Running a fundraiser is a big challenge. The risk of it not reaching its targets, not generating enough interest or simply falling flat on the night is high, and a reasonable thing to worry about. If you’ve invested a lot of your social capital (not money, but influence: your standing among your peers) to get this fundraiser off the ground, you’ll be trusted less in future and find it harder to get traction for projects you put your weight behind.
That makes it all the more important to make your first fundraiser a success, and today we’re taking a look at one of the most high stakes parts of the planning process.
Venue
Choosing the venue is likely to be one of the most important things you can decide in the planning stages of your fundraiser. When you look into venue hire in London you could easily find yourself overwhelmed so make sure you use a company like VenueScanner to simplify your search and think about the following simple points:
Where will people be coming from?
If you’re fundraising for a local issue, it makes sense to look for a venue in close proximity to that area. Even if you have invited people from further away, keeping close to the site of the issue in hand means it’s at the forefront of people’s mind and they are more likely to donate, bid or engage in the activities you’ve planned to raise money on the night.
For issues like raising funds for a school, restoring a building that’s useful to the community or working with a charity with a specific focus on the area, keeping the event close by can make sure no one forgets the point of the evening, and your fund-raising efforts will be more effective.
If the issue isn’t tied to a particular location, you should look at your guestlist instead and decide where is most convenient for your guests. An awkward journey is as offputting as a long one, so try to select somewhere with good transport links to allow your guests to get there and home again with the minimum of problems. This should increase attendance for your event, and improve it’s chances of success.
Picking the right location should help you make a shortlist of venues. Once you have that you should select for access needs: you need to ensure your venue is accessible to all your guests and attendees. If you’re fundraising to support people with limited mobility it would be, at the very best, extremely embarrassing if that they can’t access your venue.
You also need to think look at the needs of your event: if you’re organising performances, you’d need an appropriate place for them to perform. If you’re feeding your guests you need appropriate catering facilities and seating. Write a checklist of everything you need from a venue for your event to function and check your shortlist against it.
With all these checks in place, you should be able to hire exactly the right venue to make sure first fundraising event a success.