Building a one-page event site for a non-profit

I’m a board member of a local non-profit called Health Connect of South Dakota. Like most non-profits, we have a few fundraisers throughout the year with one big fundraiser where we put most of our effort. That event is the Health & Safety Festival held in the fall, October 11th to be exact (formerly called The Family Fun Festival.) In previous years, we did not have an event Web site, but instead promoted through traditional means like fliers, billboards, radio, and print, plus Facebook of course.

I wanted to create a professional looking, one-page event Web site, but didn’t want to spend an entire weekend on the task. I reviewed five or six different platforms and decided to go with Strikingly. Within 30 minutes, I had our event site largely set up, with all the details and placeholders needed. Strikingly uses a freemium model, but as a non-profit, I’m going to skip the paid version entirely and live with the non-custom domain, which shows our patrons that we are frugal.

Strikingly has all the basic features we need to take donations via PayPal, preregister guests, collect newsletter sign-ups, and present our event details in a professional style. There are a handful of good templates, but everything is customizable.

Our Health & Safety Festival can proudly direct our sponsors and participants to our professional-looking event Web site. Since we didn’t spend any money, we can direct those same resources (budgeted at $300) into event marketing and community services. Plus, it looks far better than any Web site I would have been able to build from scratch.

Thanks, Strikingly.