Episode 46: Planning Our Derby Fundraiser: Part 1

Jeff: Welcome back to the Elevate Your Event Podcast, where we talk about all the various ways you can make your next fundraising event better. We have a cool topic today. And to share this topic, we've got a couple of fundraising all-stars in the room. We have Lori Mackay.

Lori: Hello.

Jeff: And we have Elise Druckenmiller.

Elise: Hello.

Jeff: Who's got a sore back. So if she misbehaves, we're just going to push on her or something. No, we're not that mean. I'm Jeff Porter, CEO of Handbid. The fun topic we're going to talk about is we're actually going to talk about my event. One of the things as we were brainstorming through topics for conversation was, maybe we should take our audience through beginning to end what it's like to plan an event. I'm going to preface this by saying we are by no means event planning experts. But we've been doing this event for a long time and it's had its ups and downs. So we think it might be interesting to kind of hear what the dynamics are like and you can use that as a listener to figure out what to take on as a best practice and what to avoid.

Jeff: A little bit of history on this event. Kentucky Derby is the theme. Prior to starting our charity, Carrie and I came from the East Coast. I went to the University of Virginia. She went to William and Mary. I unfortunately never got to go to the Kentucky Derby because I always had an engineering final on that day. All of my friends would drive from Charlottesville to Louisville, and I would sit at home and watch it on TV. So when I got to Denver, I picked up the tradition of having a Kentucky Derby party.

Jeff: At some point, when we started the charity, one of the things you quickly realize is, we've got to raise money. We have all these great ambitious ideas, but none of them are going to come to fruition unless we have funds in the bank. The only thing we knew how to do outside of hiring a grant consultant was throw a party. So maybe we should take our Kentucky Derby party and turn it into a fundraiser. That became our brilliant idea.

Jeff: It was interesting because a whole bunch of people that came every year for the free food and drink left and never came back, and a bunch of people who had never before been involved but cared about our charity and our cause started coming. The first one was at our house in 2005 or 2006. I think we raised five or six thousand dollars. Most of the stuff we had was donated from the Rockies because Clint Hurdle, who had a child with Prader-Willi Syndrome, was the manager at the time.

Jeff: From there, it kind of grew. At one point we had over 200 people showing up at our house. I think our neighbors were the ones that asked us to move it. We moved it to the Cable Center at the University of Denver, which has a really neat video wall. That worked well with our theme because what do we want to do at our event? Watch the horse race. A two-minute horse race. We had silent auction, live auction, paddle raise. It was a family event with kids games. We wanted you to bring your kids because we didn't want you trying to find a babysitter at two or three in the afternoon. It grew and moved around town to different venues.

Jeff: Then COVID came along. We had to turn it into a series of small parties. The Derby actually got moved that year from May to September, Labor Day weekend. That bought us some time to figure out what we were going to do. For our best supporters, we ended up doing a series of private derby parties within health department guidelines, and then linked them all together with live streaming on Zoom.

Jeff: It was time to get back to something real. The Derby is always the first Saturday in May. When you're thinking about running a fundraiser, the good part is you don't have a choice on the date, and the bad part is you don't have a choice on the date. The first Saturday in May in Denver, it can be snowing a foot or it can be 80 degrees. There's really nothing in between.

Jeff: We decided to move to a brand new constructed park at Fiddler's Green, which is an outdoor amphitheater in south Denver. We were rolling the dice because the event had never been entirely outside. We did it, the weather was great, we had a band, fireworks, food trucks, and we changed so many things. For those of you who know Handbid well enough, Handbid was born at the Kentucky Derby. The idea came from running this event for five or six years on paper and hating it more and more every year.

Jeff: In 2022, we got booted from our date because AEG, who runs concerts at the venue, was hosting a concert around that day. You really can't run a fundraiser when 15,000 people are at a concert right next to you. So we did something in the fall called Country for a Cure, brought in a national act from Nashville, and it was great. But we kept getting bumped for concerts.

Jeff: A lot of people told us they missed the Derby. As an organization, we were tired of the Derby theme, but honestly, we were more tired of the stress of having to do it on a certain day at a certain time because the horse race is at roughly 4:50 p.m. mountain time on the first Saturday in May every year. But our fundraisers were not ready to let go. You've got to listen to what your donors are asking you to do.

Jeff: So we have now secured a date. We are going back to the Derby on May 4th. May the Fourth.

Lori: A Star Wars Derby. That's the after party.

Jeff: This is what we're going to be talking about, folks. All the amazing ideas you get from your planning committee that nobody wants to go do and nobody wants to pay for either. We kicked off our planning before Thanksgiving. A good six months in advance. We've done this fourteen or fifteen times, so we know exactly how to run a Derby event. The question is what's going to change and what stays the same.

Jeff: What we want to do over the next several episodes is walk through this. The first thing we'll start with is how did we kick this off, organize the team, and how are we organizing our ongoing meetings. Then throughout the rest of the episodes, we'll talk about how the silent auction is going, how sponsorship sales are going, what decisions we made up front that we now have to change, and all that.

Elise: Who is fighting with who?

Jeff: It's kind of like a little soap opera. If you were on the episode where we talked about my board sounding like Thanksgiving dinner, you should have showed up at our Derby planning meeting. We had a couple of newbies, newcomers. They had deer-in-headlights looks at the other end of the table as we're going at it with each other about whatever. We're passionate people.

Jeff: The first thing we did was obviously ask everybody to come together. We met at our house for about a two-and-a-half to three-hour meeting and discussed our goals. The very first thing was vision and goals. Vision: we want to do it back at Marjorie Park at Fiddler's Green. We want live entertainment. In the past, we always had live entertainment that wasn't a big investment, people that wanted to play on the side. But when we did the 2021 Derby event and brought in Union Gray, we made them a headliner portion of the event and people loved it. We want to go back to that.

Jeff: We want the outdoor LED screen, the stage, the band, the fire pits. We bought these semi-circular sectional sofas with bigger fire pits and sold those for five thousand dollars each. There was a lot of skepticism they were going to sell. They sold in a weekend. We only had four of them and had to add a fifth. They came with table service and also bottle service, which we're going to eliminate this year.

Lori: That was not a good idea.

Jeff: You can get your guests too drunk. There's a level of alcohol that's helpful, but sometimes too much is not a good thing.

Elise: There was definitely a lot of "man, those drinks were strong" kind of stuff.

Jeff: We want everybody to have a good time and drink responsibly, but also be paying attention when we do a paddle raise. We're not going to do the national act from Nashville. They're really hard to schedule, and what we found was people were there to support the event, not necessarily to see the headliner. We decided to focus our budget on other things. That's an expense that comes off, but some expenses come on like the LED wall. We kind of set the vision and then started talking about the budget.

Jeff: It's always good to walk into that meeting with a proposed budget. You don't want to build the budget on the fly. We walked in with a proposed budget based on what we spent in 2021, what we spent in 2022 at Country for a Cure, to figure out what to do in 2024. We looked at ticket sales. How many premium fire pits, how many square fire pit tables. The square fire pit has propane tanks in the cabinet below, and we put six plastic Adirondack deck chairs around it. We were selling those for twenty-four hundred dollars and sold all of them last year. There's about fifteen of those.

Jeff: We also had other types of chairs that caused a lot of confusion with people camping out. Someone would sit down and we'd have to tell them it's a paid seat. So we decided to eliminate all of that.

Elise: We simplified.

Jeff: Everything else is general admission. If you happen to get one of the fire pit tables, they'll be there, first come first served. We decided to leave the bigger tables at the same price. Then the question is what to charge for individual tickets.

Lori: Well, how much money do you want to raise? Do you want to raise what you raised last year or increase your revenue?

Jeff: I do want to increase. But let me explain how we do that. One of the things we've messed with over the years is what an individual ticket should cost. One variable we use is what it costs to actually run the event. We take the total budget, divide by expected attendees. In our case, it came to about a hundred and sixty-eight dollars per person. So what would you set your ticket price at? At least that. You want to cover your costs with GA tickets. And every time we've dropped that base ticket price, those people don't spend any more money than their ticket price. For people buying individual tickets, yes, a few will upgrade and spend in the auction and do the paddle raise. But for a lot of them, they're there to eat your food, drink your drinks, and maybe bid on some stuff. So you need to get some profit out of them. Right now it's set at a hundred and seventy-five, but we're toying with two hundred.

Lori: Are you doing just one ticket?

Jeff: Or you can buy the fire pit or the premium.

Lori: You're thinking like maybe a couple's ticket? Or family?

Jeff: We've had family tickets in the past, the jockey package. The problem with kids pricing is hard. Your best donor shows up with his seventeen-year-old who can eat the amount of three adults. We eliminated kids pricing with Country for a Cure and decided to keep it eliminated. Maybe what we do is an age limit. Kids under eight are free and everybody else is two hundred bucks.

Lori: Those kids aren't going to do anything.

Jeff: The other thing you have to ask is, do I want an event with a thousand people paying seventy-five dollars, or two hundred people all paying five or six hundred? We always like the more intimate events. We can provide a better guest experience and it feels less like a Derby frat party, because there's one of those in Denver already. We're looking at three hundred guests and roughly ninety grand in ticket sales. That includes all tables. Expenses are fifty-seven thousand.

Jeff: So we have to make all of our profit on everything else. Silent auction, twenty-five-thousand-dollar goal. We don't have a huge silent auction, maybe fifty to seventy-five items. Live auction, twenty-thousand-dollar goal. I think we can hit that, especially if we sell some doubles. Paddle raise, twenty thousand. We're conservative on that. It's tough at outdoor events. When we've done it inside, it's been way better. Prize drawing, five grand. Fundraising pages: we do peer-to-peer fundraising on the Handbid platform. Everybody creates a page, and we use how much they raise as an incentive to get into the event. If you raise ten thousand on your page, we'll give you admissions or a table. Every year we raise anywhere from thirty to forty thousand on those.

Jeff: You add all that up and we're at about a hundred and eighty-eight thousand. This event's always done around a hundred thirty to a hundred forty, so we're asking for a significant increase. I didn't put sponsorships in because our sponsorships often end up being table sales. We could add betting revenue too; we take about a ten percent rake on our betting software, so that's another two grand.

Jeff: The budget was presented and there wasn't a lot of conversation. It would have been nice to have you there, Lori, to remind us about the benefit of money.

Lori: I conveniently skipped that one.

Jeff: Then we start talking about expenses. The venue isn't going to cost us anything, but there are related expenses. We have a headliner that's going to cost about four thousand plus travel, maybe forty-five hundred. An opening band at about half that. AV, stage, and sound is about sixteen thousand. The LED screen alone with the stand, generator, staff, lighting is ten grand. Stage and sound adds another six. Country for a Cure was twenty-four thousand for AV, so that's about an eight-thousand-dollar savings.

Jeff: We budget for liquor because we don't always get it all donated. We sell mint juleps using a local distillery who premixes the source and sells to us at his cost. That's about two thousand dollars. Another two thousand in wine and beer as backup. I have four thousand for a live auctioneer. There are auctioneers at five hundred dollars and auctioneers considerably higher than four thousand.

Lori: In our experience, professional auctioneers work.

Jeff: You definitely want to avoid having a board member do that. Or cousin Eddie either. We've seen some tragic examples.

Jeff: I slipped this next one in and I don't think anybody noticed. Fireworks for two grand.

Elise: I knew about this.

Lori: What kind of fireworks do you get for two grand?

Jeff: They're good. Professional grade. Our opening band leader does all the pyro for the Broncos and around town, so he'd cut us a deal. Generator's in the budget. Then food. When we went outdoors, we moved away from catered meals entirely. Whether stations, sit-down, buffets, we've done all of that. We felt we could save a lot of money with food trucks outside. The complaint or risk is that people stand around waiting, but there's a way around that. You go to the food trucks, pre-negotiate what they're going to serve, that's all they make, no customizations. They just throw tacos out on tables and you pick them up. For three hundred and five people, we're estimating thirty to thirty-five dollars a person, about ten thousand for food. Our catering bill used to be more than double that. The feedback is that people have actually enjoyed the food trucks more.

Jeff: Now here came the bulk of the debate: staff. We have Handbid staff, and unfortunately Elise Druckenmiller would not give me a discount. Table service staff, they're typically volunteers at Fiddler's who earn money for their charity of choice. We pay them and they service our high-end tables. They were two hundred and fifty dollars each.

Jeff: Then the event planner. We've never had one. When it was at our house, it's easy to be the event planner. But at this park, there's a lot of ground to cover. At Country for a Cure, it was just unmanageable. We're trying to text each other, call each other. It's nice to have someone with a headpiece coordinating. The other part is that I'm there to build relationships and talk to our best donors. None of us need to be dealing with a check-in issue or a silent auction problem.

Elise: Or driving the band back and forth to their hotel so they can shower.

Jeff: Or making sure the green room has Diet Pepsi instead of Diet Coke. Somebody else can deal with that stuff. So we decided to hire an event planner. It's comprehensive: involved on a weekly basis leading up to the event, running meetings, staffed with six people. It's about seventy-six hundred dollars. That sounds like a reasonable deal. Security, cleaning, bartenders, and swag are all in the budget too.

Lori: The only reason I'm coming is for my Derby cup. People collect those.

Jeff: That all adds up to around sixty thousand. Actually, fifty-seven thousand two hundred and twenty-seven. I like to round up. So our net profit forecast is a hundred and thirty thousand. This event has always netted around eighty to ninety. This is a good step up.

Jeff: Not a lot of people at the meeting were questioning the budget, but a few were. Let's talk about the philosophy behind the debate and the mentality, because this is not atypical for how a charity thinks through their events. If we did a hundred and thirty last year and we're going to spend sixty, that seems really high. The first thing to say is, why do we expect we'll make a hundred and thirty again? The next thing is, why do we always assume we have to cut costs? Why is that the first thing we do?

Jeff: You want to cut costs? What do you want to cut? The first thing everybody wanted to cut was the event planner. That's a new cost. Take that out. Okay, now it's not sixty, it's fifty-four thousand. Who cares? Who's going to do that work now?

Lori: Leading up to the event, you could be focusing on sponsorships that have lacked in the past. That's how you get from a hundred thirty to your hundred eighty-eight goal. Why haven't you gotten those sponsorships? Because you've never had time. Why? Because you're doing all the things the event planner is going to do for you.

Jeff: Exactly. It became clear that when you're looking at an event budget, there's no one-size-fits-all expense ratio. If I spent forty thousand last year and made a hundred, that doesn't mean spending forty-one gets me a hundred and one. It's not linear. You want to find investments that are going to drive revenue. For us, the investment is getting us away from doing the planning things and out there talking to sponsors and driving revenue.

Lori: I think it's a mindset change. So many people are wrapped up in thinking this is a cost center, but it's really a profit center.

Jeff: The budget was approved. Now it's about getting everybody organized and focused around revenue, not expense. The expense is important, but we need to be smarter about where we're spending money. Sometimes smarter doesn't mean cutting costs. It means spending money. That's the big takeaway.

Elise: You're combining two different types of events this year. It used to be a Derby with some live music, and then you had the concert separately. Now it's the Derby-concert.

Lori: It's a more complex event. It requires more investment, more coordination, and more risk.

Jeff: Freeing up our time so the board can go out and get sponsorships, sell those tables. And look, we have a great board. They'll show up Thursday or Friday to help set up. But once the event starts, if a board member bought a table, I want them at their table. This event has matured. The organization has matured. It's time to work on your fundraiser, not in it.

Lori: I feel like this is a common theme.

Jeff: There's always been resistance. In the past, this was a battle I would lose. This year it wasn't even really a battle. The majority of the table said absolutely, this needs to happen. I agree one hundred percent.

Jeff: We've organized our teams. We use Trello. We have categories for: liquor and bar, graphics, social and promotion, sponsorship and ticketing, venue and event planning, auction, catering and food, AV and entertainment, and volunteers. Somebody will own every single one of those categories. Tasks include things like: connect with the brand agency for graphics quotes, determine sponsorship packages and ticket prices, set up tickets and sponsorships in Handbid, design and build sponsorship collateral, contact AEG about the venue, reach out to KYGO radio station for promotion.

Jeff: We finalize the event planner contract. That's done.

Elise: You can mark that task done for me. And I'm in charge of volunteers, so that'll be the best part. I feel like I got volunteered.

Jeff: I'm glad Elise is running volunteers because we've been to so many events where people show up and have no idea what they're doing. Everything's going out in January. I'm sick and tired of finding out in April that businesses already did all their donations for the year. Had we notified them in January, they would have had something for us.

Jeff: One thing we absolutely will not plan for is the weather. It's just going to be what it is. Last year it poured, then cleared up and was gorgeous. We missed time due to the weather because of a disaster with our sound company. Had they gotten things working on time, we would have done our sound check while it was sunny, covered all the instruments while it rained, and been ready on time. But no, we did the sound check in the middle of a downpour.

Jeff: Hopefully you guys found this helpful. Even though we've done this a long time, we still have the same conversations every year, which is good.

Lori: I guess I should log into my Trello board.

Elise: Maybe I should stay away.

Jeff: Put a task on the Trello board to invite Lori to the next planning meeting.

Elise: I'm going to rope her into the volunteers.

Jeff: All right. Well, thank you guys for listening as we walked through this. Hopefully this was helpful. We will be back again soon with another episode of Elevate Your Event. Until then, happy fundraising.