Episode 42: Measuring event success

Planning

May 13

We often talk about the need to have a successful fundraising event. But what does that mean? Just because your event made money doesn't necessarily mean it was a success, financial or otherwise.

FAST Goals

I have an acronym that I use for setting event goals. Because you have to start with goals in order to measure success. I call them your FAST goals. F stands for financial, A is attendance, S is social and T is training or education.

Let’s dive a little deeper into FAST goals and the ways you can measure event success.

F – FINANCIAL

NET REVENUE:

When nonprofits announce how much money they made at, or after, their fundraising event, they are usually declaring the amount of gross revenue they took in. In reality, though, it's not about gross revenue figure. It's net revenue. If you raised $100,000 but spent $95,000 that would not necessarily be considered a success. When you're thinking about your financial goal, you need to focus on net revenue.

There are a couple of calculations that you can make when measuring the financial success of your event. ROI or return on investment and expense to revenue ratio.

ROI:

Return on investment tells you how much money you make for every dollar you spend. You calculate ROI by taking net revenue, which is your total revenue minus your expenses. And then divide. That buy your expenses and then take that number times a hundred.

Net revenue (Gross revenue minus expenses) divided by Expenses x 100

Ex. Gross revenue = $250,000, Expenses = $50,000, Net revenue = $200,000

$200,000 ($250,000 - $50,000)/$50,000 x 100 = 400%.
For every dollar spent on the event the organization raised $4.00.

If you're ROI = 100%, that means your organization broke even.

ROI on its own isn't necessarily good or bad. It depends on your goals. If you're hosting an educational event and you get 100% ROI that's a great thing. It means you broke even.

Expense to Revenue Ratio

Generally speaking, you want an expense to revenue ratio of 35% or less. The lower the ratio, the more effective your spending is.

(Expenses/Gross Revenue) x 100.

Using the numbers from the last example…

$50,000 (Expenses)/$250,000(Gross Revenue) = .2 x100 = 20%. That means for every $20 spent we made a hundred dollars.

A - ATTENDANCE

You should always have an attendance school for your event. One major factor in your attendance goal is the size of your venue. If you're hosting an outdoor event where space isn't a factor, you should still have a target number for attendance based on staffing and volunteer capacity.

Keep in mind that bigger is not always better. It's not about getting as many people to your event as possible. It's about getting the right people. And the right people being your target audience.

You can also look at other attendance goals.

· If this is an annual event, how many of your guests are repeat customers versus new guests?

· How many guests checked in and attended versus how many registered? That's called your show rate. There are a lot of factors that can affect your show rate, but generally speaking, you can expect anywhere from 75 to 85%. If it's a free event, that show rate is much lower.

S - SOCIAL

Social media, whether we like it or not is a big component of hosting an event. Every event should have social media goals. Even if it's just to track the increase in followers during the timeframe that you're promoting your event.

If you have the capacity, I encourage you to go beyond just tracking followers.

Likes comments and shares of your event related posts.
How many people were Going or Interested in attending your Facebook event?
How many times was your event hashtag used?
What were the open rates of your event emails?
What were your website conversion rates. How many people who looked at your event registration page actually clicked through and registered?

T - TRAINING

Non-profits need to educate their audience about many things; who you are, what you do, why you do it, and why it's important.

You can use a variety of ways to measure the success of your training or education goals. Here are just a couple of those methods.

· Audience polls

· Pre- and post-event surveys

MONITOR & TRACK GOALS

Once you've determined what your goals are, you can then set up systems to track and monitor your goals. Don’t wait until the end of the event to determine if it was a success. If you're tracking some of those things as you go, you have time to course correct if things aren't going as you'd like.

LISTENER ACTION ITEM

· Set your event FAST goals.

· Create systems to track and monitor your FAST goals.

For my clients, I have their fast goals on every planning meeting agenda. Prior to each weekly meeting, I document where we are on actual numbers versus the goal so that we know where we stand and to inform our decision-making.

Success doesn't come to you. You have to go out and get it. Make sure you are setting realistic goals and measuring the success of your event based on those goals. And be sure to monitor as you go so you can course correct as necessary. You don't want any big surprises at the end.

Now that sounds like a plan.