Making Special Events A Success
When I worked for the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, now known as the Anaheim Ducks, part of my responsibilities included overseeing the community relations team for the hockey club.
The CR department had several goals but part of the responsibilities was overseeing special events and raising money for the foundation.
Recently, I spoke with a friend of mine who was planning a special event for her non profit group (non sports related) — you can see the background story at thesportscalendar blog . It made me think, how are these events valued, internally by a team and what can be done to help improve the results.
Here are a few brief thoughts that crossed my mind.
* Don’t just measure how much money was made. Also figure out if you are generating more interest in terms of attendance, exposure from media an other variables
* Are you meeting your overall business goals?
* Are you following up with participants post-event — this is easily done via a survey to find out what was good and what can be improved.
* Test new components or twists when doing the same event year over year
* Certainly check for conflicts with other events and which days of the week have events performed the best.
* Don’t settle that you must continue to do things the same way as they have been done in the past
I like your first point. In a society where we are bombarded with the message that it is “always about the money,” it isn’t always about the money. If we produce events to build relationships, the money will come on the back end!