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 Oveityou 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.
Experience economy is usually associated with millennials and the shift in spending habits. One of the experiences they(we) are most likely to engage in is live events. Multi-day festivals, for example, have become a kind of rite of passage for many.
Music, fun, experiences, and often long-term connections with peers are all desirable. As such, there is no surprise that half of the 32 million people that attend festivals in the US are millennials.
So what drives change?
Let’s start with a short intro to technology and, most important, connectivity technology. It won’t take long. You are probably aware that computers have evolved constantly since the 1970s. Flash news number two: they have now become both powerful and cheap enough to help empower people from all geographical and social backgrounds. A report from the White House shows that millennials have been shaped by the ubiquity of technology. Yup, tech is in their DNA.
Taking a photo at a festival and saving the experience. Source.
Connectivity technology was surprisingly influential. Both mobile phones and social media have been used by teens in the previous decade to stay connected, exchange information, and share moments with their peers.
This led to what is now called “Fear of Missing Out” (FOMO). As they are more and more connected to social media outlets and share important moments in their lives, the need for “being there” has increased. Also, over half of millennials report that people ask them to purchase opinions and they influence four to five friends and family.
So there is an increase in millennial influence and an increase in the number of people that want to be influenced by them. As a result, social gatherings such as live events have become the norm. Groups must attend or they fear missing out on potentially important social interactions.
Experiences rather than goods
The common knowledge is that millennials favor experience over goods. And they seem to do just that. But that does not mean that they are not spending. Actually, attendance and revenue from festivals have skyrocketed:
Lollapalooza attendance has grown from 65,000 in 2005 to 300,000 for 2014. Revenue in 2014 was $28.8 million and generated over $140 million for the local economy.
Burning Man has become a globally followed event. In 2014 more than 65 000 attended the event.
Coachella sold over 198 000 tickets in 2015 and raked in more than $84 million. One of the hottest things the festival has pushed forward was live streaming, now at 28 million views, a way for millennials to stay connected, even if they are not there.
And that’s not all — an increase in festival attendance has taken the world by storm. A long list of awesome festivals shows how millennials now acquire experiences.
It’s not just festivals, either. It’s concerts, movies and even pay TV. 83 million millennials will spend $750 a year to purchase experiences, as Deloitte reports. That’s $62 billion changing the world, spent by people who crave for experiences.
How does the experience economy change the world?
A change in purchase options for millennials is a huge thing for the global economy and as a result, society at large.
By spending more on experiences, by joining large groups, by accepting diversity and seeking it, the millennials are making the world a more connected place, smaller and less prejudice prone.
Goods as commodity and self-defining experiences
As the manufacturing of goods has been streamlined, automated, and increasingly effective, goods have become accessible. A computer or flat-screen TV used to cost a small fortune to own. Now they are both accessible to many so they have lost their social status symbol.
Even big-ticket possessions such as cars or houses will soon lose their appeal as the world perspective shifts from owning to accessing.
So goods become commodities. They are accessible and lose their appeal to the masses of millennials that will soon become the dominant spending force in the global economy.
Brands will have to face the truth sooner or later. The marketing added value will soon fade and products will be just as desired as their manufacturers are socially responsible, as millennials demand. Even now, emerging brands such as Warby Parker or Bonobos emphasize their positive impact on the society catering to their target market’s values.
Experiences will become defining for individuals’ character. And large scale events, attended in foreign cities, countries, or even continents, will build global citizens. Millennials will grow up with a global perspective rather than a local one. This will improve international relations because we already know that people that trade together don’t fight one another. We’re finding out that people that have fun together may care for one another.
New financial and payment systems
Credit cards have long become mainstream but are now increasingly less appealing to new generations.
Festivals have started to experience with new access and payment tokens, such as RFID wristbands that double as entry tickets and payment devices within the events’ areas.
Who says these new payments and financial systems cannot step outside the festivals and replace old institutions, such as banks, and technologies, such as credit cards?
Decentralized entertainment experiences may breathe new life into the music industry
The music industry has become rigid and resistant to change. A few labels own a large deal of rights to music and artist’s creative abilities. With the rise of large independent events and an increase in popularity for indie artists that can connect directly to their fans, the change will happen.
Even more — we may experience new types of art performances that so far have been hiding in underground concerts and small events. Burning Man is a great example. It went from one of the smallest festivals in the US to one of the most influential and large ones. It used to be the place where underground artists, hipsters and libertarians used to come hang out. It is now the place where tech titans meet and build new ventures.
And it’s not just music in the US. It is also tech, medical events and more. Brazil has seen a huge and steep increase in the number of business events. Eastern Europe, for example, has had a boom of tech events such as ICEEfest. Event registration tools help event organizers, small to mid to large, set up and handle their dream event.
The future will bring a more connected world, through the live events that millennials now experience. And I don’t mean connected as in digitally connected, because …
Something else will replace today’s “social media”
Social media as we now understand it is anything but social in terms of human emotional needs. If anything, it alienates individuals through over-inflated and weak relationships. The kind that we, as humans, feel good about on the short term but don’t rarely find real value in in the long term. The number of Facebook friends, the number of Instagram or Twitter followers may feel superficially satisfying but what we crave for are the real experiences.
The touch of a hand, the laughter, the warm feeling of finding someone you know you want to spend time with. These are all things Facebook cannot provide, no matter how many Oculus devices they ship.
Millennials want something that their parents and grand parents had and they have not received enough of. The digital empire brought about by tech companies as well as the very structure of our civilized world, with large cities and weak ties between people, is not satisfying.
By connecting in real life events, millennials are building a real “social world”, with the help of “social media”. They crave and they will have the strong ties that happen in the real world. They crave and they are building a new world where people are people, not just numbers on a Facebook profile. One live event at a time.
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.
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
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.
Oveit was selected as one of the exhibiting startups at Museum Rocket, the first museum and entrepreneurship fair.
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.
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.
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