4 Simple Ideas to Raise More Money for Your Charity

“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.”

Winston S. Churchill

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Charity. Source.

Each year, non-profit organizations face the difficulties of the modern-day business society.

However, there is one difficulty that stands out from the crowd: raising money. Whilst in sales a company offers something in exchange for money, most of the times non-profit organizations have nothing to offer… or do they?

Looking towards fundraising in our times you must remember what fundraising is all about.

1. Asking is the best way to raise money

Money doesn’t grow on trees, nor is anyone willing to part from it without a good reason or a good story. The main rule of fundraising is that if a charity wants to be funded, it first has to ask for it. Donations will not come by themselves, they come from people. Hence, it is important to see that money is necessary but not important. People are important. Friends of the cause are important. And one must always remember that each donor is unique and must be seen as a real person, not as a walking wallet. 

2. Inspire people with your vision

A wise man once said that the hand asking for money will not receive anything unless it has a good story to tell. This means that behind each cause there has to be a story that stirs emotion and makes people join forces or donate some money. Nobody will ever donate anything unless they empathize with the cause. Charities need a larger vision. They must think outside the box when they tell a story. Be original!

3. Organize fundraising events

How to raise money for the charity? Involve them in your story and make them actively participate in your campaigns. Get them to know the beneficiaries of the charity and let them be fundraisers themselves. Most important, organize fundraising events. These are the moments when potential donors and sponsors can interact, discuss and get to know one another. Manage your events with care, get to know each and every one of your participants and offer them an easy way to make donations. For this it is recommended the use of an event management tool that can handle access management, registration management and offer you an easy and smooth way for people to donate. Oveit can give you all the above-mentioned tools so that you can focus on telling your story to the people and not worry about managing your event.

4. Show me the money!

Once your event is finished, the adventure is not over. You might have raised an impressive amount of donations for your cause, but that’s not the end. So, follow-ups are required. A fundraiser must go from door to door and talk to the people he now knows and who are now familiar with the cause. For this, a fundraiser needs a good data base of the people who participated at the event. Using Oveit you can visualize and use the event data in the CRM section and follow up . So all you have to do is pick up the phone or write an e-mail and follow up with your kind donors .

Fundraising is not hard once you have a good cause and the right tools for your events and donations. Go out there, talk with your donors, keep them active, involve them in your campaign and always show them your results. People need to see where their money goes. If what the person donated made a difference, rest assured that she will be ready to donate once more.

May 23, 2016 Event management, Event professionals, Events, fundraising events No comments yet

Which KPI should I track for Business Events?

Event organizing can get quite messy really fast if performance is not measured. However, it can get cluttered if too many KPIs are measured.

So which KPI’s should you be measuring?

If you are organizing business events, here’s a handful of KPIs that will help you down the road, with some thoughts on why they are important.

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Sales KPIs

If you are organizing free events you can skip this one but you can benefit from a free account on Oveit (great news, right?).

But if your budget includes ticket sales or corporate partnerships, sales are at the core of your event. They are both the fuel that keeps the events going and a meter on how well you are performing.

So here are some you should be keeping your eyes on:

Average profit margin: you probably organize more than one event. The average profit margin is the median margin across your events. You should be keeping track of this figure and measure the events you organize against the APM and the average profit margin against previous years indicators

Quote to close ratio: you have your ticket sales and then you have corporate sponsorship, partnerships, and things such as exhibitor fees. Most of the time quoted prices are modified upwards or downwards (usually through bundling or up-sales) and you should try to keep the ratio between quote to close larger under 100%. Sounds a bit counter-intuitive, right?

Well, let’s think about it. This ratio looks like this:

Quoted price / Close price 

If the close price is higher than the quoted price, it means the sales team is performing well as they have effectively increased the sale. This means if the initial quoted price was, for example, 1000$, and the final close price is 2000$, you get a ratio of 50%, thus implying you have doubled the performance for the sales team.

If on the other hand, the ratio is larger than 100% it means the deal decreased from quote to close.

So by keeping track of the median quote to close ratio, you can get an overview of how sales are performing.

Tracking KPIs against past performance and against industry standards:

One thing to keep in mind is that KPIs are unimportant on their own. The keywords in KPI are performance indicators. That implies relative importance of these values. This relative performance is measured against past performance and against industry standards.

Attendee and partner sentiment analysis

One very important aspect of managing a successful event management business is understanding and measuring the way your target customers react to the event.

In terms of business events, that usually means two types of customers:

  • partners (sponsors, advertisers, exhibitors)
  • general attendees (visitors interacting with the event and with partners)

To get a sense of how they feel about the event you should split the KPI measurement into three-time frames:

  • before the event
  • during the event
  • after the event

Each of these phases can have specific KPIs measured but the general concept of sentiment analysis should be viewed as a way to quantify how your (potential) customers feel about your brand. So it’s basically turning feeling into numbers. You can do that using:

  • social media tools that monitor and report user feedback regarding your event
  • customer feedback tools (forms, surveys, automated mailing lists)
  • direct interaction (focus groups, live interviews, discussion panels)
  • automated optical recognition technology (basically video systems that quantify how happy visitors are)

Loyalty and customer retention

Loyalty is a really important brand value and it should be noted that returning attendees are probably the best measurement of how successful your event is.

The KPI you should be focused on is Customer Retention Rate (be it Partners or General attendees). To do that you should be tracking the number of attendees that keep coming back and its yearly evolution. Ideally, you should strive to get most of last year’s customers returning and increasing this ratio year over year.

Most of these indicators are easy to extract from Oveit and we hope you will find these guidelines easy to use and helpful.

Is there any KPI you would like to add?

April 21, 2016 Business events, Event management, Event professionals, Events 1 comment

Meet us at Museum Rocket – let’s talk about museum access management and ticketing

Oveit was selected as one of the exhibiting startups at Museum Rocket, the first museum and entrepreneurship fair.

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Museums have always been at the center of cultural innovation. As the times are ever-changing museums can’t ignore the impact technology has on our lives.

So a small team of enthusiasts has built a platform where cultural experts and leaders can meet tech entrepreneurs. Ideas will hopefully flourish and the two will be able to benefit from one another.

Last year’s Museum Rocket, in Berlin:

We Are Museums 2015 (Berlin, DE) from WeAreMuseums on Vimeo.

We were selected to showcase our access management technology, enabling museums to improve access to venues. With Oveit, museums can issue and check electronic tickets directly on their websites, can offer subscriptions to visitors, and can create cross-museum access passes in minutes rather than months.

Even more, museums can host events and become the cultural and social centers our society needs them to be.

The fourth edition of Museum Rocket will be hosted in Bucharest, following Vilnius, Warsaw, and Berlin, and will feature guests and speakers from all over the world.

We will be glad to meet you there.

April 20, 2016 Access management, Event professionals, Events, Museums 1 comment

The story of the brave theater that could

We believe in stories. Most of our users have wonderful stories and we want to share them with the world. This way we cans shed light on those that usually go unseen: the people behind the spotlight.

For the love of theater

Ciulley LiviuThe CI Nottara theater was founded in 1947, right after the Second World War and it was first named “The Army Theater”. It was built by Liviu Ciulley, one of the wealthiest architects of those times, as a token of appreciation for his children, whose love for the theater could not go unnoticed. His son, Liviu Ciulei, would go on to become one of the most loved and acclaimed directors of his generation, being voted the best director at Cannes in 1965 and leading the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in the 1980s, when it won a Tony Award.

Looking back to the times long gone, Liviu Ciulei, the director, remembers how it all happened. His father wanted him to follow in his footsteps and become a construction engineer. But he cared little for the exact sciences involved in erecting buildings. He wanted to be a director and he loved the theater. So one day, without his parents knowing, he signed up for classes at the Theater Conservatoire. He prepared a monologue from Henry the IVth, by Pirrandello. The day came when he was supposed to face his future teachers and prove he was worthy of joining the Conservatoire. The exam was held in a classroom with no public. Just the examination commission.

When he was ready to start, the door opens and in comes his father, Liviu Ciulley. He asks to be allowed to watch the exam. He is granted the privilege and the exam starts. His son is terrified at first and barely remembers his lines. But he starts the monologue anyway. A bit shy at first, word by word he starts delivering one of his best performances, he remembers. The teachers loved him.

That same evening the family was sitting quietly, eating dinner. His father notices: “It seams the theater thing is quite serious.” He then pauses in complete silence. The future director is terrified of the outcome but a few minutes later he sighs relieved when his father takes his decision. “I will build you a theater”.

The Nottara Theater. Click for the virtual tour The Nottara Theater. Click for the virtual tour

Surviving the communist regime

After its founding, the Army Theater, as it was named until the 1960s, lived through challenging times. Private theaters were stripped of their finances and their founders stripped of their possessions by the Communist Party.

Lucia Sturdza Bulandra

Lucia Sturdza Bulandra

After 1948 most of the private property, including the private theaters, was nationalized and what would become the CI Nottara Theater was absorbed into the City Theater, under the management of Lucia Sturdza Bulandra.

Lucia Sturdza Bulandra was an actress, a teacher, a manager and a noble descendant of Prince Ion Sturdza, Ruller of Moldavia. In an unusual choice for those times (given her noble and therefore “unhealthy” communist origin) she was invited to create and manage the City Theater.

Her presence at the theater helped actors continue on their path and gradually restored the faith in this art. Though foreign plays were at first heavily censored and adapted to fit the communist agenda, culture was seen as that little drop of freedom still accessible. The people found a way to escape the isolation forced by communist party through the plays of foreign authors and notably, William Shakespeare. His influence on the cultural evolution through this times is undeniable.

The Nottara Theater was no exception. Under the leadership of directors, actors and even ex ambassadors (such as Maxim Crișan, previously an ambassador to Moscow), the theater grew its repertoire. It proved to be one of the few places where the communist regime was somehow lacking the needed influence to block all thoughts of freedom and culture.

The fall of communism and the theater’s rebirth

When communism fell in 1989, Romania found itself in a world it did not really understand. The incoming stream of western culture was too much to comprehend in such a short time. Given the changes in the social, political and economic spectrum, the people were left rather frustrated with the new world they were trying to grasp and could not.

The frustrations were felt within the theater as well. So the actors did what they could do best. They played their feelings openly so the world could see. Nottara was never empty. Its public became enamored with the actors performance as they reflected their own emotions through plays from the local and universal repertoire.

We’ve met the staff in the spring of 2015 when they were focusing on renovating the lobby and the stage area. They were quite happy that they have found a way to handle all their specific needs in terms of event management and we helped with what we could.

We stayed close to them and tried to understand the specific needs of these passionate people. Within a short time they were selling tickets online and we were amazed at how fast the public seemed to adopt and enjoy this new way of gaining access.

And then disaster struck.

The tragic night and the will to keep going

On October the 30th, 2015, the Colectiv Nightclub in Bucharest caught fire. 64 people died and 147 were injured. It was the worst incident since a plane crash in the 90’s. The tragedy shook Romania to its core.

It was a horrific combination of a mismanaged club, pyrotechnic effects that should not have been used and a lot more people than the club was supposed to host.

As a result, the Romanian General Inspectorate for Emergency Situations conducted more than 1,000 inspections at national level, in bars, venues, clubs, cinema and theaters. Many were closed. Among these, the CI Nottara Theater, which previously received the necessary permits to conduct its activity. Now it was deemed as a seismic risk.

The actors were furious. They protested the decision which they deemed unfair. By closing the venue, the government left no alternative for the actors to continue their work. They were literally out on the street. And that’s where they played their parts.

Out in the street. Invited to other theaters. Performing in cultural institutes. They didn’t stop.

In an unprecedented move, the staff decided they would continue to perform and innovate. They received help from the Hungarian Institute Balassi, few local theaters, a shopping mall and even the Presidency that hosted some of the shows.

But the real help came from its public. Those that followed the brave theater to wherever they choose to perform that specific night. The theater’s notoriety grew from 45 to 68% in just a few months.

Nottara did not fail. It blossomed through adversity. We helped with what we could. They used our app to sell their tickets online, wherever the show was hosted.

They even crossed borders in the neighboring country Moldova. The Romanians there greeted the theater with their arms open and the shows were all sold out.

After their trials and tribulations, the actors and staff at the CI Nottara theater had proven they are unbreakable. Destiny offered some good news after more than 140 days away from home. On the 14th of April, 2016, the staff and their friends gathered in a small club in the Old City Center and celebrated the first sign of success in their struggle.

The return home

The theater announced that a seismic re-expertise was being conducted and results were  optimistic. The building which was deemed unfit in the light of the Colectiv Club tragedy, was now inspected and results showed no serious seismic risk.

Could CI Nottara be returning home? Yes, there are signs that the staff will restart performing within the same building Liviu Ciulley built for his son’s love of theater.

But the theater never really left its home. It was there where it has always been. In the public’s heart, in the actors’ minds and souls, in the center of a city that loves its performances and its history.

April 19, 2016 Event professionals, Theater No comments yet