One way to generate more funds for RMEF’s mission is to spend less. If 400 chapters were to decrease their total spending by $500 and their gross revenue stays the same, it would equate to an additional $200,000 net annually for the mission. Below, we’ll explore creative staff and volunteer suggestions to help chapters save on expenses.
Facility Expense
When evaluating your chapter’s facility expense, it’s best to start with the contract. Go through the contract and evaluate each line item. Perhaps there is something you missed and can negotiate out of the current year’s contract. Does the facility charge for setting up chairs and tables? Perhaps your committee can reach out to a local sports team or youth group to help set them up for no additional cost? If you set up the day prior to the banquet, are you charged for that extra day? Perhaps you can negotiate a reduced rate or even get the extra day for free. Also, don’t be afraid to shop for new venues. Comfort and routine in the same venue can sometimes breed complacency. Stay open to considering new venues. Compare prices, features and expenses of each. One venue may include some items free of charge while others may charge extra.
Catering and Meal Expense
The cost of meals often increases annually, especially when with premium cuts of meat. The rising expense is not driven by increased costs of the bread or vegetable served with the meal, but usually by the chosen protein. If your chapter is struggling to keep your meal cost at a reasonable price, perhaps it’s time to consider a change. One trend that we’ve seen in recent years is chapters pivoting to a lower cost BBQ style meal, rather than the typical prime rib meal with all the fixings. Banquet attendees want to have a quality meal with respectable portions. Chapters have found BBQ meals are acceptable for banquets. Doing so allows the chapter to keep meal prices for attendees reasonable. These types of meals often feature pulled pork and brisket as well as side dishes like potato salad, coleslaw and beans. Good BBQ with good portions, at an acceptable cost, will keep banquet attendees happy. Another way to potentially cut expense is to choose a buffet style of meal, rather than a plated and served option. Plated meals usually require more catering staff, which typically adds expense to the meal.
Audio/Video Expense
A quality audio/video system can add a lot of value to your event. Unfortunately, they can also come at a healthy cost. Smaller venues often get by with a smaller sound system and projector screen that can be rented locally or loaned to the chapter by someone locally. Larger banquets with bigger venues require professional A/V companies to provide screens and sound systems for their events. For these companies, have you asked if they offer a nonprofit rate? Would they be willing to discount their services by 10 to 20% for a half-page advertisement in your banquet program? Again, go through your previous year’s contract and see which line items can be cut or negotiated.
Supplement Merchandise with More Donations
What percentage of merchandise within your banquet is donated? What percentage of your live auction items were bought? By setting goals to acquire more donations, rather than depending on purchased merchandise, you can decrease expenses and generate more net revenue with your event.
Committee Basket Donations
To help add to an event’s general raffle, some committees challenged their volunteers to each donate a basket to help supplement the raffle. Baskets can be filled with whatever items each volunteer chooses, and many pick their own basket themes. For example, one volunteer could assemble a BBQ package with spices, sauce and a BBQ utensil set. Others assembled baskets with beauty items and gear made for women. Adding 10 to 20 donated baskets can save on the expense of what the same number of bought general raffle items would cost the chapter, thus adding to your chapter’s total net revenue.
Event Mailers
While the cost of each event mailer is not something your chapter can control, how many and to whom you send them is something you can manage. Your regional director gives a list request for the zip codes they chose as an acceptable radius for your banquet. RMEF manages the criteria for the members that are provided on that list, which is outlined below:
Criteria
- Contacts included for matching ZIP code AND one of the following:
- A current membership OR a membership expired within six months
- A Trails Society program designation
- A Habitat Partner program milestone
- Attendance or volunteer history with ANY chapter
- Contacts included for meeting event participation history (regardless of ZIP code):
- Orders, donation, attendance or volunteer history with National Events Chapter since 2021-01-01 (in the last 3 years)
- Above contacts will be excluded if they match any of the following:
- Being marked for NO MAIL or NO SOLICITATION
- Being marked as DECEASED
- Being a youth member that has never attended an event
- Being a member since 2021-01-01 (for 3+ years) without attending an event since 2021-01-01 (within 3 years)
Once your member list has been uploaded to EMS, your regional director and ticket or chapter chair can go through and deselect individuals to whom they do not wish to send an event invitation.
Here are some suggestions on individuals to remove from the mailing list:
- Those listed with an out-of-state address you know will not attend the event.
- Committee volunteers who do not want or need an invitation.
- Invites going to the same person but with multiple addresses (business address)
Once mailers are sent, there are often invites that get returned to the ticket chair because they are deemed undeliverable. These are typically due to an address change or incorrect information. It is important that these returned mailers are given to your regional director who will forward them to RMEF. Those will then get corrected or removed from future mailings, saving printing and postage expenses.
Printing Banquet Programs
Banquet programs also bring a significant expense, without any direct offsetting revenue. Since banquet programs are necessary for laying out what is offered at the event, it is worth looking at ways to help save on that printing expense.
The first thing to look at is the number of programs printed. Are you printing one per person or perhaps one per couple? A rule of thumb that many chapters use is to print 60-70% of the total number of expected attendees.
Another suggestion is to only print in black and white. Printing in color can add significant cost and an argument can be made that it is not worth the extra expense. For smaller events, is there a volunteer or donor that can print these for you? There are often businesses with printers capable of printing programs that are willing to do so for free.
Try to work with printers that offer nonprofit discounts. Some of them will offer partial donations in exchange for recognition within the program. Offer the printer a half or full-page in exchange for printing.
Lastly, is there anything that can be left out of the program to cut down on the number of pages? Most programs utilize 11×16 paper, folded in half, so the number of pages added or subtracted must be made in increments of four. Saving a page or two can add up, especially for larger banquets requiring more programs.
Support Materials
Although most support material items do not hit your chapter’s event as an expense, they do have a cost to RMEF and affect the amount of funds available for mission spending. It’s important to keep an inventory of your chapter’s support materials, so when working with your regional director to order more, you are not ordering items you do not need. Keep track of the support items that can be used year-over-year and order as closely as can be predicted for the items that will expire in the current year. Special raffle tickets, such as those for the progressive raffle, cannot be used in future years. Accurately estimating the number of raffle tickets for your current year’s event can cut down on waste and help save on organizational expenses.
Utilize Raffles with No Upfront Risk or Expense
Knowing exactly how much merchandise to order for an event can be a challenge. There is a balance in ordering enough merchandise to extract the most amount of funds from your crowd but ordering too much may result in unnecessary expense.
One tactic that helps ensure you have enough opportunities for attendees to spend their raffle money is using raffles that carry no upfront expense. For example, the “Never Ending Raffle” is a tactic that lets crowds determine how many raffle prizes are given out, based on how many times they continue to sell out the raffle. In this raffle, a set number of tickets are purchased (typically 50 or 60) for $20, and once all tickets are sold, a winner is drawn. The winner makes their prize choice from the raffle board and the winner is sent the item after the banquet. The raffle then starts over, and another round of tickets is sold. Sales must be gauged and once the raffle becomes a struggle to sell out, the raffle should be shut down once all tickets are sold. In some cases, this raffle has sold out 5, 10 and even 15 times at some banquets! For those events, ordering prizes to fulfill that quantity of raffles up front would have been a huge risk. Had they also ordered too many prizes, they would have had to absorb that expense. This raffle tactic allows the amount of spending within the crowd to dictate the revenue and expenses needed for the raffle.
A similar tactic to consider is when a chapter asks an FFL to bring two to three extra firearms with them to the banquet. Chapters can gauge and adapt with the spending of attendees and choose to raffle one or more of those firearms. Again, there is no risk in arranging this option with the FFL.
Conclusion
There are many ways committees can monitor and mitigate chapter expenses. It is important to continuously keep track of expenses and trim unnecessary expenses, when possible.