Managing Your Charity Events Efficiently

As a non-profit, you run several events throughout the year to drum up donations and support from current and new donors. These events can make up the bulk of donations and often drive awareness for your cause.

But managing these events can get costly if not done correctly. There’s no way to run an event for free. However, you can keep the costs down and make the most of your charity’s awareness by managing your events effectively.

Running Your Charity Events in Your Venue

The venue where you host your event requires a lot of management before you can make the most of it. What assets do you need to bring with you on-site to make the most of the space? Are there other preparations you need to make before you can run the event?

Tracking these items will help you ensure you’re prepared to run your event when the day comes.

Tracking Event Activities

Of course, after you’ve run your event, you’ll want some way of tallying what your efforts raised. Whether you’re running a donation drive or simply trying to bring awareness to your cause, you need some way to quantify what you’ve done.

Instead of trying to figure it out after the event is over, it makes more sense to track efforts as they are happening. That way, you can get a real-time look at what you’ve done. If you’re falling behind schedule, you can make a push to drive more donations. Or if you’re way ahead of schedule, you can share the good news and motivate people to contribute even more.

Ask your staff to help you record where the most hours were spent. In the future when you run these events, you can dispatch volunteers ahead of time to work on those areas to prevent them from ballooning into problems.

You’ll also need to record how much security was necessary and other issues that propped up during the course of the event. This will help you head off problems before they happen, and create a better experience overall next time.

Managing Event Costs

There are certain costs associated with running an event. Being a non-profit, you can likely get much of those things donated. Regardless of whether they’ve been donated, or if you’ve had to pay for certain aspects of the event, you need to track everything.

Use an asset tracking software, like Asset Panda, to track all aspects of things that go into making the event happen. Did the venue donate chairs, tables, and audiovisual equipment to help you host your crowd? Record that it was donated so you can send out a thank you later. Did you have to pay for catering? Put it in the tally so you can report why you had to spend it.

Recording Man Hours

Regardless of how you get the rest of the event to come together, your biggest asset in making scheduled events happen is man-hours. Volunteers are going to be your biggest asset when it comes to making your event happen on time. Without them, you wouldn’t be able to set up, take down, or even run your charity drive.

Recording individual volunteer hours is unnecessary and cumbersome. However, you’ll need some way to measure what everyone has done. Consider recording in clumps. Record what each group has done, the estimated hours it took to get it done, and the effect that effort had.

Running your event effectively will help you drive more awareness to your cause and drive more donations. When people see you know what you’re doing, they’re more likely to want to support you, because they know their money is going towards a good and competent cause.