by Susan Oetgen, Interim Program Manager, The Field
Working late at the office is not usually something I look
forward to, but three weeks ago, on a balmy May evening, I was pretty psyched
to stick around to host The Field's Special Events Career Workshop. As the rest of the Financial District was
emptying out and shutting down, I was gearing up to spend a few more hours in
The Field's sweet new conference room, taking notes from fundraising and
special events consultant Zanetta Addams-Pilgrim, along with a similarly jazzed
group of fellow go-getter artists.
As even a
quick glance at her bio will attest, Zanetta's track record as a fundraiser
and special events planner is impressive, to say the least. Equally important,
however, she's an experienced and adept teacher, so those of us in the workshop
definitely got our specific special events questions answered. While she dropped plenty of pearls of wisdom
here and there, she also had a straightforward, well-conceived methodology,
which you can find more of in the
Special Events
Toolbox she authored with Laura Goldstein, during her tenure as Program
Director at Cause Effective, a business development and management consultant
firm for non-profits. Meanwhile, I'll do
my best to recap some of it here.
After a round of introductions so we could all meet and
greet each other as colleagues, the first thing she did was to break down the
definition of a special event.
Basically, any event outside the purview of your regular programming is
a special event, according to Zanetta. Let's
say you're a dancer. That means pretty
much anything that isn't a dance performance you put on for the public. It could be an open rehearsal that you invite
potential donors to. It could be an ice
cream social on your best friend's rooftop that you invite all your friends to
in order to raise $1,000 for your latest self-produced project at Dixon
Place. It could be a dinner party at
your new Board Chair's fancy apartment where you and your entire Board of
Directors are celebrating and honoring your outgoing Board Chair. In other words, if it's not a straight-up
performance, it's a special event.
Next Zanetta introduced three practical tools that are
indispensable to producing a successful special event: OBJECTIVES, TIMELINES,
and BUDGETS. Since you might have many
good reasons to throw a special event, it's important to know what your primary
OBJECTIVE is. Maybe you're inviting
potential donors and Board members to your ice cream social. Is the event first and foremost a fundraising
event, a cultivation event or a recruitment event? Using a worksheet, Zanetta walked us through
a process of determining all of our potential objectives, and then we discussed
as a group why it is important to have consensus and clarity among the special
events team members about the primary
objective. By the way, what if you don't
have a 'special events team' because your organization has a 'staff' of one,
a.k.a yourself? The lesson still
applies. Even if it's just you on the
'team', best practice means listing out all the possible objectives for your
special event, and choosing the most important one.
With that clarity around objective as your guiding light,
you can turn your focus to creating a TIMELINE, the second of the tools Zanetta
offered us. This tool is about
information-sharing and accountability.
Producing a special event is exactly like producing a performance: there
are weeks and weeks of advance work that go into it. Zanetta's timeline tool is a spreadsheet that
breaks out each step you need to take, when you need to take it, who is
accountable for it, and what the status is, so that at any given point in time,
you know how the event planning is coming along. Seems like a lot of work to create this timeline,
rather than just diving into the steps you need to take, but according to
Zanetta, you will be glad you have it when it comes time to evaluate your
special event after the fact.
But there's a BUDGET to develop. Most of us typically draft budgets that
simply list income and expenses. Zanetta
encouraged us to take this third tool further and make low, medium and high
projections on both the income and expense side. That way, we cover the bases as far as what
we can expect to gain (or lose) financially from our special event and in the
process of laying it all out on paper, we can make an informed decision about
whether the special event is even worth doing!
That's right! Zanetta stressed
the importance of deciding against
producing a special event if it isn't financially feasible! Or if you can meet your primary objective in
a more cost and time-effective manner.
If your budget looks good and you decide to go forth with
your special event, Zanetta emphasized the importance of making time shortly
afterward to EVALUATE the success of it.
Did you meet your objective? Why
or why not? Having a detailed reflection
session on what you would differently or the same next time is the best way to
build your capacity to meet your special events objectives in the future.
It was so worth staying late at the office to benefit from
Zanetta Addams-Pilgrim's excellent workshop, and I hope the above is a helpful
recap for those of you who missed it!
Probably the biggest take-away for me personally was the notion that you
can use those three tools (OBJECTIVES, TIMELINES, BUDGETS) to assess the
feasibility of the special event you're planning before you even decide to host
it. Drop a line to
susan@thefield.org if you have questions
or comments, or post them below! And
keep your eye on this space for upcoming posts about the Career Workshops we
have planned for the fall…