Win or Lose?

Sherri: Welcome to Cahoots Commentary, where we share our comments about what to do and, most importantly, what not to do in your nonprofit communications. Thanks for joining us.  

Our topic for this commentary is: Win or Lose? Are golf tournaments great fundraisers? Before we decide, I think it’s really important for us to first define what Experiential Marketing is. A live event like a golf tournament is an experiential marketing opportunity. It allows your existing and potential donors to experience you and your nonprofit staff and gain a firsthand understanding of your programs, your products, and your services, and ultimately why you are worth funding.  

It’s one of the best ways to engage new audiences, but if your tournament includes a captivating program in addition to the golf, that makes it an even bigger impact. 

Dee: Some of the top things to think about if you do decide to have a golf tournament is one, when you start planning it, make sure that you document it, every facet of it. This will help if you decide to repeat that event and it’ll be much more efficient in doing so. The other thing is make sure you market it well. Don’t just rely only on your staff and the donors sponsoring the foursomes. Lastly, measure it. Make sure you document the income, the expenses, the attenders, your new audiences and their information and staff and volunteer hours. 

Katie: As an ad agency, we only recommend fundraising events that can reach the greatest size of audience with the least amount of staffing and underwriting necessary. The more staffing and funding it takes, the more complicated it becomes, and it starts getting very easy to get lost in the weeds and spend more time and money coordinating and organizing the event than you ever earn back from the event.  

So the next question is, whose idea was this anyway? Why do organizations do golf tournaments in the first place? 

Sherri: Generally, almost without exception, a board member recommends it. But you know, it has nothing to do with the organization itself. Unless you teach disadvantaged youth how to play golf, it’s a win because the board feels vested, but it’s a lose when you consider and evaluate what makes it a truly great fundraising event.  

It’s a win at making money, but not much. They average about $35,000 to $40,000, and we found this across the board. The only exception are golf tournaments that raise big money because they have a national celebrity attached to the tournament, and so they can charge more for the entry fees and the sponsorships and things. Generally, it’s not a big win, it’s just about $35,000 to 40,000.  

Now, if you’re a small organization, that’s a lot of money, but it’s not just what you make, it’s also what you have to put into it. 

Another really big key point about whose idea was this: One of the single biggest reasons why nonprofits, ministries, and churches do golf tournaments is because they see other nonprofits and ministries and churches doing golf tournaments. And their friend over at X, Y, Z organization said, “Oh yeah, we made $30,000 or $40,000”, and it’s a copycat thing. The key is the golf tournament wasn’t decided upon or considered or even created because it’s ideal for the type of organization that’s gonna be doing the event.

They just do it because they heard someone else did it. So, it’s a copycat thing, and we see this not just in golf tournaments; auctions, duck races on the river, I mean, there is a million copycat events where we’ve seen them, and seen them, and seen them, and seen them. You name it, walk-a-thons. They’re almost everything. If you look at it, if you’ve seen another organization do it, it’s a copycat. 

Somebody else has seen it, or the board member goes, “Oh yeah, I played a couple charity golf tournaments and they’re really great”. And that’s the problem. Instead of sitting down and going, what is the ideal experiential opportunity that our organization can host that will be unique and memorable and distinguish us from others in the marketplace?  

So who does a charity tournament reach? First of all, most of these golf tournaments are limited to 144 players. So that’s two foursomes or eight players, if you will, per 18 holes at a full day tournament. If you’ve only got a half day, that may mean that you’ve only got half that many people who are able to get involved in it.  

The National Golf Foundation, I thought this was really interesting, says that 6 million women play golf in the US compared to 47.2 million men. So, on average, you’d be reaching only about 12% of women. So, your golf event doesn’t apply to the interest of 88% of the women who are involved with your organization. In that regard, I think it’s an absolute lose because not everybody’s gonna wanna get involved. Not everybody’s gonna wanna play. And when you start doing that, especially when it comes to who the decision makers are about gifting, you don’t wanna leave the women out. 

Dee: Yeah, I agree. You know, golfers are not what we would call a broad audience. You also have to look at, it’s just weekday participation, which eliminates a lot of audiences. 

Sherri: For those people who are working during the week, right? 

Dee: Yeah. And there’s low participation because of the interest and the saturation of golf tournaments in the market for both participants and the sponsors. 

Katie: And generally, with these kind of events, existing donors will only invite their friends. Since not everyone golfs, current supporters are going to connect with people that they know will be interested in golfing, not necessarily interested in the cause itself.  

It’s certainly more difficult to walk up to a neighbor you’ve only talked to a handful of times and ask them “if they might wanna participate in a golf tournament?”, versus inviting them to, say, a dinner banquet event. Golf tournaments unfortunately limit the audience reach because of this. 

Sherri: I’ve been invited to play in golf tournaments, not just the ones we helped sponsor, and I’ve gotta tell you, they didn’t care if I could play. And, and I’ll just leave it at that. 

I still have vivid memories of standing, when I actually physically had to man a golf tournament, standing at the hole that I was supposed to be managing in either scorching sun or unbelievable rainstorms because we always said “rain or shine”, and it was literally one extreme or the other. I don’t ever remember just a pleasant, nice, cool day ever, and it’s miserable. 

Katie: Yeah, exactly. The volunteer experience is really important to consider, and most people don’t think about the fact that word kind of travels between volunteers. So, if a volunteer has an experience like that on the hole where they’re getting drenched or sunburnt, that’s gonna travel back to the other volunteers who maybe haven’t done it before or new volunteers, right?  

Somebody signing up saying, “Hey, I saw that they’re doing this golf tournament, they’re looking for volunteers”. Somebody might be like, “Hmm, you might wanna skip that event and do, you know, the gala later so you don’t have to be outside”. There’s not a guarantee that that sort of thing happens, but I have seen it happen. 

Sherri: I’ve seen it happen years later where people have an unbelievable memory for an experience like that, which isn’t a positive, it’s a negative. 

Katie: Oh yeah. And there’s always a chance too that a volunteer might be talking to a donor and something like that comes out and say, “Hey, you know, we did this, but man, it was really hard standing out there”. You have to consider how volunteers feel about it. Just making sure the experience is beneficial and fun for everybody that’s involved. You don’t want it to be a dreary, exhausting experience if you can avoid it.  

Sherri: And for the staff. 

Katie: And for the staff too, yeah. Staff are doing the same thing usually at these kind of events that volunteers are.  

Sherri: Another thing to keep in mind as far as staff on things like a golf tournament, is there’s always that thing in the back of people’s mind that, “You know what? I wasn’t hired for this. I do this aspect of work or I, you know, I wanna be doing direct ministry.” 

Katie: It wasn’t in the job description, yeah. 

Sherri: Exactly wasn’t in the job description. Which goes back to when Dee said it has to be, you have to be able to measure it. And if you don’t know what a volunteer’s hour is worth or you don’t know what a staff person’s hour is worth, you might know what you’re paying them annually. When you sit down and you start looking at it as if you are paying them like an accountant or an attorney, what the hourly cost is for that person’s time, it’s eye-opening 

Dee: Eye-opening. I think that cost is often overlooked because they don’t put it in their expenses, they just absorb it. 

Sherri: Or in their plan. 

Dee: Yeah, and so it makes it look like something very profitable. When you look at the man hours involved, then it becomes unprofitable. 

Sherri: Well, and I’ll just say this because, sadly, and we hear it all the time, “Oh, no, no, no. It didn’t cost us anything, it was volunteers”. And that grieves us because having someone’s time is like having someone give you money. For that volunteer, that’s as precious to them as if they gave you a donation. And to hear leadership within organizations and ministries say, “Oh, no, no, no. They were all volunteers”, that says you don’t see any kind of value to that. It’s like free labor. It’s not a good attitude to have with people who are investing themselves in being in front of the people that you’re trying to hopefully get a relationship with. 

Dee: And let’s not forget to just like, you know, as it was said before, that this is an all-day event. And we have weather uncertainty. So then you gotta look at, there’s also food and drink costs for the golfers and then the rental of the course. All of that eats up the registration fees. 

Sherri: So, let’s consider: how does a charity golf tournament provide a unique experience? Now, I talked about that earlier. Experiential marking is one thing, but a unique experience means it’s something that is specifically associated with just your organization. So when someone thinks about it, you uniquely are the one that possesses that experience in people’s minds. And a unique experience will distinguish you from everybody else, and by everybody else, I mean other nonprofit organizations and ministries or churches perhaps in the marketplace. Let me just talk about Denver. For those of you who don’t know, we’re in the Denver metro marketplace, and I’ll use that just as an example. We have an estimated 120 golf courses. 69 of them are public. That means anybody can use ’em. The other ones are private courses. And typically for people who love to do golf tournaments, they like to go to the private golf courses because they’re not members. So that is a draw.  

But with all that said, 120 golf courses in Denver. Now, almost every charity tournament in the marketplace are held on Mondays. And the reason for that is most courses are closed on Mondays for the specific purpose to rent themselves out to charity tournaments because they make a lot of money. That’s around 22 Mondays from May to September. That’s potentially 2,640 charity tournaments in one summer in the Denver metro area. There is no way a tournament makes you unique.  

And I can tell you that I know for an absolute fact it was like, I don’t know, five or seven years ago, I got the actual literal number and there were 420 golf tournaments for nonprofit organizations, charities, churches, ministries in the Denver marketplace. That doesn’t make anyone unique. For us, again, as an ad agency, feeling that any kind of event needs to be something that is unique for you, that it highlights and it focuses and gives attention to the people that you serve and the work that you do. And a golf tournament doesn’t do that.  

We’re looking at very small audiences, but huge amount of competition in the sense of the number of charities and organizations that use a golf tournament as a fundraiser. I mentioned a little bit earlier about how much does a charity golf tournament make an organization. It’s about, you know, $30,000 to $40,000. So it’s not a whole lot. 

Katie: Yeah, and the real difficulty is that golf tournaments tend to only generate one-off donations rather than recurring donations. More often than not, participants are only there to golf, not find out more about the organization hosting the tournament. You know, they’ll play some golf, maybe write a check for a couple hundred bucks, and then they leave and don’t think about it again until their buddy invites them back for next year’s tournament. 

It creates a difficult environment for a nonprofit to cultivate ongoing relationships. And in a lot of cases, these kinds of one-off donors are not good contacts to include on mailing lists going forward, because they don’t respond to outreach. They often become a segment to be filtered out of mailing lists so that money isn’t spent on sending them mailers that won’t get opened. 

Sherri: And it’s not unusual if you do a survey of the golfers leaving your tournament and ask them, “Can you please tell me the name of the nonprofit organization that will be benefiting from the funds raised today?” It is staggering how many go, “I don’t know. I just came with my friend Joe, who invited me in his foursome.” They literally leave the event with not even a knowledge of who was the beneficiary of the event that was hosted that day and that they just played.  

So in my opinion, it’s a big lose for those who sponsor the tournament as well. Depending on how you structure it, you know, for marketing purposes, most organizations have kind of the same structure. You can sponsor a foursome, which is a set fee. You can sponsor, in this case, advertising sponsor a hole, like for $500 or more. You can be the entire tournament sponsor, like a title sponsor if you will. And that kind of gets sometimes up into the thousands of dollars.  

But when you get right down into it, the reason somebody sponsors the paid advertising portions, like a whole sponsor where they’re gonna be presented, or for the title sponsor where their organization’s gonna be presented as well, they’re doing it as a paid advertising opportunity to get alongside your audience, a nonprofit’s audience. They want access to that audience.  

So these friend golfers, you know, aren’t really an organization’s audience on top of it. If Tom invited three of his good buddies who’ve never been exposed to this nonprofit organization before, they are not the audience the sponsor is paying to get close to. They’re Tom’s buddies. They could be a completely different demographic compared to who an organization has. You know, if it’s a ministry or a faith-based organization, the other three golfers might not even be the same type of faith people that are related to your ministry. 

And so if a sponsor is essentially positioning themselves through paid advertising of a hole, or of the title sponsorship or some other aspect of the underwriting, if you will, of a golf tournament, and two thirds, if not three fourths of the people who attend aren’t even your audience, what are we really selling there as an ad agency? We go, “That doesn’t fly”. It’s gotta be the absolute targeted audience. And most organizations can’t suggest to a sponsor that’s their audience because they’re new people on top of it all. 

So, from an agency perspective, sponsorships aren’t worth the investment with the limited and diluted audience reach, which is usually at the most 144 players. And they probably only saw the sponsor’s logo displayed at one hole, which is one impression. Generally, a business will be a hole sponsor once. Repeat sponsors year after year is almost non-existent because they don’t really see a good return on their marketing investment. 

Dee: I agree. I mean, the amount of impressions is very low for a sponsor. If you’re looking at a general marketing build out there and the players have very little engagement with those sponsors, it’s just for a brief moment at that hole and there’s not much that the sponsors can pass on to them within that amount of time.  

Sherri: You can’t expect people to remember you when they’ve just seen your logo as they’re passing through or dodging the “Fore!” or whatever. It might be a really exciting business, but one impression does not a friend make. 

Dee: And unless the sponsor has something set up where they’re actually having people fill information out for, you know, coupons or whatever or prize drawing, they do not get the player’s information. So, that does not build any of their lists, as far as donor list, that they could. 

Sherri: And what it really comes down to then really isn’t a sponsorship, it’s a donation. Because the people who are doing it and knowing their logos being placed there, the majority of people are doing it because they care about the cause, we would hope. But they usually only do it once. And the reason they only do it once is they go, you know, if it’s $500, I can buy bench advertising for an entire month on a major street for that amount of money and get a lot more traction and impressions.  

So to sum it up, Win or Lose? From a branding and benefit standpoint, I think it’s a lose. It’s simply not a fundraising event model that engages participants in a future relationship with the organization. 

Dee: I think if there’s not a unique connection with the organization, what the organization does or you know, like we’ve said, there’s a celebrity involved, I would have to say it’s a lose. 

Kate: I agree. I can see how people think it’s a win, but more tends to be lost than gained with these kinds of events.  

Sherri: So that’s our Cahoots Commentary on the theme, Win or Lose? Are golf tournaments great fundraisers? Thanks for listening. If you’d like to learn more about how to plan and execute great fundraising events for your organization, ministry or church, we have training courses for that. We’d love for you to be able to have access to those and see what some of the criteria should be when you’re starting to plan your next fundraising events. So check ’em out on our website at CahootsCommunications.com. Thanks for joining us.