Good Inaugural Golf Tournament Goals
When beginning a fundraising golf tournament, committees need to set realistic goals for their fundraising efforts. These goals will help to set the benchmark for the progress made as the tournament matures.
These 5 items are good inaugural goals for your event:
1. Financial goals
A fist time golf tournament should never expect that it will make as much as a tournament that has been going for 10+ years. Setting a realistic financial goal is important to gage the success for your event. In the first year you may incur some cost, such as signage that you will not have in following years to come. Setting a $5000.00 fundraising goal for the first year is great! This is enough to get your second year started and set a foundation for the event. Hopefully the tournament exceeds this goal, which will help gain excitement for the following year.
2. Foundation of event goals
One of the very first meetings the committee should have should be all about the events purpose. Clearly the committee wants to help out the charity as much as possible but have some goals set for the events success itself. Why are you all coming together to do this? Maybe have everyone write down a personal goal. This could be a thing like raise $1000 to get three foursomes for the event. Every event should have a big picture financial goal and then smaller departmental goals followed by personal goals set by each individual committee member. These will keep people more organized on their personal tasks as opposed to having everyone involved in everything.
3. Player count goals
For a first time event do not expect to get 160 players. Getting to a sold out event takes time and a lot of word of mouth year over year. The player count goal may be dictated by the venues minimum golfer count. This may be 100 golfers and so that would need to be the committees’ goal. To get 60 to 100 golfers to a first time event is a success! Make sure those 60 to 100 people have fun and bring more people to the following years event and your second year is sure to be 120 to 140. By the third year your goal could be a sold out event if it grows this way.
4. Volunteer goals
Volunteer goals relate to how many people you want to get involved on the planning process and day of operation. A lot of volunteers can be great as this will create more a buzz around the event and get word of mouth to reach farther. Be mindful though that every volunteer needs a specific task to avoid having to many decision makers.
5. Venue relationship goals
Building a strong lasting relationship with the golf course you choose can be very important. Many times this can lead to more donations from sister properties or more involvement from the club and its membership or regulars. Tournaments that stay year over year at one club are more likely to grow and be successful because every year you are able to adjust a few thing to make it better than the last as a opposed to starting over every year.
The biggest idea to take from this is to make sure that the committee sits down at the beginning of the planning process and lays out its goals to move forward on. This gives everyone a clear purpose and something to drive forward.
- Sarah Smith is the Tournament and Event Sales Director