Why Well Planned Events Fail . . .

Last week I spent some time with a good friend of mine who does a lot of volunteer work. He was telling me about the fund raising his organization does to raise money for charities.  Anyone would appreciate the time and energy that is involved in planning events. One of his biggest frustrations was all the effort put forth to organize and execute an event with little or no return on investment. To the best of his knowledge, he and his associates spent about 55 hours collectively planning the event and 5 hours executing the event, all to break even.

The point above illustrates an example numerous event organizers experience. They invest dozens or hundreds of hours of time with little return on investment.  If you’re looking critically at events that didn’t succeed, one might surmise “They didn’t do a very good job of planning or the event wasn’t very good.” Yet, I know a number of people, including myself that have spent countless hours meticulously planning events that failed to meet their financial objectives. Of the numerous event case studies I’ve examined the problem in almost every case doesn’t appear to be in the planning or execution phase. Ironically the problem seems to be more often than not the marketing of the event itself.

More Money Means Better Marketing, Right?
I personally don’t equate the level of marketing an organization can accomplish with the size of a marketing budget. Because an organization has a respectable marketing budget doesn’t mean that they’ll be successful marketing their event. Some of the most successful events I’ve been involved with engaged in simple grass roots marketing. They only used event posters and word of mouth. Those events did tremendously well on a marketing budget of a few hundred dollars.

Where to Invest for Your Event
If you want your event to have the greatest chance for success invest in better marketing. Event organizers don’t do enough of the right marketing to get people to their event. I’ve seen great events financially fail and poor events rake in the bucks. The same ideology applies in the business world. Regardless of how good the product or service, if there is no market, a lack of marketing, or the target market isn’t moved to act, the business will fail. I’m not sure who said it but here is sage advice, “Market or Die!”