5 Tips to offer great downloadable fundraising resources for your supporters to print at home

2022-04-21 | Fundraising

Before creating our Fundraising Pack Creator we carried out a lot of research to understand what supporters want from downloadable fundraising resources and what frustrates them. Our findings helped us shape our fundraising pack materials so that they are designed with the supporter in mind. If you want to offer great downloadable fundraising resources on your website, here are our 5 tips to help...

Tip 1: Don’t use large images or blocks of solid colours

Your supporters will be printing these off at home, they may want to print more than 1 so keep your design as ink friendly as possible so they don’t use a full ink cartridge or end up with just a soggy crinkled piece of paper.

Also it’s good practice to not have a design running to the edge of the page as most home printers can’t print to the edge of the page and will leave a white (paper) border around meaning the supporter would need to trim this to get your desired look – most will not trim this off.

Tip 2: Make it easy for people to print at home

Think about the size of your downloads. Are they A4 size so they can simply hit print? If they are smaller than A4, could you put multiple on an A4 page and offer that instead? This will be easier for people to print and reduce paper waste. Making your fundraising resources all A4 size means your supporters don't need to fiddle with the printer settings which can be frustrating.

Tip 3: Make your files optimised for easy download

By this we mean keep your files sizes below 2MB if you can get them under 1MB even better. You want your supporters to be able to download these resources quickly without having to wait for a download to finish.

Tip 4: Offer designs for different activity types

If you have the resource to do it, create designs for a range of different activities people doing a bake sale will want a different design from someone doing a quiz night, sure you can offer something quite generic to cater for all activities but this might not hit the mark and they might end up creating something themselves.

Tip 5: Make it clear to supporters what to write

Add prompts to your materials for instance on a fundraising poster, add What, Date, Time and Where to prompt the supporter to include this information, so many times we have come across posters on notice boards where someone has squeezed in the time or forgot a key part such as where it is taking place.

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We hope these tips help you provide awesome fundraising resources for your supporters to download and print with ease.

If this seems like a lot of work or if you would like to go one step further and offer your supporters online personalised materials instead of just downloads, we can help with that...

Our Fundraising Pack Creator caters to a wide range of activities, supporters complete a short online form about what they are planning, the information entered is used to personalise the materials in their pack which is ready for them to download moments later.

The best part is you can log in to the FundraizingHero admin to see how they personalised their pack and what materials they downloaded. Click here to find out how it works.

Downloads, Fundraising

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