Last week, CASE held their Annual Conference for Donor Relations Professionals. The conference brought together Donor Relations, Stewardship, Development, Annual Giving, and Advancement professionals to encourage them to think more creatively, strategically and collaboratively about how best to steward their institution’s donors. Event strategy was discussed along with many other best practices for donor relations. The session that stood out from an events standpoint, “Once More with Feeling: Effective Events,” was run by event experts Meg McAndrews of Syracuse and Angie Joens of University of California Davis.

Here are some of the top takeaways from their session on effective events:

Ask “Why are we doing this?”

No matter what type of event your organization is holding, one of the most important questions to ask is “why are we doing this?” It’s a simple question, but one that is easy to lose track of with events that keep going because they have been happening for years. Events are a big investment of time and resources and need to have clear, defined goals. Make sure you are asking the “why” question for every event big or small, new or old.

Define Your Event’s Purpose

Based on the “why are we doing this?” question, every event should have a clear goal. There are three potential purposes of an event from a donor relations perspective:

• Engagement: Sometimes simply getting more people involved and engaged is great event goal. This could relate to involving alumni who have previously not attended events or just trying to bring as many alumni or donors as possible to an event.

• Cultivation: This purpose involves moving people along in the fundraising cycle. That could mean something as simple as getting alumni to come to a paid fundraising dinner or strategically moving a major donor toward a large gift.

• Recognition: Recognizing those who have donated and making them feel good about their gifts encourages them to keep giving. If this is your event purpose, this would be a great time to use an in-person event to showcase the impact that their gifts have made on the institution.

Use Engagement and Follow-Up Plans

Having a set donor engagement plan for an event is a great way to ensure event success. Before the event, have a plan of action for which donors will be there and who will be meeting with them. On event day, make sure the right people have important donor information on hand and know exactly when those important donors arrive. On event day, make the most of the time for face-to-face interaction. Depending on the size of the event, you may want to assign follow-up tasks to specific officers to check-in with attendees after the event. Event follow up should be meaningful and personalized. Having a post-event debrief on the conversations and connections made is great way to encourage your team to share successes and discuss follow up strategy.

Measure Your Success

To measure the success for your event, you can look at something as simple as participant goals, which measures the percentage of your invitee pool that attends your event. Survey responses are another good way to determine the overall success of your event, as long as your can get your attendees to actually respond. Online surveys are much easier than paper and also easier to measure response rates. For donor relations, looking at the money raised is obviously important, but sometimes hard to track as a donation related to event attendance may not come in until long after the event takes place. For this reason, it is very important to keep track of event registration and attendance in your database to give you the ability to look at the correlation between attendance and giving.