How to Use Your Golf Tournament Website to Fuel Year-End Giving
- Nonprofit Learning Lab
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
This is a guest blog by Golfstatus.
For many nonprofits, year-end giving is perhaps the most important fundraising period of the year. It’s a prime opportunity to reconnect with supporters, highlight impact, and encourage one more gift before December 31. If you host a golf fundraiser, you have a unique advantage—a built-in audience that’s highly engaged, mission-minded, and primed to give again.
Your tournament’s event website is a powerful platform to reach the golfer donor. Often overlooked once tournament day ends, it can become a strategic year-end giving tool with the right updates and outreach to engage golfers and sponsors. Here’s how to leverage it to strengthen your year-end campaigns, deepen engagement, and ultimately raise more for your mission.
Why Your Golf Event Website Matters at Year-End
A golf tournament brings together people who have already demonstrated support for your organization. They registered, sponsored, donated, or volunteered—and they likely had a great experience doing it! So when year-end giving approaches, that’s the exact audience you want to reach: people familiar with your mission who have already taken meaningful action.
Your golf tournament website is a central hub where these supporters already expect to find information about your organization and its golf fundraiser. Using it during year-end campaigns offers several advantages:
It’s familiar. Golfers and sponsors know what it looks like, how it works, and have engaged with it before.
It’s targeted. You’re speaking directly to an audience already invested in your mission and more likely to give again.
It’s flexible. With the right platform, you can swap in new content, links, appeals, and calls-to-action in minutes.
It’s trackable. Directing golf tournament participants to your event website ensures you can track giving from that audience.
It adds more sponsor value. Your golf tournament’s sponsors get even more exposure to your audience with year-end giving, earning impressions well after the final putt.
Golf tournament platforms make these updates seamless, empowering nonprofits to use their event website beyond tournament day.
Tip 1: Add a Clear Year-End Giving Call to Action
Your first step is simple: Add a prominent year-end giving CTA to your event website. This might be reactivating the “Donate” button, an updated header graphic, or edits to the tournament details explaining your year-end fundraising goal.
A strong year-end giving CTA should:
Stand out visually with compelling graphics and copy
Point visitors to the “Donate” button
Explain how year-end gifts make a difference
Create urgency around the December 31 deadline
Your platform should allow you to update content blocks, imagery, and fundraising goals quickly, making it easy to keep your year-end message front and center.
Tip 2: Highlight Tournament Impact & Tie It to Year-End Needs
One of the best ways to encourage year-end giving is to remind supporters what their participation in the golf event helped accomplish. Use your event website to display:
A brief tournament recap
Photos or videos (or both!) from the event
Total dollars raised with specific outcomes
Programs or services supported by the tournament’s fundraising
Testimonials from participants and beneficiaries
This storytelling resonates with golfers and sponsors. When they see the real-world impact of the event they attended, they’re compelled to make another gift. Your event website can help connect the dots between your tournament and the bigger picture of your organization’s work.
Tip 3: Use the Website to Promote Matching Gifts, Challenges, or Special Appeals
If you have a year-end matching-gift opportunity, Giving Tuesday campaign, or other special year-end initiative, your golf event website can help amplify it. Try these ideas;
Add a banner or imagery promoting the matching gift campaign
Create a short section highlighting the impact of year-end gifts
Updating your donation goal tracker to visually show how close you are to your goal
Because golfers and sponsors already feel a connection to your nonprofit, these targeted appeals can convert at a higher rate than campaigns to a broader audience.
Tip 4: Target Golf Tournament Participants With Dedicated Messaging
Your golf tournament’s participants—golfers, sponsors, volunteers, and even committee members—make up one of your most engaged audiences. With the right targeting strategy, you can encourage them to further their support with a year-end gift.
Ways to Target Your Tournament Audience
Send a segmented email campaign. Create a year-end appeal specifically for golfers. Reference the tournament experience, any memorable events, share event photos, and explain how their participation moved your mission forward. Keep the email’s tone focused, warm, and appreciative to reinforce the connection they already feel.
Share the updated event website in your outreach. Include a link to your event site in your emails, social posts, and donor updates. Golf tournament participants will appreciate seeing the familiar website and will immediately understand why you’re reaching out.
Leverage your sponsors. Sponsors often budget charitable contributions on an annual basis. Your updated event website gives you a professional, branded space to highlight sponsor impact, offer them additional exposure, and encourage year-end or ongoing engagement.
Use your event management platform to send emails or even push notifications to golfers with just a few simple clicks, making targeted outreach to this audience fast and efficient.
Tip 5: Add “Save the Date” Details for Next Year’s Tournament
While donors are on your event website making year-end gifts, it’s the perfect time to plant a seed about your next event. Even if the registration isn’t open yet, include:
The planned date or time of year
The location (or confirmation that it will be returning to the same golf facility)
A short bolded line like “Registration will open in early spring!”
When supporters can see the next event on their horizon, they stay connected. And with the right platform, you can easily copy the event, update the website, and go live without needing to recreate everything from scratch.
Tip 6: Promote Year-End Giving Through Sponsor Branding Opportunities
If you offer digital sponsor exposure through your event website (and if you’re not, you’re missing out on a prime exposure point), year-end is a fantastic time to utilize them.
Consider adding new sponsor logos that feature:
● A “Year-End Giving Champion” sponsor
● A local business that matches year-end gifts
● A spotlight on an existing sponsor who supports your year-end appeal
This approach adds value for your sponsors while reinforcing fundraising messages in a space that supporters already associate with giving.
Tip 7: Keep the Site Updated to Build Trust
Sponsors are much more likely to donate when the event site looks active and accurate. Refreshing the site with new photos discussed above, updated mission language, current goals, and timely year-end messaging signals that your nonprofit is engaged and stewardship-minded.
Your event website should be designed to be updated quickly without coding or complicated interfaces, so you can keep content fresh with minimal effort.
Turn Your Tournament Website Into a Year-End Asset
Your golf tournament’s fundraising doesn’t have to end when the last putt drops. By adding clear calls to action, updating content, and targeting participants with tailored messaging, you can transform your tournament’s digital home into a powerful year-end fundraising engine.
With tools like GolfStatus, keeping our website relevant, effective, and aligned with your year-end strategy is simple. And when your most enthusiastic supporters see familiar, mission-centered content, they're more likely to get involved again—both at year-end and when the next tournament rolls around.
You can get a free event website, access to GolfStatus’ suite of tournament management tools, and best-in-class coaching and support at no upfront cost. Get started by booking a meeting with the GolfStatus team!
