I was knee-deep in mapping out a roll-up-your-sleeves session for a client on events when I saw a great blog post come across from Seth Godin.
It was exactly what I was working on. I was trying to get our client to concentrate on what they really wanted out of events rather than other stand-in data points (aka things you don’t really care about, but are measuring anyway).
In this timely piece, Seth says, “It’s not always easy to measure what matters. Sometimes, the thing that matters doesn’t make it easy for you to measure it.”
There really isn’t any better example of this challenge than in events.
Event fundraising is very frenetic business. It is swamped with detail and is all-consuming for staff and volunteers. Just getting through it seems like an achievement. No one really has time for analysis before it happens and after it happens, everyone collapses in a heap of exhaustion.
So, we tend to measure events with the easiest data points possible: attendance and gross income.
But do we really want there to be as many people there as possible? And does gross income (total raised, excluding expenses) really give us a picture of success?
I’m afraid not.
Don’t we really want to know how efficient the event was? So, how much net income was made after expenses?
We also want to know if we got the right people there. So, if we are trying to bring in new donors, how many came?
Maybe we want to know of those people that came, how many of them took the action we wanted? If we wanted them to make a first-time gift, how many of them did? If we wanted them to upgrade to the major gift level, how many of them did? If we wanted them to take some other kind of action, like bring a friend or sign up to get information on planned giving, how many of them did?
Doing events is fun, and of course there are those carrying the “raise awareness” flag for events, but the only real rationale for doing a fundraising event is that the event is the way to move ahead your fundraising strategy.
Is your end goal to just get as many people in a room as you can? Of course not! If you get one person to come and they end up giving you $25,000, isn’t that just as good as 250 people who bought tickets for $100 each? (Or even better??)
And while all that gross income is great, if it gets eaten up by event expenses, isn’t that just a waste of time? (Not even accounting for the opportunity cost of what all those staff members and volunteers could be doing.)
Stop measuring things that don’t really matter to your fundraising strategy. Start setting specific objectives for things like events and gather the information to help you determine if you met those objectives.
In one of my first jobs, an incoming fundraising director was horrified by the organization’s obsession with growing gross income. He had a sign – much like the one Seth Godin talks about in his blog – that said: “It’s all about the net” to remind all of us what he wanted to measure.
What does your sign say and are you gathering the right data to get you there?
Photo courtesy of Dorianelectra.com via Creative Commons
