Your challenge events fundraising pages might be the most important pages on your website. Every year, they can bring in thousands of pounds of lovely fundraising income for your charity.

But you face stiff competition. Lots of other charities have these pages too, targeting the same potential fundraisers as you. Those fundraisers have plenty of choice.

Here are the essential elements your page has to have to compete.

Great text

Inspiring text is requirement number one. Go beyond listing the time, date and location of the event (because let’s be honest, that might be important but it ain’t inspiring).

The Make A Wish Foundation lead with sharp bullet points on how they will support you if you run for them. You might take that support for granted – but it might be the difference between someone running for you and running for another charity.

Call out quote

Go beyond the general text by pulling out a key section as a pullquote to immediately draw the eye.

Here’s Mind’s page for the Tough Mudder London West Half 2017. Straight away, you know that “The atmosphere was amazing!” last time, moving you emotionally to get involved this time.

Big call to action buttons

Your target audience will want to take action on the page pretty quickly.

If you make it hard for them to do so, they’ll head to another charity’s page instead.

Check out Anthony Nolan’s page for Great North Run-ners. Those buttons are big and let visitors self identify mega quick.

Inspiring imagery

A strong hero image is super important. After all, aren’t your events fundraisers aspiring heroes themselves?

Give them an immediate visual cue that exudes the emotion you’re trying to stir in them.

This image on Tommy’s page for the Great North Run is good. The beaming runner is looking straight to camera with her arm stretched out in triumph. Although the face of the lady to her left is a bit close, and lessens the impact a little.

Video content

Having a video on your landing page can increase conversion by as much as 80%.

If you add a video to your challenge recruitment page, you can convey the emotion thousands of times faster than text (and therefore thousands of times faster than your competitors).

Back to the Tommy’s Great North Run page. They’ve added a video of raucous cheering points, making lots of noise and high fiving their runners. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?

A nice form with progress bar

For those that do sign up, Mind give you a lovely progress bar to show you how far you’ve got to go in your registration form.

Humans are driven by the need to complete goals and to measure their progress. A progress bar like this will increase the number of people who complete your goal.

Whatever your audience wants

Have you asked all previous challenge participants what motivated them to run for you?

It could be super-simple, like a connection to the cause or the support you gave.

If you do ask, I bet you’ll find recurring themes. So simply add them to your events page to get even more.