The Best Exercise is Walking

How getting up and getting out can really boost your MarCom efforts

One of the least expensive, and most effective way of communicating about your organization is as old as campfires in the hills.

Think about how you learn about new restaurants to try, new movies to see, new bands to hear, new networks to check out. In most cases, even in our hyper-connected age, word of mouth is still the most trusted communication, especially for recommendations. Sure, we all use Yelp and TripAdvisor, but don’t you usually ask your friends, too?

Getting up from your chair and getting out of the office to talk with people is one of the most cost-effective marketing arrows in your quiver.

There are a million opportunities to get out and tell people about your organization’s great work. Most are free to very inexpensive. A few require larger investments, and as with any other MarCom purchase, you need to evaluate the potential ROI.

In my last job, I had my assistant call all of the local Rotary, Lions, and Elks clubs, as well as Chambers of Commerce, offering my services as a presenter at their frequent luncheons. Our goal was one presentation a month, and after a few weeks she had easily lined up those presentations for me. Not only did they directly bring in new business from people who were unaware of our organization (a nonprofit social enterprise) and its great work and mission, but it enabled me to make a few long-term connections that have proven beneficial. The cost of this? A few hours of my assistant’s time and a few hours of my time. And generally speaking, I got a free lunch out of the deal.

An added benefit of these lunch-time talks was the rehearsal time they afforded me. Most top marketers are frequently required to make presentations on their organization and its programs. The Rotary lunch talks got me ready to talk to our funders and donors. They helped me see what descriptions made the best impressions, and how to best talk about what we did. The frequent talks showed me which jokes worked and which programs created the greatest empathy. And because I generally had a slide presentation as part of my speech, the frequent repetitions helped me fine-tune that, fixing slides that didn’t flow well, or that people didn’t seem to understand. And after you do this a couple of dozen time, your stage fright will disappear, or at least becomes controllable, and your presentations will get better and better.

Finally, the questions that always came after the prepared remarks revealed how well I was communicating, which concepts were easy to grasp and which were confusing, and what parts of our program really resonated with people. All of this was incredibly useful information. And a great opportunity to hand out business cards and some brochures.

Is that a badge in your pocket, or…

Of course, one must include conferences and conventions in your marketing efforts. They are great opportunities to meet lots of people by giving presentations, but also by simply being there. There are dozens of conferences every day – and you could spend your entire career on the road attending them. But if you pick the top two to four conferences each year and attend those, you’ll make dozens of new connections and spread the word about your organization while learning new tricks to help your work improve.

Speaking at conferences usually involves one of four presentation options: Panels, Breakout sessions, Plenaries (to everyone), and Keynotes.

Panels are conversations between two or more people on a specific topic. Audiences like these because they get a multitude of opinions and expertise addressing a specific issue. Organizers like them because they enable a lot of people to talk, and usually each speaker brings in income for the conference organizer.

Panels can be a good way to present information, but they have a few drawbacks. Unless the moderator has good control over the panel, you can get a runaway speaker situation, where one presenter monopolizes the time available. This can be especially annoying when that presenter is not very good, or is boring and uninteresting. Another hazard of panels is poor moderation in general. The panel moderator needs to know enough about the subject to be able to ask interesting and provocative questions, and to be able to keep the panelists on topic and on time. Panels are especially good because they give you an opportunity to get feedback from the audience. The question-and-answer period after a panel presentation is usually the most useful part of the presentation, and almost always the most interesting.

If you are asked to moderate a panel, be sure you understand the topic and the presenters as well as possible. Call the panel members beforehand, preferably in a video or audio conference so that everyone can talk together, and discuss  the topics you want to cover, the order of the speakers, how long each of them has for an introductory speech, whether or not you want them to use slides, and how much time you have overall. Well-run panels can be really interesting for the audience members, are great way to meet other experts in your field, and can be very rewarding.

Breakout and Plenary presentations are a bigger deal than panels, and put you in the spotlight in front of the audience, all by yourself. Breakouts take place at the same time as other sessions, and typically have only a portion of the total attendance, but otherwise are very similar to Plenary sessions. Plenary presentations are usually a half hour to 45 min. long. They require a firm understanding of your topic, a tight presentation that doesn't wander or give people time to get bored, good slides, and confidence on your part. Usually you'll work with the conference organizers to determine what the topic should be, what style of presentation they prefer when you're going to give the presentation, and what audiovisual or other amenities will be available. This is a tremendous one-to-many communications opportunity, and a chance to tell important stories about your organization’s efforts, methods, and impacts.

Keynotes are often among the most highly-anticipated presentations at a conference. This gives you a huge messaging opportunity. Keynote speakers often get featured in the program and receive a lot of attention. As with any important presentation, you want to be sure to talk to the organizers of the conference beforehand to understand their expectations, how long you have, what the stage and presentation area will be like, who you're following and preceding, and any other details that are important.

Before you do any presentation at a conference or even a luncheon be sure to rehearse it. I find it really good to talk to myself, to give the presentation while looking at the slides on my computer, to get a sense of flow and timing. Flow is very important — your slides and your presentation has to move along as if it were a conversation. The best presentations sound like someone talking directly to you, not like someone reading a book. It takes time and practice to get relaxed enough to give a talk like that, and its only possible when you know your material well.

After you've talked through it yourself a few times, looking at your slides and checking how well the flow and timing works, ask a few friends to be guinea pigs and critique your presentation. I always do this before an important talk and find it to be incredibly valuable.

You don't want your friends to be just your friends when you're doing a rehearsal talk and asking for their critique. You want them to point out the things they don't understand, and the places where you struggle with your delivery. You need them to tell you if your talk is interesting, and holds their attention. You need them to be brutally honest with you. This isn’t the time for people to be patting you on the back, and telling you how good you are. (But you are, you’re really good!)

One last thing. Don't make your presentations commercials. Talking in a way that sounds overtly like a sales pitch is going to alienate your audience and make them far less receptive to what you have to say. Your presentation needs to tell the stories that help people understand your topic. It can be all about your organization and the great programs it provides. But don't make it just a sales pitch; tone it down, keep it subtle, and make it interesting. When you get people engaged with your stories, they'll be eager to learn more, eager to help, and eager to donate.

I recently saw an online conversation that started with the question, “How do I get my development director out of the office and talking to people?” don’t let your boss ever ask this question. Whether you’re in development, MarCom, or general management, get up off your chair and go tell your story.

In summary, here  are a few of the types of places you can make presentations with a few thoughts about each type of venue.

Venue	Good for	Remember
Hallway conversation at a conference	Getting to know people. Practicing your elevator speech Getting the latest gossip Learning about things before official announcements Making friends and allies	This can be the most important time at a conference Practice your elevator speech before you go. Notice how people react to your elevator speech and refine it as needed.
Talks to service clubs (Rotary, Lions, Chamber of Commerce, etc.)	Getting the word out to local people. Creating new supporters Practicing your presentation skills.	Wonderful practice opportunity – get your presentation down. Great way to get info to the community. Good place to meet local who will support your mission.
Panel discussion at conference	Opportunity to be seen and have your story heard Be seen as equal to other presenters (increased status) Providing short comments on a topic Learning from other panelists while presenting	A way onto a conference program. Usually a larger audience than a service club. Meet other presenters who may be good to know. Low-risk way to get feedback and test your messaging and presentation before a larger, more sophisticated group.
Plenary presentation at conference	Providing long-form information to an interested audience. Establishing authority and the importance of your topic/organization.	A bigger audience, with higher expectations than at a panel presentation. Keep your talk general enough to appeal to everyone. Be sure you rehearse until it becomes effortless.
Keynote presentation	Captivating an audience with the strength of your personality and the importance of your cause..	This is the big time, be sure you are ready. Remember: a plenary talk is often as much about entertainment as information. A great way to introduce new ideas, plans, efforts. By virtue of place, your status increases.

Making the Most of Your Events

Everybody thinks that an event is a great way to raise a lot of money fast. This isn't always true.
by Ben Delaney, © 2013

According to my former boss, and development guru, many, in fact most, events lose money. He pointed out that the cost of a good event is substantial and that the immediate payback from it is not always high.

He explained that key to really using an event well is to use it both as a reward and cultivation opportunity. In other words, it's a place where you reward the people who have been helping you the most. Bringing your staff is a great team builder and incentive. It also helps fill seats in case your event isn't the sellout you hoped for (more on that later). The other people you reward are your donors, those who have really helped you out. Not by asking them to buy a table or to support the event, but rather by giving them a table or providing recognition from the stage.

Now there are as many types of events as there are organizations. For the purposes of this chapter, I'm thinking about an evening gala. I think you'll find that most of these ideas apply no matter what sort of event you are producing.

A well done event makes your entire organization look good.

The highest value of your event is cultivation. Cultivation means talking to people that may give to your organization and talking to people who have given to your organization with an eye on getting, or increasing the amount of, their support. Events do this by providing a good meal and an entertaining program that helps them feel good, better understand the organization, and see how well run it is.

It's essential to demonstrate competence, because the impression that people get from your event is going to carry over to the entire organization. Think about your reaction when you have a great waitress at a restaurant. The food tastes better. In a great restaurant, if the service is bad it leaves you less excited about the food. The impression you leave with is dependent on the totality of your experience.

Enveloping your planning for the event itself is all the promotional and impact planning, as well as establishing measurement points for evaluating the event. Your event planning should start with concrete and measurable goals. Those goals might include developing five new major donors, or having X number of City Council members attend. Your goal might include a dollar amount, such as raising $100,000. It's important to have all the goals in mind because this will guide the event planning, and allow you to make informed decisions on the budget and which ideas contribute to the overall impact of the event. After the event, they provide the measuring stick against which you evaluate the event's success.

Event planning as part of Systems Marketing™

Let's think a little bit about events and how they connect to your full marketing effort. In an organization with Systems Marketing thinking, event planning would start early. A year is not too early to start thinking about a large event. Annual events are often on staff work plans as a year-round effort, because there's always something to do to prepare, and there's always follow-up activities. As Systems Marketing organization knows that a big event is going to impact virtually everybody in the organization.

Every event should have a planning committee that is made up of people from the various departments that are affected by the event or contribute to it. These people are conduits for information from the teams with which they work directly, to the committee and back again. Obviously the communications team has to get the word out early and often, and plan follow-up. In fact it's recommended that you follow up an event with a press release that describes how well it went, how much money raised, what dignitaries attended, whatever else is important, and announces the date of next year's event.

The event committee needs to keep in mind all aspects of the event. The planning checklist varies a lot, but will include things like catering, decorations, printing of a program, door prizes, program, securing a venue, and, if you have an auction, arranging for donations for it, as well as the many other items critical to the success of the event. That is just for the event itself. As you can see from that list, which is nowhere near complete, there's an awful lot of aspects to pulling off the big event. At one event I worked on, we produced a nine-minute video that took three months to produce. It's important to do your planning in advance, and understand the time and the budget.

It's also important to evaluate what you can do in-house and what you want to hire expert help for. Catering is an obvious task that is usually best to contract out. AV production, decorating, and printing are other aspects of events that are often handed off to contractors. Be realistic in balancing your resources – some things you can and should do in house, some things should be outsourced.

The event committee needs to work closely with your communications department to make sure that the branding of the event, including its name and logo, are appropriate both to the event and to the larger branding of the organization. It's possible to completely confuse your audience by mixing up your messages. A clear purpose and messaging are essential to garner positive attention and attendance.

Often the development team is the lead team on event planning because it's so critical to their work. As we discussed earlier, donor cultivation is a major goal of many events. This is where the development team shines. Events give the development team a reason to personally reach out to major donors. It also enables fund raising, especially from corporate and foundation supporters, who will buy tables and sponsorships. It's an opportunity to raise money through raffles and auctions, and thereby a chance to reach out to in-kind donors who will provide the items that you offer. The development team will also see your event as an opportunity to invite people who haven't donated to come to see what your organization is all about.

It's very important for the development team to be thinking about goals and accountability related to the event. If your goal is to invite 20 new potential owners, sell 12 tables, and raise $15,000, you need to write those goals down and measure the appropriate data to determine whether or not you've hit your targets. This is easy when you build in specific points to measure at the planning stage.

The event

Let's plan a hypothetical event and take a look at what it takes to make the event work well. Our hypothetical organization is Kitty Rescue League. Kitty Rescue League collects feral cats,  sterilizes them, and re-releases them or finds them adoptive homes. The hopefully annual Fat Cat Bash is being attempted for the first time. The goals are to bring in 20 potential new donors and raise $10,000. There also will be recognition of existing donors.

In order to raise interest and recognize major supporters, Kitty Rescue League is going to make three awards to people or organizations that have really helped save the most kitties in the past year.

 A quick sidebar on awards

Why do so many organizations give so many awards? It's not a conspiracy by the award industry. Awards are a great way to gain positive attention, recognize your donors and others in the community, and give your organization a topic for a good press release. Awards bring in the recipients and their friends and families. They increase interest, and rightfully bestow recognition on those who work hard for your cause. 

Awards don't have to be extravagant to be appreciated. A nice trophy, an engraved clock, or some similar trifle says thank you over and over. No one gets all the attention they need or deserve; your organization can make its donors feel great by recognizing them at an annual event, where the community can hear about their good deeds and express its appreciation.

The Fat Cat Bash budget

Kitty Rescue League has a mailing list of approximately 3,500 names. They're hoping that they can get 5% of that list, or 175 people, to come to their bash. So now the planning team needs to create a budget that shows how to pay for the cost of the event and show a profit.

Kitty Rescue League's budget  for the Fat Cat Bash looks a bit like this:

EXPENSES

Space rental                       $1,500

Catering, 200                       5,000

Audio/visual                         1,500

Programs and favors               875

Program                            15,000

Marketing costs                   5,000

Decoration                           1,000

                                       -----------

Total                                $29,875

INCOME

Tickets, 175 at $75          $13,125

Sponsorships                    20,000

Program ads                       1,000
                                       -----------

Total                                $34,125

NET                                 $3,250

As you can see, even if Kitty Rescue League meets their goals, they miss their revenue target. And it means that the planners need to decide if they want to proceed with a smaller return likely. That illustrates the difficulty in event planning.

Looking at this budget, the event committee has several options. They can change their goals, they can change the cost of the event, or they can figure out a way to bring in more revenue.

Key to making this evaluation is determining what's more important: cultivation or immediate revenue. If cultivation is more most important, then it may make sense to run the event expecting a low return, or even take a loss, in order to have the opportunity to meet and interact with the people that you need to talk to. If revenue is a prime goal then it is important to look at both sides of the budget to see what can be reduced or grown. For example the $15,000 cost for the program includes creating a video montage of the award winners. Perhaps money could be saved by instead doing a montage of still pictures which would require no original taping. Or maybe a video production company can be found that would donate part or all of the cost of production. Other expenses should be looked at too, but it's always best to start with your biggest expense, because that's where you're most likely to find some fat to trim.

On the income side of the table, there aren't very many options. Calculating the increase in donations resulting from the dinner will help, but is a very unreliable figure. owever, factoring in the anticipated increase in donations in the next few montKitty Rescue League can charge more for tickets, but that may make it more difficult to get people there. Additional sponsorships may be possible and it may also be possible to raise the cost of advertising in the program to raise more money there. Maybe adding a raffle or auction would increase revenue, but with additional costs that have to be figured in. Perhaps bigger actually works better than smaller. Because your expenses do not go up directly with the number of attendees, it may make sense to increase seats to 200 or 300. However the challenge then becomes getting those additional people to the event, which typically would require increased marketing and communication costs, and often more staff time.

Which brings up the importance of filling seats. Nothing is worse than a partially empty banquet hall. It is far better to oversell a small event, and bring in extra tables, then to undersell the room. You may have the same number of people there, but the packed room looks infinitely better. This where you use staff people to help out. A good rule of thumb, if your staff is large enough, is to have one staff person at each table. Board members can help with this usually pleasant assignment. They can answer questions about your organization and help make your guests feel welcome. But staff and board members and their (adult) families can also help fill seats to ensure that the room is filled to capacity. It is a nice reward to invite your staff, and they will help your event succeed simply by being there.

The Program

What is going to happen at the Fat Cat Bash? You don't want people to simply come in, eat and leave. So a program is in order.

First, don't overdo the program. 30-45 minutes is usually enough. If you run late, people become impatient. If you are boring, it's even worse.

The program needs to be both entertaining and interesting. Again, an award ceremony, if it is appropriately brief, is a great way to create excitement and enthusiasm. A door prize drawing does the same. Perhaps Kitty Rescue League has connections to a musical act, or a staff member who is a good magician. Adding that entertainment to the bill can be very enjoyable. But again, be sure the entertainers, unless they're cute children, are professional enough to entertain, and not embarrass.

A keynote speaker is often considered de rigueur at nonprofit event. This can be good or bad. Some very impressive and effective people are not good presenters. Some speakers enjoy their own voices so much you almost have to drag them off the stage. Either of these situations can really bring down the mood.

If you have a keynote speaker, find someone who knows your organization and can say nice things about it. Have someone go see them present before you book them to ensure that they will provide a good presentation. If at all possible, get someone with name recognition who will help you sell tickets.

Finally, don't forget the ask. No one is going to be offended by having your Executive Director or Development Director make a brief pitch. People are there because they care. So Kitty Rescue League will tell them about the tremendous impact they've had over the past year, some of the challenges facing the organization, and how X more dollars will make a huge difference in the coming year. For added impact, have a donation envelope under each plate.

After the event

After the event, there are two important tasks – follow-up and evaluation.

Follow-up means that your event and development teams get on the phone and call people to thank them for attending. Nothing cements a relationship like a personal touch. One could write an entire book on cultivating donors, but suffice it to say that you need many touches with each donor, and your post-event phone call is an important one. This is when you can ask for support, get feedback on the event, and stay in touch with the people who keep you going. I can't overemphasize the importance of this step in funder cultivation. 

Also thank your in-kind and other donors that helped you stage your event. Again, your personal attention is worth a lot, don't be stingy with it.

Finally, a few days after the event (when people have had a chance to catch up on their sleep) get the event team together for a postmortem. What went well? What would you do differently? What was awful? Be honest and fair. Evaluate the work plan, the promotional efforts, and your vendors. Take notes and refer to them before your next event. Only through an honest appraisal will you be able to improve on your event.

This chapter addressed planning for a dinner event, but planning for any other type of event is not dissimilar. Obviously, a 5K run has different details, but the process is similar.

Events can be a lot of fun, good money-raising opportunities, and ways to acknowledge the people that help you carry out your mission. But they are complex and important, so do the work up front, and then enjoy your event. As my old boss always said, “Have fun kids!”