Create a cost-effective budget that facilitates your fundraising goal:

• Benchmark your budget using historical data. Review similar campaigns your organization has run to set a realistic, measurable goal with clear milestones.
• List your non-negotiables and nice-to-haves. Try to outweigh your expenses with enough revenue-generating activities to achieve your fundraising goal. For example, how many people usually open your fundraising emails—would that be enough registrants to cover your projected expenses?
• Begin with your biggest expenses (venue, sponsors, food, and entertainment) and consider the additional resources necessary for effective communication and promotion of your event. Ideally, the budget should allow both.

For example, food and entertainment can incentivize attendance, but to be worth the expense, your staff needs adequate time and resources to communicate the incentive (through invitations, promotional emails, face-to-face interactions, and more).

To accurately track nonprofit event registration and attendance, it’s necessary to uphold proper data collection procedures at your nonprofit organization. Manual data entry is prone to mistakes and miscommunication, so it’s best to entrust your nonprofit software (CRM) with syncing and organizing registration data.

Accurate event tracking (using a CRM) allows you to:

• Measure event success and return on investment (ROI)
• Identify trends in supporter engagement
• Personalize future outreach
• Allocate resources more efficiently
• Make data-driven decisions for future events

For example, DonorPerfect integrates online registration forms and event management features into one fundraising system so you can manage every aspect of your event including ticket sales, mobile check-ins, and RSVP lists without manual data entry.

Your nonprofit CRM is your greatest asset for event management, as it allows you to leverage organization-specific data to make informed decisions about your success. 

If considering additional event tools, or integrating them with your CRM, it is best to use ones created specifically for the nonprofit sector to ensure they include donor management and donation processing capabilities.

Here are a few examples:

• AgileTicketing to update donor records with attendance information
• Qgiv to accept online, in-person, recurring, and mobile donations
• ReadySetAuction to track and bundle auction item donations

Furthermore, depending on the type of event you want to host, there may be a specialized tool to facilitate your specific campaign. Some examples include BirdEase for charity golf events and Winspire for luxury item auctions.