Event ROI: Keep, Fix, or Kill
The honest audit your events have been avoiding: real costs, real returns, and what to do with the answer.
Through the Human Services lens
Net per staff hour is the number a one-person shop needs most, since an event consuming three hundred hours is effectively the organization's whole fundraising capacity for a season, and this lesson's comparison, a gala netting twenty-two dollars an hour against an appeal netting a hundred and eighty, is the exact argument a solo fundraiser needs for a board that loves its annual dinner. Opportunity cost here is not abstract: it is the appeal or the donor visit that did not happen.
Continuing education
1.00 points
Securing the Gift · Volunteer Involvement
Learning objectives
- Account for an event's true cost across three ledgers, direct costs, staff time at loaded hourly rates, and opportunity cost, and compute its true net, cost to raise a dollar, and net per staff hour.
- Run every recurring event through the ROI calculator annually, subtracting sponsorships that would arrive anyway and relationship gifts booked to the event, and sign a written verdict of keep, fix, kill, or repurpose.
- Fix an event that must stay by cutting hidden staff hours, giving the committee defined jobs, pricing tickets from actual costs, and following up with every flagged guest within 72 hours.
- Read a composite gala retirement for its sequence: the sheet to the finance committee first, sponsors converted before the announcement, a final event as an ending, and the freed hours reassigned to named programs with numeric goals.
Designed for CFRE continuing education. Not yet accepted; no CFRE points can be claimed.
Lessons
- 18 min
Video lesson
True-cost event accounting
I Pause · Securing the Gift
- 20 min
Template· XLSX
Event ROI calculator
III Discern · Securing the Gift
- 19 min
Field guide· PDF
Fixing the event you have to keep
VII Multiply · Volunteer Involvement
- 15 min
Case study· PDF
Case study: killing the gala, raising more
III Discern · Securing the Gift
This is members-only material.
Members get every lesson, template, and worksheet in all eight tracks, plus the support to put them to work in your shop.
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One master case document that powers every appeal, proposal, and conversation, built from your mission's real evidence.
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