New City Rotary Festival
Overview
Rotary International is one of the largest service oriented organizations in the world. The New City Rotary Club, one of the largest in Rockland County (New York), created its annual Wine & Food Festival to raise money to fight hunger and poverty in the local community. The Wine and Food Festival is New City Rotary’s signature fundraising event and they needed a website and an associated Facebook page to promote the event, sell tickets, acquire sponsorships and sell Journal advs.
We built a custom, mobile friendly website that promotes the Wine & Food Festival and enables New City Rotary to raise significant money to support its charitable giving. The 4th Annual Festival raised more money than ever and ticket and journal adv transactions were done through the site.
The website is here.
Background/The Problem/Project Goals and Objectives
New City Rotary prides itself on making a difference in its community by its members volunteering to support not-for-profit and antihunger and anti-property programs and through its fundraising activities to support its charitable programs. There was no way other than word-of-mouth to promote the Wine & Food Festival, an annual happening designed to become the club’s signature fundraising event.
The club recognize that it needed a website to:
- build awareness for and promote the event to attract food and wine vendors, sponsors, advertisers
- provide a way for people to buy tickets to the event
- provide a way for businesses and individuals to purchase advertisements in the commemorative Journal
- give information about Rotary’s fundraising philosophy
- provide logistics information to people looking to go to the event
Process and Insight
New City Rotary is made up of professionals and business leaders and it was important that the Wine & Food Festival website promote the event appropriately in accordance with the ideals of Rotary. The Festival committee created the messages for the site and took a keen interest in its design, as well as the associated transaction processing aspects for Journal advertisements and tickets.
To reduce costs and streamline operations, the website was the only place where tickets could be purchased so it was important that the site be easy to use and reliable.
Solution
We built a custom, mobile-friendly site for the first annual Festival that has continued to be used and updated for the recent Fourth Annual event. Using a flexible forms engine combined with a secure credit card payment gateway, all tickets, Journal advs and sponsorships are transacted through the site with the funds deposited directly into Rotary’s bank account.
The site is used to promote the event months before the Festival and committed sponsors and vendors have their logos prominently displayed on the site. Photos from past festivals are included in custom galleries and, when they are available, video commercials for the festival are posted on the site.
We built a Wine & Food Festival Facebook page and connected it with the website to increase engagement on both platforms.
Results
The website has been instrumental in the growth as the signature fundraising event for New City Rotary. The site is the go to place for all transactions related to the Festival and the club continues to receive donations for its anti-hunger and anti-poverty programs through the Festival site throughout the year.