On Monday, October 12, PerfectVision held the 8th annual Boys & Girls Club Charity Golf Classic at Chenal Country Club in Little Rock. According to their announcement on LinkedIn, this year's tournament raised $381,643.58, a record for the event. Across eight years, the tournament has now contributed more than $2 million to Boys & Girls Clubs in Central Arkansas, which serve more than 10,000 kids every year. Every dollar goes directly to the clubs.
Congratulations to the whole PerfectVision team, the organizing committee, the volunteers, the golfers, and every sponsor who made it happen. That is a remarkable number, and it is a remarkable thing to have built year after year.
A quick note on our part
We are proud to have built and relaunched the tournament website for PerfectVision. To be clear about credit: the record belongs to the people who showed up, gave, and sponsored. A website does not raise $381,643.58. People do.
What a website can do is stay out of the way, and make it easy for generous people to say yes. That was the whole brief, and it shaped a few decisions we would make the same way again.
The features that matter most for an event like this
If you run an annual fundraiser, these are the pieces of the build we think earn their keep. We covered the design thinking in the relaunch write-up and the technical details in the full case study, so here is the short version.
Sponsorship tiers that sell themselves. Each level, Bronze through Titanium, is its own WooCommerce product with its own benefits and price. A company deciding on a sponsorship can compare tiers and check out on their own schedule, without waiting on a phone call. For the committee, every purchase is recorded, so there is no spreadsheet to reconcile in the weeks before the event.
Three separate paths for three kinds of people. Sponsoring, registering a team, and making a one-time donation are distinct flows. Someone who wants to give $50 never has to fill out a foursome registration form, and a golfer signing up a team never has to scroll through sponsorship packages. Fewer detours means fewer people giving up halfway.
A mission-first homepage. The first thing a visitor sees is the purpose of the day and the Boys & Girls Club alongside the PerfectVision brand, with a Donate button that stays in the navigation on every page. For a sponsor weighing a larger commitment, seeing the beneficiary front and center builds trust faster than any amount of body copy.
Pages the committee can edit themselves. Tournament week is busy, and nobody wants to file a ticket to change a tee time. The site is built so committee members can update the schedule, swap in a new sponsor logo, or adjust event details on their own, including from a phone between meetings. Each year's event is updated in place rather than rebuilt.
Analytics they can actually read. We connected Google Site Kit so the committee can see where visitors come from and which pages lead to sponsorships and registrations. That turns next year's outreach from a guess into a decision.
Why this kind of project is worth doing well
Nonprofit event sites are easy to treat as an afterthought. They run once a year, the budget is tight, and everyone is volunteering their time. But the site is often the front door for the biggest check the organization receives all year, and it has to work for a first-time donor and a long-standing corporate sponsor alike.
Working on a project that helps put more money in front of kids in Central Arkansas has been one of the more meaningful parts of our work. We are grateful PerfectVision trusted us with it, and we are looking forward to the 9th annual.
Support the clubs
If you are in Central Arkansas, or you just want to back a good cause, you can learn more about the Classic and the Boys & Girls Clubs it supports at perfectvisiongolf.com.
If you run a tournament, a fundraiser, or any annual event where the people maintaining the site are not developers, we would love to talk. Get in touch and tell us what you are planning.
