What’s inside:

Checklist for assigning and tracking tasks for your next event or conference.

- 3 months before the event
- 1 week before the event
- 1 day before the event
- On the event day
- Post event

Organizing an event? Try Eventzilla for setting up the event registration page. It is free and takes less than 5 minutes. http://www.eventzilla.net

A fund raising event may carry lots of nobleness and philanthropy within its objective, making it success requires skill, tactic and strategic planning.

Here we bring 5 effective ways that would help in making a fund raising event meet big success:

1) Select the right target audience:
The most prime thing to be taken care is that it should be targeted towards niche audiences. People would feel encouraged to attend a fundraising event only if they see some commonality in the subject matter of the fundraising. Either find relevant fundraising ideas for the niche audiences or select the intended participants who would enjoy the subject matter thoroughly.

2) Create a fresh theme to promote the event:
Keep apart the traditional and conventional ideas of fundraising event and think up of some offbeat and interesting ideas that would be crowd pullers. A unique and a creative idea of organizing would not just pull in the serious kinds of participants but would also add credibility and worthiness to the event. One interesting idea is to organize the fundraising event at the beach side instead of in a conventional hall.

3) Create a successful grassroots marketing campaign:
One effective way of imparting significant visibility to the fundraising event is by making it noticeable over social networking sites. Today almost whole world is present over these social networking sites and plan their social outings in conformity to those only. Create the related group or profile for the event so that it arises interest amongst the niche users. Text messages can also be used to easily spread the  buzz for the fundraising event.

4) Personalize invitations:
Another way to pull huge crowd to the fundraising events is to extend personalizes invitations. This would make the events personalized and close-circuited in the minds of the attendees. Also add a benevolent phrase at the end of the invitation card so that right kind of spirit gets generated in the minds of the recipients.

5) Make it a memorable event:
Provide something different and extra to give solid reasons to invitees to become the attendees of the fundraising event. Plan to distribute a memento, a gift or any promotional gift along with the invitations. This would ensure that invitees would get interested and encouraged in attending the event.

These ideas and suggestions would help a fundraising event see lucrative success in an effective way. The fundraising event would not just become earn positive buzz but also attract many potential donors. Also infuse enough motivation and inspiration in the promotion of the event that benevolence spills all over the fundraising event.

Hosting an event? Try Eventzilla – a simple to use online event registration  software.

Paypal
This is one of the popular and an easy way to accept payments for your events. PayPal has 87.2 million users making payments worldwide.

• Attendees can buy tickets with a credit card—they don’t even need a PayPal account
• Attendees trust that PayPal won’t share their financial info with merchants.

It supports numerous options of payments that can be used as per subjective needs and requirements. Some of its additional features are – supporting for donations, shopping cart and recurring payments for an that repeats every month. This payment option is being used worldwide for its immense ease and convenience.

PayPal
(Fees for payments more than $10: 1.9%-2.9% + 0.30 cents per transaction)
(Fees for payments less than $10: 5% + 0.05 cents per transaction)

Amazon Payments
Amazon Payments is a payment platform that offers excellent services for better conversion. This site is associated with online shopping magnate of Amazon.com and makes it easier for its shoppers to make their purchase easy and payments easier.

Amazon Payments
(Fees: 1.9%-2.9% + 0.30 cents per transaction)
(Fees for payments less than $10: 5% + 0.05 cents per transaction)

Google Checkout

This online payment system is known for its competitive processing fees and layered pricing structure. It claims to charge zero hidden fees along with perpetually no gateway service or any set up fees. Additionally, Google Checkout also does not charge its users for transferring of funds from its own Checkout account to the users’ respective banks.

Google Checkout has proven its credibility and is being widely used for plenty of security and convenience it brings along. Some of its additional and attractive features are – its expedient checkout process; credit card processing; capturing of partial funds; prompt refunds etc. These features have made Google Checkout great favorites of many shopping portals, and event management companies like eventzilla, to make it their e-commerce collaborator.

Google Checkout
(Fees: 1.9%-2.9% + 0.30 cents per transaction)

Authorize.Net

Authorize.Net has been growing immensely popular since the time of its inception in the year 1996. It has many convenient features that have earned it the apt title of ‘gateway’.

This online payment system has backing of ‘Fraud Detection Suite’ (FDS) that helps in identification of fake and fraudulent transactions with great expertise right before the shipping of products. It is also ensures that the shipping address and the billing address match perfectly thus eliminating any fear scam. In case the technical backing of Authorize.Net identifies any chary activity, it blocks that IP address’s functionality. This makes this online payment system extremely capable and fool proof.

Authorize.net
(See website for more details)

To be continued…

Hosting an event or workshop? Accept registrations and payments online using Eventzilla for free.

Additionally, here are some helpful suggestions that would help in finding the suitable kind of keynote speaker -

• Meet the speaker in person
  Another useful suggestion for selecting the right kind of keynote speaker for an event is to attend another event of similar theme and find out what is being delivered and how it is being delivered. The organizers can make effort to meet the same keynote speaker after that event and talk to hire him for their event.

• Set clear goals for the speaker
  Another tip to make the right selection of a keynote speaker for the event is to have a clear identification of the goal and the purpose of the speech. Once the organizers are clear about what they want out of the speaker, their hiring process would be much better and fair.

• Don’t go with recommendations
  If any recommendations are coming on the way, don’t follow them blindly. Even if a keynote speaker is being referred vehemently make a thorough check before hiring the person. Do not just make the hiring to make the recommended lest to damage the reputation of your event.

• Agencies
  There are several service providers who make it easy to hire a professional keynote speaker. They may be even having their websites that can be logged in to check the relevant details.

• Ask for sample work
  There are many freelance keynote speakers that offer their independent services. They carry with them their recorded sample speech that can be checked before deciding to hire them. Their sample speeches, in the form of DVDs, can be used for skillful evaluation of how well can they speak and have communication skills.

• Rhetoric skills
  It is also important to gauge the oratory skills well in advance so as to not put up a flop show in front of the audience. The prime task ahead a keynote speaker is to make the audience spellbound through their oratory and rhetoric skills.

Finally, apart from these points, budget is yet another significant factor in making selection of the right kind of keynote speaker for an event.

Hosting a professional event or workshop? Learn more on how to setup a custom online event registration page using Eventzilla for free.

Once you’ve decided how to raise your funds, you have to go about planning and executing your event carefully. You will need someone to market it, someone to worry about logistics, someone to handle the money, and a whole team of people to do decorations, food, programs or favors, and other details. You also will need to know who is coming, especially if you are hoping for big names. Event registration software can help you get what you need as quickly as possible.

The person, or team, marketing your fundraiser will probably be the one to sell tickets. Whatever event you choose to hold, whether it be a conference, workshops, concert, or something else altogether, needs to be well-attended for your fundraiser to work. With Eventzilla you can sell tickets online, or use the conference registration software to track online registration for the event. This is easier than trying to figuratively go “door to door” to sell tickets. Event registration software can even make it easy for your guests to RSVP through online registration, so you don’t have to worry about following up with them. This also means you know how many to expect for your event. All of your staff will need this information, so it is imperative that the marketing team takes advantage of the software to get it quickly.

To really make your event profitable, you will need a team to handle the logistics. This entails the details surrounding the location, the time and date, and even the arrivals of caterers, guests, musicians, and more. They need to be able to focus on details. The type of people who are successful at this are the people who are able to think through an event step by step, and make sure each detail is taken care of. For many events, such as conferences, they will need to know how many people to plan for, so use a software program, like conference registration software, so you can plan accurately.

The best way to handle the funds earned at an event is to put a few people solely in charge of the money. Depending on your event you may have checks, cash, or even credit card payments. Be ready for anything, and handle it all professionally. You may even have the option of setting up a fund online. You can certainly sell tickets online, which eliminates the problem of cash or checks being everywhere as you gear up for the event. You want people to remember how easy it was to give to your cause or organization. Remembering this will increase the likelihood of future fundraisers will be as profitable.

You also need different teams for the focus of your event. Food, drinks, music, decorations, and more all need to be handled. If you have enough people, you can delegate these responsibilities. Otherwise, be prepared for some hard work. But it can all pay off if your event is well attended and successful.

Problem #1: Poor Planning

Everyone knows about this one. The program is thrown together haphazardly. Clients have little or no notice about the upcoming workshop or class. What’s worse is the event planner, due to lack of knowledge or inexperience, probably never considered hiring an event photographer, using event registration software or how they were going to promote the conference.

Solution: Using online event registration software like Eventzilla makes it possible for even the most inexperienced of planners to create conferences, workshops and other events that get results.

Problem #2: Failure To Promote

The company plans workshops, classes or product shows for six months into the future. Unfortunately, no one knows anything about their shows because they fail to promote the event. They never place advertisements or send out mailings. They just assume because they know about what they are planning, everyone else will get the message.

Solution: Marketing is the key. You wouldn’t try to sell a product without advertising. Why do this to your events? Sell tickets online, promote on Facebook Fan Page, send a tweet to your followers, create a hash tag for your event, send out messages to your mailing lists and use event registration software to log who is planning to attend.

Problem #3: Choosing The Wrong Conference Registration Software

Even though a program is designed to make the job of conference planning easier, if it is difficult to work with or doesn’t provide all the functionality needed, most people aren’t going to use it.

Solution: Pick a conference registration software program that has all of the functions you need without a long list of extra bells and whistles to confuse your planning and scheduling team. There are many pay per use event registration softwares available in the market.

Problem #4: Making It Difficult To Get Tickets

The consumers of the world are big fans of convenience. They want to do their shopping or find the information they are looking for in one place and anything that makes their lives easier becomes popular quickly. Unfortunately, many conference planners fail because they simply make things too difficult for prospective attendees.

Solution: Sell tickets online and offline. Make it easy for your clients to purchase tickets to your events as soon as they hear about them. Include the links to your online ticket purchasing outlet in your emails to your mailing lists so client can purchase tickets while the idea is still fresh in their minds. Last but not least – add a phone number to your event page to make it easy to reach you in case the attendee has a question before purchasing tickets for your event.

Problem #5: The Sins Of The Past

Was your last workshop a flop? While it is possible to recover from events that went bad in the past, it requires a lot more work to regain your reputation.

Solution: Prevent the problem before it starts by always using a top quality event registration software and follow through with your clients. Hire a professional event photographer to show prospective attendees just how much your even planning has improved. In short, show your clients that you learned the lesson and you are putting in the work to regain their respect.

Hosting a workshop or conference? Try Eventzilla to setup a custom registration form and accept payments to your PayPal account for Free!

1. It allows you to display live twitter feeds by attendees and partners (example: your event’s official twitter handle, your guest speaker etc). You can also nominate relevant hashtags that you would like to feature from twitter.

2. Here is how you can setup this live feed:

Complete setting up an online event registration page for your event at Eventzilla for free

Select Event > Select Buzz from left Navigation > Enter the Twitter (Example @Techconference) and hashtags (Example #techconference #2010events) and you all set to track live social media conversations from your event page now.

Hosting an event? Accept registrations and payments using Eventzilla for a flat fee $1/ticket. Start your free trail today at http://www.eventzilla.net.

Analyze the Event

This is the most important step once the event is done. We need to evaluate if the output from theevent was according to the expectations. If it wasn’t, where did we lack and even if it was, thereis always scope for improvement, isn’t there? Here are some suggestions that can help you measure the success of your event.

There may be many parameters to judge the success of an event.

1. Customer satisfaction
2. Budget for the event
3. Turnout for the event
4.Number of potential business leads

One of the important ones is the customer satisfaction. If your event attendees are satisfied – analyze the factors that will help fixing this problem in future. Make sure you follow-up with your event attendees with simple surveys to collect their feedback. You can also use online event registration tools like Eventzilla to send them discount codes for future events.
Budget: Add up the tangible as well as intangible benefits and outcomes from the event and compare that to the expenditure.While a profit or loss may not be your biggest concern, it is an imperative aspect for any event planner.

Turnout: Compare the turnout for the event to the number of people who had been invited. If there’s a shortfall, look back at the planning process and try to find out the weak areas.

Assess your marketing campaign and then analyze whether the turnout was as per the marketing done. There are new tools in the market to measure the social media marketing success and if the number of attendees were less, it’s time to re-design the marketing strategy.

Potential business leads: Analyze the number of leads for your business vs planned target number of leads expected out of this event.

Last but not least – create a lessons learned plan and share it with your event management team. Consider using online event registration software products like Eventzilla to setup and track event registrations for upcoming events.