There are many occasions when your nonprofit organization may need to use a waiver. For example, fundraising campaigns with an event component like a 5K pose a risk for participants. To help protect your organization from legal liability, it’s best practice to have these participants sign a waiver.
However, this isn’t the only benefit that waivers can offer. Specifically, digital waivers can simplify processes and provide valuable information and insights for your nonprofit. This brings long-term benefits like improved donor engagement and retention, helping you further your mission.
In this guide, we’ll explore the top reasons why you should start using digital waivers to both protect your nonprofit and promote its success. Let’s get started!
Better supporter experiences
One of the most well-known benefits of digital waivers is their convenience. Because supporters can access them from anywhere at any time, it’s much less of a hassle to complete the waiver—for the supporter and your nonprofit.
In particular, online waivers can boost convenience and simplify the event check-in process by:
- Allowing off-site signing. As mentioned, supporters can sign waivers from anywhere, even before arriving at your event. This gives them more time to read over the document and understand what they’re agreeing to. Additionally, supporters who have trouble reading the document can increase the text size, use a screen reader, or even translate the content into a different language.
- Reducing check-in chaos. When supporters can complete waiver signing before events, you can drastically reduce lines and check-in desk pile-ups on the event day. However, try to have measures in place for any supporter who forgets to sign in advance. Have volunteers post scannable QR codes that link to your waiver for smartphone users or set up waiver kiosks with tablets and mobile apps.
- Enhancing security. You never want supporters to sign and submit a form and then worry about what will happen to their information. With paper waivers, they may wonder who will handle the waiver and whether it will be safely stored. Digital waiver providers like Smartwaiver, however, have tools that automatically store and back up waivers in a secure database, encrypt data, and allow you to set role-based permissions.
- Fast and reliable call-back. If your supporters need to sign a waiver, chances are, it’s for a reason. Sooner or later, you’re going to need to call back that waiver at a moment’s notice. Digital waiver solutions offer enhanced online dashboards that make call-back easy and reliable.
Digital waiver storage isn’t just better for security reasons. It can also save your staff time since they won’t need to worry about organizing and filing the waivers away. And if an incident does happen and you need to pull a specific waiver, you can find it in seconds using the searchable database.
Access to key supporter insights
Using your data for marketing purposes is one of the smartest moves you can make. Using your attendee data, you can build more effective outreach campaigns to engage, retain, and acquire more support. For example, if a supporter attends the same type of event again and again, you might reach out to them to see if you can recruit them as a volunteer.
Here are some of the data points you can gather from digital waivers, along with ideas on how to use them:
- Age: Analyze the average age of your supporters or identify key age groups. You can use these findings to tailor your programming and messaging to the preferences of those generations. If most of your supporters are young people, you might place a heavier focus on social media marketing, social justice, and community-based advocacy efforts.
- Gender: Assess the diversity of your supporter base—is it equal or skewed more toward a certain gender? If you notice a gender imbalance, it may be worth revisiting your communication methods and offerings to attract a more balanced audience (e.g., starting a women-led initiative).
- Location: Note whether the majority of participants come from around the same area as your nonprofit, or whether you have a good portion of tourists or other visitors partaking in events. This can reveal how far your reach extends and help you target advertisements and other messaging more accurately.
- Attendance history: Take a look at repeat participants versus first-time attendees. If you have plenty of first-time visitors but few follow-ups, adjust your communication strategy to draw in repeat attendees. For example, send emails thanking them for coming to the event, ask them to complete a feedback form, and recommend ways to get more involved.
- Referral: In addition to basic contact information, consider asking participants where they heard about your nonprofit (online, word-of-mouth, advertisement, etc.). This is a great way to measure the impact of various strategies and/or communication channels. Allocate more resources toward those top-performing channels, and strengthen those that are underperforming.
Tracking trends with these data points can help you create donor segments, or groups of donors based on shared characteristics. For example, you may segment them by age or special interests. Segmentation allows for personalization at scale as you can create messages tailored to entire groups that still feel targeted and relevant to individual recipients.
Opportunities to boost personalization
In addition to any other marketing and communications strategies you may implement, focus on personalizing communications for each supporter. Consider:
- Launching tailored email campaigns that correlate with supporters’ interests or engagement histories, which you can infer from event attendance history.
- Sending event invitations that are relevant to the supporter’s past event attendance, demographic preferences, and geographic location.
- Communicating through preferred channels, which supporters may indicate if you include referral questions on your survey (e.g., more actively engaging followers on social media after learning it’s your top-performing channel).
- Sharing personalized recommendations of next steps, other ways to get involved, resources from your website, and more based on inferred interests.
- Sending milestone or birthday greetings using data from waivers (e.g., the anniversary of their first interaction with your nonprofit at a fundraising event).
As Double the Donation’s guide to donor stewardship explains, personalizing your communications with supporters is a powerful way to develop relationships with them, fostering connections that will last far longer than any single event. This is why it’s so important to extract online waiver data and infuse it into your event invitations, updates, and thank-you messages.
More effective future event planning
Waiver data can support more than just your marketing efforts. It can also guide your future event planning efforts by helping you:
- Prioritize top-performing events by pinpointing those with the highest turnout.
- Effectively allocate resources to your most-attended events.
- Improve volunteer scheduling by identifying peak check-in hours.
- Collect and incorporate feedback from attendees by adding fields to the waiver and reaching out with post-event surveys using their contact information.
- Understand which communication channels to focus your event promotion efforts on.
It’s key to use a comprehensive, capable waiver tool rather than the first free online waiver signing software you find on Google. Along with being more secure, reliable, and scalable, the top tools also offer more extensive customization. This way, you can insert custom fields into your waiver to get the answers and information you need from event attendees.
Digital waivers streamline event registration and offer valuable insights to enhance future events and interactions with supporters. This data is crucial to deepening relationships with supporters and securing support that lasts beyond a single event.
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This article was contributed by Logan Lewis, Content Coordinator at Smartwaiver, the leading digital waiver service trusted by thousands of organizations around the world.