Club Funding – How to raise club funds online
Raising funds and donations for your club is HARD! Raiding funds for new sports and clubs is even harder!
in the traditional ways, based on your local community your sports club would have a system that has developed over many years and be integrated into the local community have local government support, schools would be connected or involved and local business would be behind your club and support it but if your club or sport is new, that’s not so easy.
Also with many new sports spreading across a larger distance these community ties are more difficult to develop and maintain. Events to raise funds require commitment, organisation, coordination, discipline, constant promotion, the gathering of info and the administration of funds. That sucks.
We found this to be impossible to make any meaningful impact or progress so we needed a solution.
We created our club draw here: https://costagaels.com/draw
This draw allows us to gather signups via our website or mobile, through a secure payment gateway and have subscribers confirm an automatic reoccurring payment every month and then have the funds transferred to our linked bank account every few days. From the payment gateway we produce full and legal invoices for submission and declaration, all transactions are tracked and managed online and all we have to do is draw a winner each month!
Here’s how it works and what you need.
REQUIREMENTS
A website built on WORDPRESS
A bank account and your details
WP Simple Pay plugin (We bought the €149 a year version. Worth every penny but for individual clubs the €99 version should be grand).
HOW TO GET STARTED
The hardest part of this process is the same as everything else, its in the integration. Once this is done, its done! So lets get started.
First login to Stripe to connect the club bank account.
Heres the steps:
https://support.stripe.com/questions/add-a-bank-account-for-payouts
Next you need to connect your WP Simple Pay plugin to Stripe so open a new tab, login to your WordPress website, install the plugin and activate it.
Then go to the WP Simple Pay dashboard and follow these steps:
If everything all connected then thats the hard part done!
GETTING THE DRAW ONLINE
Login to WordPress and create a page for your draw or promotion.
Open the Simple Pay dashboard and create a PAYMENT FORM
In here there are various options for you to configure and adjust so you can display your draw for your visitors.
The options look like this below, and you just have to fill in the blanks with your information.
All the options you need to define are there, including the reason for signing up, the entity you pay, the type of payment and the info thats required to fulfill that payment.
As soon as you decide this and hit PUBLISH you can then take the shortcode like this one:
and insert that on your page to display the REGISTER/ SIGNUP / PAY HERE button.
As you can see in the screen shot there is a TEST option so you can try it out a few times ot make sure its all working as intended before putting it live.
Heres how: https://docs.wpsimplepay.com/articles/using-test-mode/
FIGURES
So to get people on the draw and attract them in you have to have an incentive.
We charge €5 a month, the lowest possible amount, and anyone who pays that is considered a social member.
Also, we pay out a €50 prize once a month to one of the participants in the draw (effectively covering their cost for being in it!) but we can then use this to promote the club as we announce the winner and congratulate them every time like this example
So if you get 50 people on your draw you can begin offering 2nd place prizes, with 100 people 3rd place and on.
At €5 a month x 50 subscriptions thats €250 a month (minus the €50 prize) so €200 x12 = €2400 per year….that will buy plenty of footballs, bibs, pay for pitches or help promote a kids club and it can only increase as you grow!
Its that simple! – We like simple!
APPLICATION & IDEAS
This way of gaining recurring payments is great and can be useful for other things, not just the club draw! Club membership, insurance payments, or similar could be applied but BE CAREFUL OF THE FEES charged by the payment processor stripe and make sure to account for them! We even have a donate button on our site for anyone who just would like to support us but not join the draw.
Our next step is to offer up the Draw to businesses as a form of sponsorship for €25 a month and have them mentioned on the site, regular mentions on the social media and invites to all matches and events we host.
All of these can be created on the WP Simple Pay plugin really quickly and easily and launched in an hour if you know what you want and all the transactions are monitored, tracked, and controlled on the Stripe Dashboard.
The aim for this was ultimately to make it simple, fast and efficient to raise fund since any member of the club can promote it, to friends, family or associates, anywhere in the world, INSTANTLY online, and it has evolved into an integral part of our club taking away massive admin and management headaches and alleviate financial worries!
HELP
We cant help everyone but as more clubs take this up more will become available but if your stuck or need a chat about it and have any questions no covered in the docs or guides above, just contact us and we will do our best to support you and your club!