HOW TO ORGANISE A CHARITY PAMPER EVENING

I recently held a successful charity pamper evening in support of Multiple Sclerosis Resource Centre, and in the absence of comprehensive instructions on how to go about it on the net, thought a step by step guide may serve a useful resource for anyone planning a similar event.

I have organised events before, but never to raise money for charity, so I started with one simple goal: spend little, raise a lot. With this in mind, these are the steps I followed…

1. The charity

Its really important you contact the fundraising manager of the charity to tell them your plans and get their support. They should supply you with an official collectors’ badge, or a signed letter at least. You will need this when approaching potential stallholders and raffle prize donors to prove you’re not just trying to fund your summer holiday. The charity should also be able to support you with publicity and give you collecting tins if required.

2. Timescale

Like me, you may have a full time job and be doing this in your spare time. If so, you need to set a realistic timeframe to organise the event. I allowed three months from start to finish – the first month to find a venue, the second month to find stallholders and the third month to sell tickets and promote the event. Raffle prizes can be sought during the second and third months.

3. Venue

You should aim to get your venue for free, a feat which is entirely possible. Start with who you know by posting on facebook and emailing – someone in your friends or contacts list may be able to help. If not, they may know someone who can.

If that doesn’t work, move on to what you know – you may have attended events at places you think will be suitable for your pamper evening. Venue managers will, if they are charitable and sensible, realise that an event like this will be positive PR and they’ll take money on the bar, so should be willing to offer their space FOC.

Regarding the size of the venue, you need to have in your mind the number of stallholders and attendees you hope to achieve. The more tickets and stalls you can sell the more money you can make, but you have to weigh this up with cost. If the venue is small but free, could you make more money than if your venue is large but charging you a couple of hundred pounds? If your venue is large and free, happy days!

You will probably be looking for somewhere private, intimate and stylish for your pamper event, as attendees will want to feel relaxed and not gawped at by Joe Public whilst having heir eyebrows plucked. A private room is the best scenario but if you have an area of a public space on offer, you need to think about how you can make it more intimate. Perhaps you can borrow some screens from someone, or curtains hung onto clothes rails might do the trick.

You also need to ensure your venue has adequate lighting and accessible power sockets for your needs. Ask the manager if he/she can supply extension leads (steer clear of bringing in your own electrical equipment) and whether they have a PA system you can use to draw the raffle.

Accessibility to the venue is also hugely important – for your stallholders and your attendees. Your stallholders will be bringing products and equipment so will need an elevator if your space isn’t on the ground floor. Depending on your charity, you may also have disabled attendees and it would be a major embarrassment if they couldn’t get in.

4. Setting the date and time

Have a rough date in mind of when you want to hold the event, but the actual date will depend on the venue’s availability. Thursdays tend to be good as people are in weekend wind-down mode, but probably won’t have anything in the diary as it’s still a work night. The first Thursday of the month is the holy grail – fresh pay packets burning a hole in purses!

Start and end times are important because you need to ensure that a) your venue allows enough set-up time before hand, and b) your stallholders have enough time to make back the money you are charging them. Eg, if you charge them £25 for their space, and they charge £5 per treatment, is there enough time for them to do more than five treatments? Ultimately this is their concern, not yours, but it may make the difference between them signing up or not so it’s worth considering. My event ran from 7pm – 10.30pm, and the venue allowed access from 5pm to set up.

5. Stall holders

With venue booked and date set, you need to start finding stallholders and decide what to charge them. £25 is reasonable price considering it’s a charity donation. Don’t forget as well that you are bringing many potential future customers to them – if they’re sensible they’ll see it as a marketing opportunity. Your venue size will dictate how many stallholders you can comfortably fit in, so this should be your target.

Begin by writing a list of appropriate products and services: back/ head massage; manicures/pedicures; eyebrow threading; hair styling; make-up; henna body art; holistic therapies such as reflexology, aromatherapy, reiki, crystal healing; cosmetic surgery consultants (botox, lazer treatments etc); jewellery; cosmetics/ skincare products; bags, clothes and accessories; gifts and cards; chocolate.

Go through your list and look up all the local services you can find in each category. Before you start calling, have all the relevant information to hand including the size of the table you are offering (go to the venue and measure them), accessibility, parking, and lighting. All of this information will help convince them attending your event is a good idea.

As soon as they’re on board, take down their details and ask them to send their payment straight away. Does your charity accept cheques? If so, ask the stallholder to pay by cheque made out to the charity, which will further convince them that you are a bone-fide fundraiser. The sooner you get their payment, the less chance there is of them backing out at the last minute. Go and collect it in person to save you having to keep asking them to send it.

Following a verbal agreement from your stallholder, follow this up with an email so that they have all the details in black and white. Don’t book more than one stallholder of the same type, unless they offer different styles; a hairdresser won’t want to compete with another hairdresser, but a jeweller may not mind if one sells silver and the other sells beads.

6. Tickets sales and promotion

When you have sold enough tables to make the event worth attending, start shifting your tickets. How much will you charge? If you are paying for a venue, or offering food and drink, your price will be based on a real calculation. If not, the cost will depend on what you think is reasonable. My venue was free and I wasn’t offering refreshments, so I thought £3 was fair. Don’t forget you’ll be asking the punters to spend money on pampering services and raffle tickets so you don’t want to bleed them dry.

When you’ve decided on price, you need to run off some tickets. It’s easy enough to design and print them yourself, stating date, time, place and charity. You can also list what kinds of services are on offer – don’t use specific names of stallholders in case they pull out at the last minute. Keep it loose: ‘Services include hair and make-up, massage, manicures etc’.

When selling tickets, start with the people you know – go through your phone, address book and facebook friends list. Contact them all and tell them about the event. When they agree to buy tickets, be prepared to do the legwork – delivering tickets in person rather than waiting for them to collect will ensure sales and real cash up front.

Some of your friends may work for large companies and might be willing to shift some tickets for you. If so, give them a pile of tickets to sell on your behalf. Make sure you write down how many tickets they have taken so that you know how much money to expect from them.

When you print the tickets, print up some flyers as well so that you can start promoting. Make sure your tickets and flyers look different – you don’t want people passing off flyers as pre-bought tickets on the night. Take your flyers to local businesses where the types of people you want at your event go: hairdressers, bars, shops, soft play centres, beauty salons. Ask your stallholders if they will take some – it’s in their interest to do so.

Post your event on all the social networking sites such as facebook, myspace and twitter, and keep updating the information as you sign up more stalls. One posting a month before the event will do no good at all; you have to keep reminding people what’s coming up and why they should come. Your promotion should culminate with a flurry of postings, mail outs and texts a few days before the event. Also, contact your local media and see if they can help.

7. Raffle

At the same time as booking stallholders and selling tickets, you will also need to start collecting raffle prizes. There are two mantras here:

1. ‘If you don’t ask, you don’t get’
2. ‘You don’t know unless you try’

If you assume you’ll never get a free Caribbean cruise and don’t bother trying, then you definitely won’t. But if you give it a go, you might just be surprised. Set your sights on some lesser prizes as well though – treatment vouchers, gym membership, jewellery, skin and haircare products, accessories, photographic sessions and dinner vouchers are all totally realistic. Big stores will probably already have a designated charity for the year and will likely turn you down, but independent businesses are much more likely to support you. Be sure to tell them they will receive a name check and a big thank you on the night. Ask your stallholders as well – many of mine donated prizes.

It’s a good idea to contact your charity and check whether they have any guidelines on raffles – it’s essentially gambling so they will probably have rules such as not pre-selling tickets and maximum ticket price. A realistic price is 50p each, or £2.50 a strip (offer the strip before the single ticket) unless of course you have been lucky enough to get some truly amazing prizes, in which case you could probably double it.

When selling tickets on the night, enlist the help of some friends and give them different coloured ticket books. Also give them some paper and a pen and ask them to take down the name, telephone number, ticket colour and numbers of buyers who have to leave before the draw. Display your raffle prizes on a table near the door so customers can see what’s up for grabs as they come in.

8. Just before the event

Draw up a table plan, and print out the names of your stallholders in large print on separate sheets of A4 so that you can put these on the tables at the start of the night.

Enlist someone trustworthy to ‘work the door’, checking that people have tickets and selling new ones.

Get some secure moneybags that you can give to your door person and your raffle ticket sellers – across the body or round the waist type. Use the money you have already made on ticket sales to make up a float for each bag.

Get some brightly coloured ribbon you can make into sashes for the people who are ‘working’ at the event and ask them to wear black so the sash will show up. Everyone will then know who the organisation team is if they have any questions.

8. Setting up

So the day of your event has arrived. You’ve signed up your target of stallholders and they have all paid, you’ve sold a number of tickets in advance and you have more people turning up on the night. You have an impressive list of raffle prizes and you have people to help you.

You must make sure you are the first to arrive at the venue to greet your stallholders as they arrive and set up. Hopefully there won’t be problems but you have to be on hand in case of last-minute hiccups. It would probably be wise to have a couple of stallholders in reserve just in case someone pulls out at the eleventh hour.

Then all that remains for you is to enjoy the evening, have a couple of treatments and watch the money rolling in.

Oh and one last tip – at the end of the evening make sure you don’t leave the venue on your own if you are carrying all the money.