Your organization may be better suited to use other ways than event fundraising to raise money.
Holding a major event may involve some substantial financial risk. Many other ways to raise money are easier to plan and don’t require as much staff and volunteer time as event fundraising. How can anyone really know what to do?
Event fundraising is complicated in many ways. It is not an activity to undertake lightly, and those who do undertake it had better know the basics of event planning and have completed a clear, objective evaluation of the potential financial outcome of an event. I advise event planners to develop business plans for events, which include developing a budget displaying costs as well as anticipated revenues, because events can be very costly to hold. My reason for mentioning business planning and budgets is to emphasize that events must be carefully planned to earn net revenue. If planners cannot work out an event budget that logically allows for that, they need to find some other way to raise money.
I have developed a very simple question and answer test as a first step in determing the potential for an organization to use a major event to effectively raise net revenue.
Please click here to take the event fundraising test.
Adapted from the book, Money for the Cause: A Complete Guide to Event Fundraising by Rudolph Rosen. Texas A&M University Press.
There has never been a greater need for raising the funds necessary to promote the causes that will help build a sustainable future. In Money for the Cause: A Complete Guide to Event Fundraising, veteran nonprofit executive director Rudolph A. Rosen lays out field-tested approaches that have been among those that helped him and the teams of volunteers and professionals he has worked with raise more than $3 billion for environmental conservation.
(c) Rudolph A. Rosen, 2011