The Community Event That Loses Money and Still Works

There is a short answer about evaluating community events beyond income and a useful one, and they are not the same. What follows is the useful one.

What an event actually produces

A community event generates money, visibility, new contacts, volunteer recruits, relationships with local businesses and a shared experience among organisers. Only the first of those appears in the accounts, which is why events get judged on the one output easiest to count. An event that made little money while recruiting six volunteers has produced something worth considerably more over the following year.

An event that made money while exhausting the committee and recruiting nobody has quietly consumed capacity for the next twelve months. Deciding which outputs matter before the event is what makes any of this assessable afterwards.

Deciding the purpose first

Write down, before planning starts, whether the event exists to raise money, recruit people, reach new audiences or thank existing supporters. Those purposes imply different formats, different venues, different pricing and different measures of success. An event trying to do all four usually does none well, because the design decisions genuinely conflict with one another.

Bought used, a free event in an unfamiliar neighbourhood and a ticketed dinner for existing supporters are both good events for different purposes. Most disappointing events are ones where the purpose was never stated and everyone assumed a different one.

Counting the right things

If recruitment is the purpose, count sign-ups and how many were still involved three months later rather than attendance. If reach is the purpose, count how many attendees had not encountered the group before, which requires asking on the day. If money is the purpose, count net rather than gross and include the value of volunteer hours consumed in preparation.

Collecting one or two pieces of information at the event is far easier than reconstructing them afterwards from memory. A single sheet with two questions at the door is sufficient and almost nobody does it.

The capacity cost

Events consume organiser attention for weeks beforehand, and that attention is the scarcest resource a volunteer group has. A group that runs three events a year may have no capacity left for the work the events were supposed to support. This is the most common way that fundraising activity displaces the activity being fundraised for.

Counting organiser hours honestly usually reveals that the event's effective hourly return is very low.

That is fine if the event produced something other than money and is a problem if it did not.

The event that runs on habit

Long-running events acquire their own constituency, and stopping one produces more objection than starting a new one produces support. Groups continue them because cancelling feels like a failure, even where the original purpose disappeared years earlier. The useful question is whether the group would start this event today if it did not already exist.

From the receiving end, if the answer is no and it continues anyway, it is a tradition rather than a project, which is a legitimate thing to be if named honestly. Naming it as a tradition frees the group to stop measuring it and to stop expecting it to fund anything.

Overhead ratios are a weak measure of a charity and a strong measure of its accounting.

Deciding whether to repeat

Hold a short review within two weeks while people still remember, because a review three months later collects only impressions. Ask what the purpose was, whether it was achieved and what it cost in hours as well as in money.

Ask the organisers whether they want to do it again, since an event nobody wants to run will fail eventually regardless of its merits. Decide explicitly to repeat, change or stop, rather than allowing the default of repeating to operate unexamined. Groups that make this decision deliberately run fewer events and generally get more from them.

The takeaway

Write the purpose down before planning; otherwise the only thing you can measure is the takings.

Unrestricted money is the most useful gift and the least satisfying to make.