Benevon Weblog

"Year-Round Table Captain Recruitment" by Terry Axelrod

All year long, be on the lookout for people who are the most excited about and dedicated to your work. In fact, the best time to start your next year's Table Captain recruitment is in the week following your Ask Event^™ as you are making your Follow-Up Calls.

Part of the standard Ask Event follow-up procedure is to call each Table Captain the day after the event to thank them and ask what their guests said as they walked away from the event. Did they mention that they wanted to go home and talk to someone about giving to the organization? Are they affiliated with a corporation or foundation that they wanted to talk with before making a gift?

Odds are, your Table Captains will be excited! They will tell you who said what, how much they loved the event, and perhaps give you feedback on parts they feel could be improved. Special note: Don't get defensive when they do this; instead, listen closely to their feedback and thank them for it. Assume that you might have had that same feedback had you been a guest at your event. If appropriate, consider how you can incorporate their advice for your next Ask Event. Your Table Captains will likely also tell you about people they wished had attended, like, "I was so sorry Angela couldn't be there. She would have loved it!" As you are listening to their feedback, it will be very natural to tell them the date of next year's event and ask them if they would agree to be a Table Captain again.

We have many groups that secure 50%–60% of their Table Captains within two weeks of the preceding Ask Event. Of course, it helps if you have locked in the date of your next Ask Event before you make your Follow-Up Calls.

"How to Phase Out an Existing Event" by Terry Axelrod

We encourage our groups to take a close look at their events and evaluate whether each event really connects people to their mission. Many groups come to realize that it is time to phase out a popular (or not-so-popular) event. If the decision were theirs alone to make, they would know how to eliminate it. But events tend to build up loyal followers and supporters, often for emotional (and no longer rational) reasons. Often the biggest challenge is convincing board members and volunteers that the time has come to eliminate an event.

The best way to eliminate an event is to do an analysis of what it costs versus what it yields and then do a phase-out plan and proposal for your board or development committee, retaining the best aspects of the event or inserting them into other events you are keeping.

In other words, do your homework. Put together the spreadsheets showing the true costs associated with putting on the event, including the hidden staff time and the opportunity cost of having staff focus on this event rather than on other major gifts work. Document the results that have come from the event. Propose how to capitalize on the best parts of the event—the sponsors and some of the key guests—and connect them even more to your mission. Explain how streamlining the event will give you time to do proper follow up. Present all this to the executive director and the people on the board who will be most supportive of eliminating the event. Secure their buy-in before taking it to the full board (if full board approval is necessary).

For example, we have a group that had a fancy awards banquet to honor donors and volunteers. The money it raised came mostly from sponsorships for corporate tables. The event had become quite stale. Most guests had no connection to the organization or the award recipients. They were given a "ticket" from their boss and told to attend. While some of these people could have become genuinely interested in the organization during this event, that was unlikely without a large dose of the mission inserted into the event to educate and inspire them. That is a tricky thing to do at a fancy banquet.

Rather than keep this event going as is, they converted it into a Free Feel-Good Cultivation Event^™ for all of their Multiple-Year Donors, making it special and free for them to attend. They made sure that the award recipients showcased the various program areas of the organization, using stories about each program in the actual award presentation. They restructured their program to include a brief Visionary Leader^™ Talk and a testimonial from a person whose life had been changed thanks to their work. The total program lasted thirty minutes and left people inspired and educated about their organization. They reduced the number of sponsors down to one so that it was a special privilege to be the sponsor of this event, with more visibility and a more exclusive audience. Then they asked some of the other prior banquet sponsors to sponsor their other events, such as other Point of Entry^® Conversion Events like their golf tournament—which they decided to keep doing—as well as their Ask Event^™.

Even if you see that you need to eliminate several events, I recommend that you design a two- to three-year phase-out plan so you can test out the impact of each one as you continue to show results over time with the model—both from your Ask Event and the other one-on-one major gifts asking you will be doing. That way, when you are ready to phase out the third or fourth event, critics will have seen the impact of the model. In the worst case, you will decide to keep these other events, and the board will see the importance of hiring someone else to manage them, freeing you up to keep focusing on growing the model towards sustainable funding.

"The Ripened Fruit Formula" by Terry Axelrod

Many groups are surprised to see the rigorous scorecard we use to measure each organization's ongoing success with the model. Click here to see the top ten of the thirty-three standards on the full Sustainable Funding Scorecard.

One of these top measures is: After year one, 40% of Ask Event^™ attendees have attended a Point of Entry^® Event prior to the Ask Event. (20% is the minimum for year one; 40% for all subsequent years.)

We call this the "ripened fruit" formula, and it ramps up after year one from 20% to 40%. There is no substitute for a Point of Entry prior to an Ask Event. You can work backwards from the number of guests you plan to have at the Ask Event to figure out how many people should attend your Point of Entry Events.

If you plan to have 200 Ask Event guests, you know that eighty of those people must attend a prior Point of Entry Event. Because only 25% of Point of Entry guests will actually end up attending an Ask Event, you can plan in advance to have 320 or more people at your Point of Entry Events during the year before the Ask Event.

While this may seem like a lot of work to attain the requisite eighty Ask Event guests, do not feel that you have wasted your time on those other 240 Point of Entry attendees. Some may never come to an Ask Event, but if your Point of Entry is sizzling enough, they may give one-on-one, and they will certainly refer others.

If your passion for the mission comes through at the Point of Entry, even the guests who choose not to become involved themselves will remember the impact of your work and mention it to others who might share a passion for your mission.

Furthermore, many Point of Entry attendees will want to become involved in other ways, perhaps volunteering in one of your programs, introducing you to their company or friend's work group or family, or helping with your fundraising efforts by hosting a Point of Entry for their friends or family.

Of course, the eighty people in this example who do attend the Ask Event after coming to a stellar Point of Entry and receiving personal cultivation will be some of your biggest donors at the Ask Event and beyond. In fact, another one of our statistics shows that Ask Event guests who have attended a prior Point of Entry give at least four times as much money as those who have not attended a prior Point of Entry. Many will be Table Captains at your first event and for years to come. It all starts with that sizzling Point of Entry.