By: Debbie McCann Partner W4Sight A virtual event is a great opportunity to showcase your nonprofit’s resilience and demonstrate your impact amidst the “new normal.” Just like with any in-person event, good planning is critical to virtual event success. Keep these three tips in mind to ensure that people remember the inspiring speaker, the amazing video, or the thought-provoking panel discussion – not the glitches. Tip #1: Set Expectations. Make sure people know what your event is all about, especially if you are doing a virtual event that specifically takes the place of an in-person event. In your email blasts...
By: Melissa Lagowski CEO/Founder/Queen Bee Big Buzz Idea Group We watched the world change, hour by hour, for several days until landing in our current “Shelter in Place” status. Initially, as the country began to respond to the coronavirus, we started to feel the impact on our nonprofit events, but they didn’t appear to be in the direct line of fire. But then on March 15th, the CDC issued new guidelines that stated that all gatherings with more than 50 people should be cancelled until at least May 12, 2020. The initial potential impact was now an impending multi-car...
By: Amanda Wilson Nonprofit Account Manager Big Buzz Idea Group Imagine we’re in the year 2000 and a respiratory virus is spreading throughout the world, causing all events and social gatherings to be canceled and forcing businesses to close. The internet, while gaining traction, is still rudimentary. Google was invented only two years prior and popular websites like Wikipedia, MySpace or Facebook are still years away. With mandates to socially isolate to help stop the spread of this disease, meetings would cease and businesses would have been unable to maintain daily operations. Additional programming like professional development seminars would...
By: Melissa Lagowski CEO/Founder/Queen Bee Big Buzz Idea Group Some events can draw crowds for decades while others fall flat after a year or two. It can be tricky to forecast what makes certain gatherings an instant success, but it shouldn’t be difficult to measure an event’s effectiveness over time. “Events are often passed down for years, from one set of staff or board members to another, and no one actually stops to think about what the event should be achieving,” says founder and president of Big Buzz Idea Group Melissa Lagowski. “To properly evaluate an event, you must first...
By: Brad Ball Vice President Big Buzz Idea Group Most nonprofit organizations simply love to host events. Whether to fundraise, friendraise, educate or otherwise, the regular gathering of like-minded people is a standard tool in the nonprofit toolkit. One of the key traits of a successful event is choosing the right venue. To help make your organization’s next gathering a success, here are five things to remember when finding your next nonprofit event location: Is your event date available? While this may seem like an obvious place to start, the purposes of asking the question leads to this point: How...
By: Chris Baylis President & CEO, The Sponsorship Collective Events can be great. They can engage your donors, show off your cause, increase revenue and, most important of all (in my highly biased opinion) drive sponsorship dollars. Sponsorship sales can be a major revenue source from events. With a little effort, you can make your next event a sponsor’s dream! MAKE SURE YOUR ATTENDEES LOVE YOUR EVENT What do your attendees have to do with fundraising event sponsorship? Everything. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that the people at your gala are excited about another 30 second speech from a donor or sponsor....
By: Tiana and Thomas Kubik Owners, TK Photography As photographers, we know that great images can make or break a memory or experience. Professional photography is a great investment, but it is one that becomes a do-it-yourself (DIY) project when budgets get tight. Especially in the day of fast paced social media, even when a photographer is present, cell phone photos are often the first images to hit the web as a representation of your event. With that, here are some tips on how to make these first images as strong as possible: Guidelines for interesting photo composition Avoid empty...
Does your organization host an annual event? What is the purpose of the event and why is it relevant? Do your members know and understand this? Are your guests fully aware of the purpose of the event? Far too often when we meet with NPOs, they are not at all clear why they host an event. And at least half of the stories begin with “a key member of the leadership team wanted an event so they created one.” It takes a great deal of time and money to plan and produce an event, so it is imperative that you...
By Cat Donovan Executive Assistant Big Buzz Idea Group In March of 2020 we began navigating a maze of unknown depth and complexity. Juggling balls and spinning plates multiplied by the day. Professional settings and expectations changed overnight. Families with school-aged children had the routines they depended on completely uprooted. It quickly became apparent that managing and maintaining positive mental health was going to be both a challenge and a priority. The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), a nonprofit organization focusing on national health issues, released the results of a tracking poll about one year into the pandemic that indicated four...
By Melissa Lagowski CEO/Founder/Queen Bee Big Buzz Idea Group Have you ever had one of those situations? You know the one. You are communicating with a colleague, and you thought that you had given such incredibly clear directions that you couldn’t believe it when they didn’t do what you had instructed? It happens unintentionally. Most of the time people think that they are being very specific in their conversations. We believe that we have transferred all the relevant information for the recipient to properly execute a task, but in reality we have a lot of information in our mind that...
