate atop the Google results page every month! This can be a boon for registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations to not only market your golf event, but get even more visibility for your cause online.

If you’re already taking advantage of a Google Ad Grant, run a campaign around your charity golf tournament in the months and weeks leading up to the event date. As soon as you have a date set for next year, consider running a new campaign to get it on supporters’ radars as soon as possible.

If not, don’t wait to get started! Either way, you may want to consider working with a Google Ad Grants agency if you need help deciding the best keywords to target for your campaign and ensure your organization complies with Google’s rules.

5. Segment your audience to target your invitations.

Your donor database is a gold mine of information; it’s just a matter of segmenting it properly. A one-size-fits-all approach may not be the best digital strategy to garner support for your golf tournament, so drill down further and divide the records into useful chunks.

There are a number of data points you can use to segment your donor data for different promotional email campaigns, including:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Giving capacity
• Giving history
• Participation in events
• Volunteer history

Next, craft targeted marketing messages that appeal to each of your desired segments. For example, you might invite a supporter to register a team to play in the tournament that’s happening at a golf course in their community. Separately, you could make a more focused appeal to a high-capacity donor that previously supported your gala for a donation to support the tournament.

The Bottom Line

Marketing your charity golf tournament online is necessary for a successful, lucrative event that raises money for an important cause. Whether it’s through golf event management software, your organization’s website, social media, online ads, or targeted email campaigns, your nonprofit can leverage its digital presence to attract players and sponsors for a lucrative golf fundraiser.