Speaker 1: Fundraising events are one of many ways that non-profit organizations can raise dollars to support their mission. They can be a lot of work, so careful planning is needed to make sure that your non-profit fundraising event can run smoothly, raise the dollars that you need for your mission, and generally be a good return on investment for your time and efforts. So in this video I'm going to help out beginners to the non-profit fundraising event world by sharing the steps involved in planning a successful event. Thanks for stopping by my channel. I'm Amber Melanie Smith, a non-profit founder and executive director. I have planned and led my fair share of fundraising events, some that I would consider successes and others flops, and I would say that fundraising events are about 90% planning and strategy and about 10% actually executing on the event itself. If you are looking for helpful resources on non-profits, fundraising, creating a social impact, and more, definitely check out the rest of the videos on my channel and check out my website founder2fulltime.com, as well as join my Changemakers and Nonprofit Leaders newsletter for regular tips and resources to your inbox. I really hope that you find this helpful and useful. Don't forget to like this video and subscribe to my channel, ring the bell for alerts, and all that stuff. All right, so let's get into that step-by-step process to plan a non-profit fundraising event from start to finish. There are three phases to planning an event, and as you'll see, most of the steps fall under phase one, which is planning. So all the steps that I'm going to list under the planning phase are supposed to happen before you even announced your event to the public. Step one is to identify your fundraising goal for the event. This means not just identifying the amount of dollars that you need to raise through your event, but also if there's going to be a specific purpose for those dollars. Are you raising money to cover the costs of a specific project or program, or is it just to support your organization's general activities and general operations? Knowing these things in advance will allow you to craft your messaging geared towards that answer later. Once you have identified your fundraising goal, step two is to brainstorm the creative ideas or themes for your event that will help you meet that specific fundraising goal. Keeping in mind that to meet a large fundraising goal, you need one of two things. You either need to have a large event that can accommodate a lot of people and that you have the ability to reach a lot of people at a lower registration or ticket price, or maybe a smaller or medium-sized events where you have fewer people but there's a higher registration amount and you know that the people in your network are going to be able to afford that higher registration amount. Comparison might be a small expensive fundraising dinner compared to a large street fair where you have 10,000 people. You also want to be sure to align your event ideas and themes with the mission and activities of your organization. Event themes should really make sense for your cause. For example, a 5k where you can bring your dog along to walk with you could be a great fit for an animal rescue organization. A special art gallery viewing might make sense for an arts nonprofit. Obviously you want to make sure that for marketing purposes and just for clarity of vision, your themes and ideas are not so far contradictory to your organization's mission that it's hard for people to grasp the concept of them. Step three is to create your event budget. Now that you have your fundraising goal, you've got some possible ideas for themes or activities or types of events you might do, you can use that information to determine what number of registrations or sponsorships or donations you're going to need to bring in for the income part of your budget in order to meet your fundraising goals. And you can also start researching and identifying what expenses go along with the ideas that you've laid out and then subtract, of course, your expenses from your anticipated income to determine your net fundraising accomplishment. Another reason it's important to create your event specific budget early on is that when you're researching the costs for the different ideas you have for your events, you might find that some of the things you need to effectively pull off that idea are cost prohibitive, and that will give you an opportunity far ahead of announcing anything to the public to either pivot to another idea or make adjustments to your idea in order to meet your budgetary needs. Step four is to create your event marketing plan. You need to think about your target audience for the event and who you already know in your existing nonprofit audience or network who might fit that target audience or be likely to want to attend and participate in that event. Using the example I gave earlier of a 5k in which dogs can come along to walk or run with their owners, obviously your target audience for that particular event is people who have dogs. That's not everybody, but you're gonna market a specific way to the people who have dogs versus those who don't. And if you want to be able to reach more people who fit that target audience that you don't already have in your network already, you want to think through your outreach strategies here. What are some media platforms or partners or publications in your community who might be media that is read or consumed by your target audience or partners who also reach members of your target audience? Using the same example I've been using so far for that dog 5k, you would perhaps look for dog lovers magazine as a place where you could market your event, or websites for dog lovers, or other animal rescues who might help you spread the word, or dog owner clubs or pet supply stores. You get the idea. Step five is to set the date and time for your event and secure your biggest event needs. Ideally you want to be able to secure or schedule or book the top event needs that you need to pull off your amazing event before you publicize to the public for a number of reasons, but two of them are 1. the public wants to know this information to inform them and influence whether they sign up, and 2. if the thing, venue, space, entertainer, food, etc. that you wanted isn't available, you need some time to come up with an alternative plan of action. Step six is, if your event is going to involve sponsorships, to secure some or as many as possible of those sponsorships before you announce the event to the public. Sponsors might be cash sponsors or they might be providing in-kind items or services for the event, like donated food or donated entertainment. Having sponsors lined up early gives you as the event planner a sense of security knowing that you have some of those big things covered, or in the case of a cash sponsorship, that you have already some of your expenses for the event covered so that you can count more of the registration fees and donations towards your fundraising goal. And on the sponsor side, it gives them a little bit more time to be visible and get recognition as a sponsor. Step seven is to prepare your event website and set up registrations and get it going. Identify the best ticketing or registration systems for your particular event and its needs, get it up on a beautiful web page or website, make sure you have your mission statement up there as a nonprofit, and any information about how the funds raised will support your organization, and then announce it to your networks. The second phase of event planning is marketing and executing your event. Step eight in this whole process is to promote your event to not just your own networks, but to the target audiences wherever you can reach them. Consider writing a press release and sharing it with the media to reach those folks as well. You can create social media graphics and sample post language and share it with your team members and your volunteers and your board members and encourage them all to post to their networks as well. And you can ask local blogs or groups or clubs or other organizations who align with your mission to help spread the word on their channels to their newsletter and more. Step nine, we're getting into preparing for the event itself. So step nine is to create your event run of show or agenda, which outlines what happens at your event at each hour of the day. For example, at 10 a.m. at your event, brunch will be served. At 11 a.m. your speaker will take the stage. Having this plan written out allows you and your team to stay in sync about what's gonna happen and prepare for each thing as it comes up, and it also allows you to create contingency plans in advance in case something goes wrong. Speaking of team members, step 10 is to determine your team leaders and assignments for the day of the event. You want to think about the skill sets and capacity of your team and assign them to different roles throughout your event, whether it's someone to help manage the entertainment, someone to oversee the food, someone to handle guest check-ins, etc. And you want to train each team member on their role and what to expect for the day. As someone who has spent a lot of time running around big events trying to handle everything, I can tell you having awesome, skilled, trained team members makes all the difference. Step 11 is to monitor signups and registrations for your event. You're gonna have guests who have questions or challenges or technical issues, and you want to make sure someone is being very responsive to them to handle those in a high-quality customer service sort of way throughout the period of time between your launch and the event. And of course, to thank them for registering and signing up to begin with. Step 12 is to hold your event. Follow the plan you wrote, get ready for unexpected challenges along the way, and roll with it. Phase 3 of event planning is pretty short, and it's what happens after the event. So the 13th and final step that I will share with you is to celebrate and give thanks. You want to very graciously thank all of the people who attended your event, who bought tickets, all of your sponsors, all of your volunteers, all of your donors, everyone, in order to make sure that they know that they are appreciated and might be willing to come back later. And finally, share your event success, the funds raised, and how they will help your mission with all of those folks so that can really drive home why helping you out was important in the first place. I'd love to hear from you now. What has been your experience with nonprofit fundraising events? I want to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly. Share in the comments below. And as I mentioned before, if you need some help figuring out the steps to start a nonprofit or with other nonprofit elements, don't hesitate to check out my website FounderToFullTime.com and join my newsletter for nonprofit leaders and changemakers. The links to both of those are in the description below. I really hope that you found this informative and useful. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel. And one final thought. If you are on Facebook, come check out my group Change the World or BUST. Join that group and you'll be in good company with lots of other changemakers and nonprofit leaders and social impact leaders from around the world having great conversations. So I hope to see you there and I hope to see you next time. Thank you so much for watching. Bye.