Charity Organization Hosting a Philanthropy Event
The charity organization that Rem and Company represented is a 501 (c)(3) philanthropy helping at-risk St. Louis youth without regard to race, ethnicity, or religion. It was founded in 1962 by St. Louis Sportscaster Buddy Blattner to supply sports equipment to charities and organizations that use organized sports to help redirect the lives of at-risk youth, including boys & girls clubs, police athletic leagues, homes for kids, community centers, and after-school programs.
Situation:
The St. Louis-based non-profit holds an annual Golf Classic and Charity Auction to finance its equipment donations to underserved youth athletic groups in the St. Louis area. However, the client was uncertain how best to plan and operate its annual charity fundraiser amid the COVID-19 pandemic and associated social-distancing restrictions.
Challenge:
Overall, our client sought to maximize each component of its annual Golf Classic and Charity Auction. The organization asked for assistance boosting the amount of corporate sponsorship for the event by identifying potential strategic partnerships and crafting cohesive messaging. Moreover, the non-profit organization tasked Rem and Company with filling player signups and obtaining additional event volunteers–both tricky tasks in the age of social-distancing. Finally, Rem and Company strategists were assigned to optimize the client’s online charity auction by increasing the number of potential bidders.
Approach:
Our team sought to provide insight to each public facing detail of the charity event to maximize the efforts our client had spent putting together an event to benefit their community. In recognizing that, while the non profit organization had experience in event planning, some of their overarching struggles throughout the organization had been a lack of bandwidth and knowledge to effectively market, and struggled to excite and retain volunteers. We were able to effectively consider four potential areas of improvement for their event: getting sponsorships, encouraging sign-ups, volunteer outreach, and auction maximization.
For each of these areas we were able to research best practices and apply them into suggestions for our client. By both identifying types of sponsorships and specific organizations that could provide sponsorships, we were able to break down how to approach different groups, what types of groups to approach, and different ways sponsorship could work within their aspirations to improve the exposure of their organization, gather donations, and encourage young local leaders to be involved. In addressing player sign-ups, we were able to create suggestions both holistically for maximum engagement, but pertaining to the event, we were able to develop potential incentives that would lead to a larger level of engagement. Similarly, for volunteers we were able to both provide suggestions for outreach to encourage volunteer attendance, but also implement components of the event to maximize the experience of volunteers in order to increase retention. Lastly, we researched best practices for maximizing the revenue of the auction, a core component of their event, and created suggestions for both how to implement this aspect of the event online during the COVID-19 pandemic, but also increase donations through better auction practices (i.e. advertising items, getting sponsorship items, changing logistics of the auction to ensure proper value)
Impact:
Our impact can be broken down into boosting player signups, increasing sponsorships, optimizing the online auction, and increasing volunteers. Our recommendations enabled the nonprofit to bolster their marketing efforts and more than double their player signups, recently hitting 100% capacity. Our social media strategy involving an event countdown, advertising auction items, and displaying sponsors--along with help from Rem’s graphics team--has allowed the nonprofit to increase social media traction and attract more event participants.
Our recommendations for increasing sponsorship attraction and retention enabled the nonprofit to secure sponsorships for all event components and develop new sponsor partnerships. Our strategy for optimizing the event’s online auction by setting minimum starting and incremental bid values as well as implementing new advertising methods will boost the revenue generated on each item purchase by at least 30%.
Rem and Company Team:
Team Lead: Justin Wyman
Senior Strategist: Jacob Jeffries
Strategist: Priyanka Iyer
Strategist: Derek Voigt
Brief description of the client:
Company: Non-profit Organization
Industry: 501(c)(3)
Location: St. Louis, MO
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