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How to engage your board without letting them derail your event goals.  You’ve got the venue locked in, a killer theme, and a list of donors and sponsors ready to support your cause. Everything’s on track for your fundraising event… until your board steps in with their ideas. Sound familiar? If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation, you’re not alone. While board members are essential to the success of your nonprofit, their involvement in event planning can sometimes cause more harm than good. But here’s the thing — it doesn’t have to be that way. Let’s talk about how to engage your board in a way that supports your event goals instead of derailing them. Understanding the Problem Board members come with a wealth of knowledge, experience, and (hopefully) passion for your mission. But when it comes to fundraising events, their enthusiasm can sometimes manifest as unsolicited ideas, overstepping boundaries, or pushing for personal agendas. Suddenly, your carefully crafted event turns into a hodgepodge of random suggestions that don’t align with your original vision. Common board pitfalls include: The result? An event that feels disjointed, misses its fundraising targets, and leaves your team frustrated and burnt out. Setting Boundaries and Expectations The key to avoiding these issues is setting clear boundaries from the start. Your board needs to know their role in the event and understand where their input is welcome and where it’s not. Here’s how to do it: Giving Your Board a Purpose One of the best ways to engage your board is to give them a sense of purpose. People want to feel useful, and if you don’t assign them tasks, they’ll find ways to insert themselves into the process — often where they aren’t needed. Consider assigning board members specific roles like: When board members feel like they’re contributing in meaningful ways, they’re less likely to interfere in areas that aren’t their responsibility. Handling Conflicting Ideas It’s inevitable that board members will bring ideas to the table — and not all of them will align with your vision. The key is to listen respectfully while keeping the event’s goals in focus. Here’s a handy phrase to keep in your back pocket: “Thank you for your suggestion! Let’s bring that to the event committee and see how it aligns with our goals.” This response shows that you value their input but also reinforces that decisions are made collectively with the event’s success in mind. Celebrating Their Contributions Lastly, don’t forget to recognize your board’s efforts. Acknowledge their contributions during the event and in post-event communications. When they feel appreciated, they’re more likely to stay engaged in the right ways for future events. Final Thoughts Your board can be one of your biggest assets when it comes to fundraising events — but only if you manage their involvement wisely. By setting clear expectations, giving them meaningful tasks, and handling conflicting ideas with grace, you can turn potential derailments into valuable contributions. Remember, the goal is to keep everyone rowing in the same direction. With the right approach, your board will become champions of your event, helping you hit (or exceed!) your fundraising targets while keeping your sanity intact.

One of the most intimidating things about planning a charity gala or fundraising event is facing the task of cleaning up your invitation mailing list. This is the nonprofit equivalent of cleaning out your garage – you know you must do it, but you put it off for as long as possible! When is the best time to start organizing and purging your invitation mailing list? The answer is TODAY!  The beauty of taking the time to dig deep and clean out incorrect addresses, deceased donors, and duplicate names is that from this point on you will have a clean invitation mailing list that gets your invitations into the hands of prospective guests and alleviates the cost of returned undelivered mail. * Note – your event mailing list should be kept separate from your organization’s general mailing list. Contacts given to you by honorees and committee members, for the specific purpose of inviting friends and colleagues to an event, cannot be automatically added to your main list. If one of those contacts purchases a ticket, places a tribute ad, or donates then it is appropriate to roll them into your general mailing list. Here are the 5 steps to get you on your way to cleaning up your invitation mailing list. 1. Don’t Do It Yourself Your Board and event committee are key to efficiently cleaning up your existing event mailing list. The most efficient way to share the responsibility for editing this list is to send all board and committee members an email with a link to your mailing list spreadsheet and ask them for their assistance with removing and adding names and addresses.  However, it is important that you retain control over the integrity of the list. When sending the spreadsheet make sure that it is “read-only” for the recipients. Have each person send you the contacts they feel should be deleted or updated directly. This will ensure that no well-meaning committee or Board member accidentally messes up the spreadsheet which will make your task even more difficult. It is also important to have a date in the title of your spreadsheet so you can easily find the most recent version of the event mailing list.  2. Start by Eyeballing the List This step may feel intimidating to those helping you as many event mailing lists contain over a thousand contact names, so be clear at the start as to what you are trying to accomplish and give your team a list of details to look for. You will need the group to make a couple of passes reviewing the mailing list to get all the kinks out of it. For the first review, your team should just do a quick scan to see if any names jump out at them that need to be edited out or deleted. Have them email you a list of the changes so you have a record of which edits are being requested by each Board and committee member. For the next review of the mailing list, have them look more closely to ensure they didn’t overlook any obvious typos and name spelling edits. At this point, it is your job to delete duplicate names in your event mailing list. This can easily be done on spreadsheets by highlighting the first name and last name columns and then clicking Home > Conditional Formatting > Highlight Cells Rules > Duplicate Values. 3. Look for the “3 Ds” When reviewing the event mailing list look for the following issues: Deceased, Divorced, and Doesn’t Live Here. 4. Don’t Forget New Donors & Last Year’s Guests Each year your organization will obtain new supporters and donors, so don’t forget to add those newbies to your event mailing list if they are good candidates for attending the event. If you are hosting a free or low-priced fundraising event, then you can include all your new supporters in the event mailing list. This is especially true if you are only sending digital invitations as you can send an unlimited number of invitations without incurring extra printing fees.  If you are hosting a gala, you will want to be more discerning about which new donor names are being added to the event mailing list as you will be mailing printed invitations and each invitation incurs printing and mailing costs. For charity galas and other high-end events, determine what is the lowest donation level that will qualify a new donor to be included, and then add all your new supporters at that level and higher to the gala mailing list. 5. Consider this a Stewardship Opportunity While it is time-consuming and sometimes frustrating to comb through an old event mailing list, you should consider the silver lining to the situation! Each contact on that list that needs updating is a perfect opportunity to reach out and connect with a supporter.  ____________________________________ Want to learn the strategies used by professional event planners to create engaging and profitable events? Sign up for our newsletter and get your organization on track for successful events and sponsorships. About A.J. Steinberg, CFRE, of Queen Bee Fundraising: With over 20 years of experience as a nonprofit event producer and engagement strategist, A.J. Steinberg has worked on over 100 successful events and raised millions of dollars for organizations with her Los Angeles-based production company. She is a recognized topic expert and trainer and presents on subjects such as nonprofit event planning, event sponsorships, committee and volunteer leadership, generational giving, and guest engagement. Website: www.QueenBeeFundraising.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ajsteinbergproductions   Twitter:  https://twitter.com/QueenBeeMalibu Facebook: www.facebook.com/queenbeefundraising

Many nonprofits realize the benefits of hiring an experienced event planner to help them plan and execute their fundraising events. They know that the money they invest in a professional planner will reduce their staff’s stress and help to ensure a well-run guest experience.  There are a lot of event planners out there vying for your organization’s business. Many nonprofits are wondering how to find the best fundraising event planner to suit their particular needs. The first thing to know is that there are three types of event planners – social event planners, corporate event and meeting planners, and fundraising event planners. Social event planners specialize in weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other important life events which we celebrate. Corporate event and meeting planners typically focus on meetings and conferences that require meeting rooms, multiple meals and snack services, and often hotel accommodations.  Nonprofit organizations should use a specialized fundraising event planner. This type of professional is proficient at producing galas and fundraisers, and is experienced with tasks such as: To find the person or company that best fits your organization’s needs, start by asking these five questions. Question 1: What other organizations have you worked with? Getting references from the fundraising event planner’s past clients is the first step towards determining if they will work well with your organization. Always ask for a list of three-to-five past clients that you can call or email to find out specifics about the planners’ quality of work. Create a survey of questions to send to the past clients to make it easy for them to respond to your inquiries. You can use Google Forms, which makes it easy to create surveys and allows you to customize questions to be answered with a rating scale or a short answer.  For rating scale questions, with 1 being dissatisfied and 5 being very satisfied, ask the past clients to rate their satisfaction with the fundraising event planner’s: For questions that require a short answer, ask questions such as: Question 2: How will you share the workload with our staff? Let’s face it, putting on a successful fundraising event is a lot of work! There are committees to manage, invitations to design, auctions to pull together, guest lists to finesse, and volunteers to deal with. Nonprofit organizations vary in staff size and resources, and this means their requirements for an event planner vary as well. If you are a small organization with a very small, or one-person, development department then you will need more hands-on help from your planner to fill in the staffing gaps. You will need an experienced professional who can take a big chunk of the workload off your shoulders and keep you on track with deadlines.  Tasks that can be handled by a professional planner include: Larger organizations that have adequate staff to handle some of the extra workload may want to manage some of these jobs in-house which allows their staff to have more control. Question 3: Will you manage our event committee? Working with a committee can be a lot of work, and often fundraising event planners will step in and help you organize committee meetings and work with committee members. Whether or not you want the event planner to participate and manage your committee is up to you and your organization. Why would an organization forgo their planner’s help to manage their event committee?  It is because some nonprofits want to use the committee experience to strengthen bonds with their committee members.  An event committee generally consists of a nonprofit’s loyal supporters and the time spent attending meetings and working together is an exceptional stewardship opportunity. Volunteer committee members find it is a great way to reinforce their affinity for your organization and your mission. However, if your organization lacks an experienced leader for managing committee meetings and committee members, then it is best to let your fundraising event planner step in and lend a helping hand. They can assist you by creating meeting agendas, leading the meetings, and taking notes which can be distributed to the group afterwards. Even if an event planner is leading committee meetings, there should always be a staff or board member present. They will monitor the meeting and ensure that all decisions made by the committee are in agreement with the organization’s rules and bylaws. Question 4: How can you help keep us within our budget? Some organizations obsess over their event budget. They spend hours crunching numbers and updating estimated costs vs. real costs, and then crunch the numbers all over again when any line item changes. This may make them feel like they have control over their budget, but it is an illusion. An event budget is no more than an educated guess, and it is a constant work during your event planning. The budget keeps track of how much each event element is expected to cost and then is updated as the real costs become known.  Though an event budget number is a moving target, organizations need a budget in order to get a general idea of how much the total event will cost them. Budget estimates help nonprofits set their sponsorship levels and ticket pricing, and set their expectations for how much money needs to be raised in order to meet their net financial goal. When interviewing prospective fundraising event planners you should ask where in the budget they feel you should invest money and where you can cut corners.  Some fundraising event planners are excellent at negotiating better pricing for their clients. This could be lower corkage fees, reduced pricing for AV, or better pricing from a florist. Other planners will look towards creating underwriting opportunities that will defray costs for line items such as valet, printing, and wine. In rare cases there are planners who have event vendors extend a 10% discount to their nonprofit client in lieu of pocketing the industry’s typical referral fee themselves. If you find a planner who does this as their policy,

As nonprofit organizations adjust to recent shifts in the economic climate – plummeting stock values, uncertainty in the housing market, disintegration of the cryptocurrency markets – they should be looking for new revenue streams, such as nonprofit event sponsorships, to help hedge against potential financial losses. Corporate sponsors for nonprofits can have a huge impact on the reach of an organization, particularly when it comes to fundraising events like charity galas. While traditional income streams from donor stewardship, legacy giving, grants, and events continue to be organizations’ bread and butter, smart nonprofits should be looking to implement robust nonprofit event sponsorship programs in order to bring in additional revenue. Though the thought of newfound revenue through nonprofit event sponsorships seems appealing, most organizations find the process of finding and landing sponsors frustrating. Nonprofits get hung up when trying to figure out what they have to offer potential event sponsors and how to value it. They get discouraged when trying to find the right businesses to solicit. They can’t figure out why other organizations have lucrative sponsor partnerships but they have had no luck with it. When organizations fall short of their event sponsorship goals it is because of two reasons –  they lack an understanding of sponsorship basics and they don’t follow the 3 Steps for Successful Nonprofit Sponsorships. Corporate Sponsorship Basics Before starting the search for sponsors, organizations should understand exactly what sponsorships are. Unlike regular charitable donations, sponsorships are not from people. Sponsorships are generally from businesses. This does not mean, however, that you don’t need to cultivate relationships with the people at a business who will decide whether or not to partner with your organization as a sponsor. As sponsorship dollars come from businesses, a nonprofit must make its case as to why the sponsorship offers a good return on investment (ROI) for a company. They want to know if the sponsorship will bring them new business and position them favorably in front of their target market. The 3 Steps for Successful Sponsorships By implementing these three steps you set your organization up for sponsorship success. Step 1 – Assess & Valuate Before you do your prospecting homework, and before you pick up the phone and make the sponsorship sales pitch, you need to figure out what your organization has to offer to potential sponsors. While it is tempting to take the easy route and just copy what other organizations in your area are offering in their sponsorship packages, that won’t get you very far in your quest for sponsorship dollars. Take the time to evaluate your own organization’s unique donor base, your mission reach, and your targeted marketing plan. We refer to all these things as assets. Your nonprofit has far more assets to offer than you might think, and you just need to do a little creative brainstorming with your staff and board to come up with some great ideas of how to add value to your sponsorship packages. Examples of great sponsorship assets are sponsor logos on organization vehicles and building exteriors, presenting sponsorship position of a mission-driven event or informational gathering, and logo placement on gala bid paddles and seating cards. One of your most appealing assets is the number of people reached through your organization’s social media and email blasts.   Be bold when stating the strength of your communications’ reach. If sending out a series of social media posts during the span of a sponsorship, multiply the number of your followers by the number of social media or email posts included as a part of the sponsorship. For example, you could say “Your sponsor logo will receive 20,000 impressions over a six-month period through a series of 20 social media posts to our loyal followers.” This really amplifies the value of their sponsorship exposure. Another major asset your organization has to offer is the sales potential of your support base. If you can drive customers to a company’s place of business or website, especially if you can find ways to track these visits by using devices such as digital coupons, then you have a leg up when it comes to landing sponsors. Trackable devices help prove that businesses are getting good ROI from their investment. Once you have identified your organization’s assets, you need to bundle them together to create sponsorship packages and assign a value to each offering. It is important to keep your sponsor pricing realistic for your area and for the assets you are including. This is where it is handy to research what price other local nonprofits are asking for their sponsorship packages. Use those other comparable sponsorship offerings as a guide for what you will ask for your sponsorships. Step 2 – Prospecting and Outreach After you have created the sponsorship packages, it is time to figure out who you will ask to partner with your organization as a sponsor. In sales, this process is called prospecting. Your best sponsor prospects will be businesses that already have a working relationship or personal connection to your organization or one of your board members. Having a pre-existing connection raises your chances of succeeding with bringing a company on as a sponsor. For prospecting, enlist the help of your board for a brainstorming session. During this meeting help your board identify industries and businesses where they spend their money such as banks, attorneys, CPAs, dentists, and insurance companies. Make sure to take notes during this meeting and include which board member has a relationship with each business listed. Unfortunately, when it comes to prospect outreach your board likely won’t be of much help. It is a fact that most board members don’t like asking for money in general, and sponsorship outreach is no different. The good news is that they don’t have to be the ones asking for money. All they need to do is make an initial phone call or email to their contact and let them know that they are an ardent supporter and active board member

Are your donors, boards, and volunteers aging themselves out of existence? I often sit in on my clients’ event committee meetings and am concerned when I see the same faces year-after-year and most of those faces are over 70. This is worrisome as all organizations should be actively engaging younger supporters and volunteers to fill the void that is fast approaching as the current elderly supporters disappear due to life-changes, illness, or even death. The problem is complex. Organizations must find ways to engage Millennials, Gen X, and even Gen Z to ensure the long-term viability of their organizations. Often, however, older generations don’t want to relinquish the reins of boards, committees, and events. They don’t want to see their long-time projects and signature events hijacked by younger generations by whom they feel threatened. Their fears usually stem from a lack of shared cultural perspectives and societal values, and the elders often feel daunted by younger folks’ technological prowess. This is especially true when it comes to volunteer committees. Older generations can feel threatened when younger members are added to existing committees. The existing long-standing members push back against the introduction of new ideas and changes to existing norms. Younger members want to see changes that reflect more modern trends and appeal. Blending generations in committees almost never goes well and usually the newer, younger, committee members leave within a year of joining. The solution to this problem? Stop trying to blend generations! Of course it would be wonderful if we could easily transition the committee from octogenarians to Millennials, but the reality is that rarely works. Instead, look to engage younger supporters with new opportunities that will resonate with them and their peer group. As an example, let’s consider my client who has a long-established gala fundraiser that supports a symphony, and the volunteer committee that is made up mostly of 70-80 year-old guild members. Let’s also consider that this event was fading away due to lack of attendance and entropy. The solution for this? Let the existing guild keep their beloved black tie gala, but at the same time put together an entirely new, younger committee and have them create their own generationally-appropriate event. This could be an outdoor concert music concert, a craft beer festival, or a farm-to-table food tasting which has a lower ticket costs and that appeals to a younger demographic. This new group should be called something totally different than the existing guild. You can give the committee a name that indicates they are next generation or emerging leadership. The members of this new committee can be incorporated into the mid-donor stewardship cycle with plans to move them up to major donors as their future ability dictates. This new group should be treated with utmost respect, should be asked for valuable input and their suggestions implemented when possible. Remember, these new committee members are your future board members and major donors! This is the best of both worlds. It ensures the gala will continue its traditions for a few more years and provide its reliable revenue stream, while building relationships and organizational brand-recognition with a new, younger support base. It may take some time and effort to build the affinity and loyalty you have enjoyed with your long-time committees, but it is well worth the energy as it will ensure your organization is able to gracefully transition from one generation to the next. Help your volunteer event committee to become superstars at Asking! Read this blog to find out how!