While a 5K run, a Monte Carlo night or a wine tasting can be fun, these events are serious business, bringing much-needed attention and dollars to organizations. But events can be time, labor and money intensive, often taking as much as six months to a year and tens of thousands of dollars to produce. And with time, staff and resources always in short supply, organizations look to get the biggest return on their investment.
To start, says Chris Malloy, co-owner of Malloy Events in Rochester, plan the event knowing the objective you want to achieve. “We always ask [clients], what are we trying to do here?” Malloy says. “A fundraiser and the activities that you do, and monies that you can spend for that, are going to be different than the 100th anniversary celebration, for example.”
Malloy says organizers who don’t identify what they want from the event at the outset can run into problems later, which can slow progress.
“As you get a few months in, you run into these almost competing ideas or someone will say, ‘it would be great to do this.’ Well yeah, it would, but you have to ask, ‘does that support what we’re trying to do here?’” he says. A clear objective at the start is key.
Maximize Limited Resources
Often a main objective of an event is simply to bring in revenue, but you can’t determine success without also accounting for all the expenses that go into creating the event. “At the end of the day,” says Anna Berry, former executive director of the World Affairs Council of NH in Manchester, “We need to make money to support our organization, and events are very time intensive, so we need to make sure we support the cost of planning and implementation on the staff side.”
Saving time and effort is a crucial component to doing just that, so don’t waste time reinventing the wheel, says Laurie Mantegari, an event planner and owner of Everyday Details in Hampton. Even if you’re not going to hire an event planner, which she recommends, organizations should try to at least create a stable of reliable vendors to save time, money and worry.
Another way to maximize resources, Berry says, is to partner with other organizations for the event. For example, each fall the World Affairs Council holds a Global Business Summit, where they partner with Southern NH University (SNHU). By doing that, she says, a smaller organization can leverage the resources of a much larger institution to get the most out of the event.
These resources include gaining access to expert speakers, an audience of students (who in turn can be seen as future supporters of the organization), buying power and access to the school’s vast social networking platforms and audience. Further, she says, from a branding standpoint, partnering with a larger institution can bring an added measure of respect to an event, which draws more attendees and raises the value of the event. “People know when they come to the event it can be relied upon to be one that has value both in terms of networking and in terms of education.”
Drumming up Interest
With so many events and other activities competing for people’s time and attention, attracting an audience is ever tougher. And if an event doesn’t deliver on its promise—whether it’s networking or education—count on losing audience for the next event. “Attendance is obviously very important,” Berry says. “But of equal value is the quality of the event. If we have a much larger number of people, but the information isn’t valuable or the speaker is boring, then we don’t look at that as a success since that will deter people from coming back again.”
The success of an event isn’t always measured in dollars, but also in attention and interest an event can generate in the cause, business or organization. One way to gin up interest, says Mantegari, is by changing offerings each year. While it’s a good idea to establish some constants in the first few years of an event to let people know what they can expect to get in return for the cost of their ticket, Malloy says changing up a few things or adding one or two things each year can also maintain and even generate new interest.
Experiment
Keeping an event fresh means looking beyond programming. For example, Malloy experiments with seating arrangements. “So if you imagine your traditional event where you have a table of 10 in a ballroom, everybody either has assigned seats or they just pick a seat when they are there, either way they are kind of locked into that seating arrangement for the entire event,” Malloy says.
“So what we’ve been doing is bringing in lounge furniture, more high top cocktail tables and either having food stations where people are expected to walk across the room, get some food and then they can go to whatever table they want. They might even see someone new that they want to talk with, but it just encourages movement, and we’ve found that works really well for social events.” Keep what people like, but make little changes that keep the event feeling fresh and worthy of word of mouth attention.
Social Media
Instead of complaining about the people who have their eyes glued to their smart phones rather than the speaker, take advantage of that technology and use social media to enhance your event. Have interactive elements at your event like a live feed or solicit questions from your Twitter followers, Berry says.
Malloy adds that asking guests—who are already likely taking photos at the event and posting them on social media—to add a designated hashtag for the event.
He says this can be a great way to raise awareness of the event in order to garner more guests the next year as well as awareness of the cause or business generally.
Friendraise
Another option is to host friendraisers, which are events strictly meant to raise awareness or maintain and engage current membership. For these events, the goal is not necessarily to make money, though that can be an added bonus.
Michele Talwani, vice president of marketing and economic development of the nonprofit Families in Transition in Manchester, says they created the Wicked Fit Run in Concord simply as a way to get the word out about what they do and who they were.
“That first year there was an investment,” Talwani says of the board decision to hold the event. “[The board decided] We were going to put up X amount of dollars and if we lose it, that’s okay because we really want to build those friends—that network of people—that really don’t know what we do in the Concord area, and so this would be a great opportunity to introduce ourselves in a more public way in the community. In the end we ended up netting $10,000. So it went from a small friendraiser to a fundraiser and has significantly grown.”
Current Issue - May 2024