How One Board Raised $50,000
By Harriet Moss

Friends of the River (F.O.R.) is California's premier river conservation organization. For the past 30 years it has worked to protect and restore western rivers, streams and watersheds, and has had many successes in these areas. It's a grassroots organization with a small core staff and a large number of volunteers, many of whom feel a strong personal commitment to the organization.

Because of its grassroots nature, F.O.R. has not had much of a history of doing high-end special events, nor of board participation in organizing such events. Past F.O.R. events tended towards conferences and festivals, which are wonderful for public education and for member socializing, but not for raising money. Until September 11th of last year, this wasn't a problem; however, after 9/11 Friends of the River began to experience the same downturn in funding that still is plaguing nonprofits around the country and was looking at a sizeable budgetary shortfall in 2002.

Around that same time, F.O.R. acquired a new Board Chairperson, JoAnne Skinner, and a new Development Chair, me. Both JoAnne and I had been involved with the organization for a long time, and both of us were highly motivated and recently unemployed. (NB: The upside of the economy's downslide is that there are a LOT of highly-experienced professionals out there with time on their hands...FIND THEM AND USE THEM!) Our response to the organization's funding crunch was to decide that we would take what had previously been a minor awards ceremony held at F.O.R.'s conference each year and turn it into the organization's major fall fundraising event. We knew that, due to budgetary constraints, we would have to produce the event ourselves as Board members and only rely on F.O.R.'s staff for certain specific tasks, such as getting the invitations mailed and keeping track of people buying tickets. The rest was up to us.

ESSENTIAL STEPS

We started working on the event approximately four months before it was to happen (next year, it will be a more comfortable six+ months). We began by creating an event timeline, which we stuck to religiously throughout the process. Then we confirmed the two awardees and their availability. Next we located an appropriate site and confirmed the exact date. The venue we chose was an historic boat, the Ferryboat Eureka, docked at the Maritime National Park in San Francisco. In lieu of the $1200 rental fee, we were able to trade the Maritime National Park Association a river trip for eight donated by one of F.O.R.'s members (The Park Association auctioned the trip off to one of THEIR donors). Lastly, we solicited pro bono graphic design services from one of F.O.R.'s longtime volunteers, a graphic artist in Silicon Valley.

While all that was happening, JoAnne and I, who had overseen other people putting on events but had never actually produced one from A to Z ourselves, set out to talk to colleagues we knew who had. We received invaluable advice and were able to start pulling others into the planning process. Given our short timeline, we struggled with whether or not to create an event committee or to try to do everything ourselves. Ultimately we did create a 9-person Host Committee which was composed half of F.O.R. Board members and half not. It turned out that the Board members were the key element in soliciting table sponsors for the event and the non-Board members were extremely helpful in getting various other things done. Next year, the Host Committee will be the first thing we'll set up.

Prior to creating the Host Committee, JoAnne and I met with Friends of the River's Executive Director, Betsy Reifsnider and Development Director, Marian Bender, to come up with lists of names of people to be called and solicited for event sponsorship. We decided on 5 levels of sponsorship, ranging from $10,000 to $1000, which gave the sponsor an acknowledgement in the invitation and program and a certain number of tickets. Because F.O.R. didn't have much experience with the kind of event we were planning, we had to build the list from pieces of information the organization did have in its donor database, as well as names that JoAnne and I could pull out of our (and eventually, the Host Committee's) heads. We also met with the award recipients and asked them for lists of potential sponsors as well as invitees. I input all the names we came up with into a spreadsheet and, over a series of phone calls, we divided up who would call whom, with JoAnne, me and Betsy doing the bulk of the calling.

CALLING IS KEY

This telephone work was the key to the success of the Awards reception. We called over 100 people to explain the event and to ask them if they would be sponsors. Over 30 said yes, insuring that all our event costs were covered well in advance of the reception itself. The fact that JoAnne and I -- Board muckety-mucks-- were personally telephoning these longtime supporters, some of whom were no longer even members, not only provided the financial underpinning for the event but made everyone we spoke with excited about the reception and eager to come. It was very good PR for F.O.R., brought a number of people back into the fold and insured that folks had the event on their calendar.

Board members on the host committee also pledged money themselves. It was easier to solicit donations when a board member could say, "I've pledged $2,500 already. Will you match my pledge?"

Another thing we did was to ask several people who run in higher-roller circles than we do, but whom we knew supported Friends of the River, if they would sign personal letters to their friends encouraging them to be sponsors. We wrote the letters, they signed them, we mailed them and this worked very well in broadening F.O.R.'s pool of donors. We'll be doing more of this next year.

Last but not least we found a caterer who was both good and reasonable ($17/pp for substantial hors d'oeuvres, very well done), and with the help of other Board members solicited beer donation from a local brew pub, 10 donated cases of various wines from several local wineries, and a pair of excellent musicians who were friends of a staff member and willing to play for expenses. We bought lilies at the local flower market, little bud vases at Costco and had a lovely flower display on each tale for a total cost of about $30, or the price of one flower arrangement from the florists I had called.

So — how was the event? It was fabulous! There were 160 attendees (we had projected 150) and everyone had a wonderful time, including the awardees and the staff. We ultimately spent $7K in expenses and brought in $50K in sponsorships and tickets. We now have a template for the event, one of the goals JoAnne and I set for ourselves in producing it this year. And the whole board is psyched about taking this on again next year and making it even better!

A CAVEAT (From Bestsy Reifsnider, E.D. of Friends of the River)
The board spent an enormous amount of time (in excess of 400 hours) working on this event. It would have been impossible to do without Harriet and JoAnne working almost fulltime as unpaid staff. The paid staff already had a full plate and the reception would have failed without one or two people focussed exclusively on it. Events of this kind can be enormous time sinks, and other organizations considering taking on such an event should be sure they have board members or volunteers with similar time availability and experience before moving forward.

Harriet Moss is a recently retired CEO and the Development Chair of the Board of Friends of the River. She can be reached for questions at harriet@moss.net