Nonprofit Launch Plan Podcast for Startup, Small, and Growing Nonprofits

Matt Stockman (00:00)
Planning a big nonprofit event can feel exciting. A banquet, a gala, a golf tournament, a big night where people gather to support your mission. But here's the question a lot of nonprofit organizations and leaders forget to ask first. Should we actually be doing this event at all?

Today we're going to talk about how to pressure test whether or not your nonprofit is ready to host a major event and the two foundational questions that will determine whether or not your event will become a powerful moment for your mission or something that just puts too much stress on you, your team and delivers less than awesome results.

Welcome to the nonprofit launch plan podcast for startup small and growing nonprofits. This podcast is here to help you build your nonprofit from the ground up on a strong, sustainable foundation by providing clear frameworks, practical tools, and the real world guidance that you can actually put into practice in your nonprofit starting today.

I'm your host, Matt Stockman. a nonprofit growth coach. And here at Nonprofit Launch Plan, we believe that every successful nonprofit has to be operating at peak performance in six key areas. Those areas are leadership, fundraising, marketing, programs and services, operations, and finances. So on every episode, we focus on one of these core areas to help you create lasting impact.

without unnecessary complexity. before we dive into today's episode, I want to give you a quick personal invite and a heads up if you're in the dreaming or the early phases of your nonprofit, you're looking for clarity on your mission and vision, you're building your board.

You're doing your initial fundraising. You're figuring out what I call your MVP. Your minimum viable program is. This is a personal invitation for me to you to join me for my upcoming virtual Launchpad Workshop, Essentials for Moving from Nonprofit Idea to Impact. It's three hours over three days where we do things like workshop your mission statement and your vision statement. We define who your board members should be. We drill down into your fundraising. We help you build out

your beginning programs and a lot more. And we talk about stuff that we're not necessarily able to dive deep into on the podcast and a whole lot more. So if you're feeling overwhelmed, and kind of stuck in your dream for a nonprofit, sign up for the workshop April 28 through the 30th one hour each day. Try your best to be there live that does make a huge difference to experience this and be able to talk in real time with other people who are in exactly the same place in the journey as you but if you

can't make one of the sessions you will have access to all the recordings as well. But sign up today space is limited cost is $49 for the whole thing. Go to nonprofit launch plan calm and click on workshop to sign up again nonprofit launch plan.com. Now today we're taking the deep dive although some might call it a nose dive into some basics around the planning and execution of nonprofit events.

A lot of nonprofit leaders hit a point in the journey of the growth of their nonprofit where they believe that hosting a big event a lot of times as a fundraiser, or even just as a way to introduce the nonprofit to a lot of people, they think it's a good idea. And in my experience, 99 times out of 100, based on the phase of the nonprofit flight path that their organization is actually on

That nonprofit isn't at the right phase of their flight path, in other words, in their growth to really handle hosting a large scale event.

Because if you've ever hosted an event like this before, you know firsthand very intimately how much work they really are. There's the venue, there's the catering, there's the invitations, there's the promotion and marketing, there's the decorations, there's the programming. If it's a fundraising event, there's the ask. Events can take an incredible amount of time and energy to pull off and they're not for the faint of heart.

but they can also be incredibly powerful when they're done well. A well-executed event can help you accomplish a lot of different things all at once. Like for example, you can introduce new people to your mission and to your organization.

You can deepen relationships with your existing supporters at an

And often if you do it right, you can raise a meaningful amount of money in a fundraising event. But if you've listened to this podcast before, you've heard me no doubt talk about the nonprofit flight path. It's a series of five growth phases that over my years of experience, I realized that every nonprofit goes through.

If you want to know more about maybe where you're at in that whole nonprofit journey and which phase of the five phases your nonprofit might be in, that's episode 39 and 40 of the podcast. I dive deep into the five phases of the flight path, but check those episodes out. Most nonprofits that are actually properly equipped and aligned to host a big event are either in the later part of phase three, the first steps phase, or they're in phase four.

or five and oftentimes nonprofits dive into events before they're really set up and equipped to be able to do them well.

So if you're thinking that the next logical step in your nonprofits growth is throwing a larger scale event, and you want to kind of pressure test yourself to make sure you're able to do an event well, here's a few questions I want you to ask yourself first. One of the most important things to ask is do you have a financial support base that is deep enough?

to absorb the loss of an event should it all go sideways. If an unforeseen and impossible to predict circumstance arises at the last minute that causes your event to get canceled, can you withstand the financial loss? If so, that's great. If not, then you might not be in the right phase of your nonprofit flight path to be able to throw an event like that.

What you don't want to do is to have an event and have so much money invested in it that it tanks the nonprofit if you're not able to execute the event.

Second question, do you have a team capable of executing the logistics of an event like this? If in the initial planning and thinking through this event, you think three to four people can probably pull it off, you'll actually likely need closer to eight to 10 people. So between your team and your volunteers, do you have the manpower and the ability to make that happen?

That's the second question. Then the third question, do you have a clear strategic purpose for the event? This is where we're going to focus for the bulk of this episode. Many nonprofit events struggle not because of poor execution, but because the planning kind of started in the wrong place. Let me describe what I'm talking about. You and maybe your board decide for example, we should have an event. You share it with your team and your volunteers and right away,

Everybody starts straight into logistics. Where should we host it? What should we serve? Who should speak? entertainment should we have? Those are all important questions. But before you get to any of that, there are two foundational questions every nonprofit event team should answer first. And if you skip these two questions, the chances of your event becoming confusing or ineffective go way up.

But when you get these two things right, they act like a filter for every decision that you make moving forward. So let's talk about the first one. First question before you ever get into the logistics of planning the event.

What is the purpose of the event? Now this might sound obvious, but you would be surprised how many organizations never actually write this down. You'll hear something like, we want this event to raise as much money as we can, which sounds good. But the problem is, is it's actually pretty vague. A fuzzy goal makes it difficult for your planning team to stay focused.

And it actually makes it harder for donors to get on board and give generously rather than easier. People want to know what their gift will accomplish. We talk about this all the time. They want to see how their contribution fits into the bigger picture. Again, something we talk about all the time you hear it on the podcast often. So instead of saying, we want to raise as much money with this golf tournament as we can, give your event a specific purpose statement.

And here's a simple formula you can And if you've listened to my podcast about mission statements, you're going to say, this sounds pretty familiar. The simple formula that you can use to create a specific purpose statement for your event is...

The purpose of this event is to raise or accomplish this specific goal, which will result in this specific impact. For example, the purpose of this golf tournament is to raise $50,000 specific goal, which will provide 20 new workstations for the computer science lab at the community center. Very specific impact. Or another example.

The purpose of this silent auction is to raise $10,000, which will provide all the hay and food needed to care for the horses at our equine therapy center this winter. See how different that feels. Instead of a vague objective, you now have a very clear mission for the event. That clarity helps your team make smarter decisions. It also gives your guests something tangible to rally around. Because people...

are much more motivated to give when they can clearly picture the outcome. So before you start booking a venue or designing invitations or talking about catering, all those things, take the time to sit down with your team and craft a simple, clear purpose statement for your event. That's question one. Question two then, who is the target attendee? This second question is just as important.

Who's the specific type of person you want in the room for your event? A lot of nonprofits make the mistake of saying something, our events for everybody who cares about our mission, which is great. But that kind of thinking usually leads to unfocused marketing in an event that doesn't quite resonate with anybody. Instead, imagine for a second if you could only invite one kind of person to your event, who would that person be?

The way to kind of come up with the answer to that might be to think about your most engaged supporter. The one of all your supporters who is truly the most excited about your work. The one who invites friends to everything. The one who gives generously.

What are they like? How old are they? What are their interests? What communities are they connected to? What networks are they connected to? What motivates them? Write that all down on a sheet of paper. So for example, let's say you're hosting a silent auction for the equine therapy center, which I talked about just a moment ago, your ideal might look like.

Something like this, somebody in their 40s or 50s, they love horses, they love the outdoors, they understand animal health and wellness, they're connected in the local equine community, they're philanthropic, and they have the financial capacity to support your work. That's sort of the ideal event attendee for this. When you define your target attendee like that, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to design an event that fits them.

Your marketing becomes clearer, your messaging becomes a whole lot more compelling, and the experience of the event itself becomes more enjoyable for the people in the room. Those two questions matter for a lot of reasons. When you define both the purpose of the event and the target attendee, you now have a filter.

Every idea that comes up during planning can be evaluated through two simple questions. One, does this help accomplish the purpose of the event, which you now know clearly? And does this make sense for our target attendee? Would the person who you have in mind of you'd like a room full of people like this, would they enjoy this? And if the answer is no, it's probably a distraction.

Let me share a quick story to kind of illustrate that this is a true story. Years ago, I worked with a faith based men's mental health nonprofit that hosted a fundraising event called a wild game dinner. You've heard about these before a couple of hundred outdoor loving guys gathering together to talk about hunting the outdoors and eat all kinds of wild game. Very rugged, lot of flannel shirts, very masculine, super outdoorsy.

During the planning process of this event a very well-meaning supporter Offered to donate his services to the event He was a professional clown and balloon artist, you know the kind you see at kids birthday parties, right? He insisted that he wanted to utilize his services as a contribution to the fundraiser

And the planning team thought, well, sure, that sounds fun. And they didn't really think about this whole idea of a target attendee. So they added him to the evening. Now imagine the scene, a room full of rugged outdoorsmen, all eating grilled different kinds of meat, venison, wild boar talking about hunting trips. And in the corner is a clown making balloon animals.

not exactly the atmosphere that the event organizers were hoping for. And if that planning team had clearly defined their event purpose and target attendee, they would have immediately recognized that while the clown balloon artist was genuine in his desire to help was probably not the best fit for the evening. Not every good idea belongs at every event. And that's exactly why these two questions matter.

Now the third thing I want to encourage you with before we sort of get into the takeaways is this. Think smaller initially rather than bigger, which is very, very counterintuitive. We want to scale everything up as quickly as possible because we want the outcomes to be as big as possible as quickly as possible. But in the end, I would much rather you have a smaller scale, sort of stripped down version.

Year one of a special event that you're planning that you can then scale up appropriately in year two three and four Rather than something that is just so massive from the get-go that you're not able to manage it Well

So in year one in particular, in your initial planning phases for events, I always encourage people start small, think smaller, get a proof of concept down, make all the mistakes that you make in year one

you can sort of mitigate and manage the damage and put together a successful smaller scale event that you can then scale up in future years rather than trying to do something too big, too fast and have it just kind of stress everyone out and not really turn out all that well.

So the takeaway is this, getting crystal clear about your event's purpose and your target attendee, it's not just a planning exercise that you put on paper just because some coach someplace told you you should probably do that. It's the difference really between an event that feels awkward and scattered and doesn't really work that well or doesn't really meet the goals that you set and one that feels focused and engaging.

and successful. So think of these things as like your events North Star, specific purpose statement for the event, and your target attendee for the event. These things guide your decisions, it helps your team to stay aligned, and it protects you from all those strange balloon animal moments.

the next time your nonprofit starts planning an event or you're thinking this is the time for us to dive in and create an event to scale ourselves up.

Pause before you dive into the logistics and ask these two questions that matter most. What's the specific purpose of the event and who's the exact type of person we want to attend? When you do that groundwork first, you will dramatically increase your chances of creating an event that not only meets your goals, but leaves people excited to support your mission again in the future.

Again, before we wrap up, if you're in the dreaming or the early phases of your nonprofit, you're looking for clarity on your mission and vision and your board, your fundraising, your minimum viable program.

Your MVP is this is a an invite for you to join me for the upcoming virtual Launchpad workshop, essentials for moving from nonprofit idea to impact three hours over three days where we'll dive deep into this stuff. We'll workshop a mission statement for your specific organization. In a vision statement, we'll define who your board members should be. We'll drill down into your fundraising will help you build out some programs for your beginning in a whole lot more. We'll talk about stuff that we don't get to on the podcast.

So if you're feeling overwhelmed or just stuck in a dream and you don't know where to go next Sign up for the workshop. I promise it will be worth your time April 28th through the 30th an hour each day Try your best. Like I said before to be there live. It does make a huge difference

But keep in mind, if you don't make all the sessions live, you will have access to all the recordings as well. bucks for the whole thing, space is limited though, and it's going quickly. So non-profitlaunchplan.com to find out more and click on workshop to sign up again, non-profitlaunchplan.com click on workshop.

That is it for this episode of the Nonprofit Launch Plan podcast for startup small and growing nonprofits.

If in some way or another this podcast was helpful, would you consider sharing it with another nonprofit leader or somebody else on your team who maybe is just getting started and needs the clarity and needs the help? And of course, reach out to me if I can be of service in any way or another. You can always book time on my website, nonprofitlaunchplan.com and click book a call.

It's free and I'd love to hear more about what is happening in your nonprofit journey. Until next time, keep building wisely, keep making a difference and thank you so much for watching and listening.