Months 3 & 4 of your walkathon planning focus on walk day details and driving up attendance.
An important note on attendance - at this stage, driving up attendance may not be as important as maximizing the effectiveness of the existing registrants. For example we've had clients that had 600 walk participants who raised $165,000. Sounds pretty good, right? We've also had other clients that had 50 registered participants who raised $200,000. That's better. More attendees can be a logistical nightmare and drive up costs.
Here are some common items to complete before the walk.
- Make final arrangements with the Event venue: Pay the balance of the rental fee, make sure you've made arrangements for electricity, restrooms, music, LCD projectors, and other materials.
- Finalize agenda: After creating an agenda, debrief the speakers and all organizers of the schedule. Post the agenda on your website or include it in an email blast to participants.
- Two more email blasts: Send one more email to your membership database with a link to the registration and donation pages of the walk website. Send one email specifically to to the registered participants with fundraising advice, incentive information, and the agenda. You should also include information about what to do in case of bad weather.
- Press release: Fax or email press releases to the local radio station, newspaper, and TV station. Be creative with your release. Don't submit a release about the event. That's boring. There are hundreds of fundraising events going on all the time. Try to find a human interest story. For example, maybe one of your participants served in the military and is now back in the U.S. to do some good. Or perhaps a local teacher is walking with her whole class. Pitch something interesting.
- Order t-shirts: E-bay is not a bad place to find screen printing and t-shirts on the cheap. There is no reason to break the bank on this. It's a good way to keep the walk on people's consciousness throughout the year.
- Transportation arrangements: Decide how you will be transporting all of the equipment to the walk site. Find out if you can you leave things at the walk site overnight on the day before the walk? Assign someone to drive the the van or truck. Assign other volunteers to help with loading and unloading?
- Finalize check-in procedures: Assign volunteers at the check-in table. You need to have separate tables for checking in and submitting contributions and pledge sheets. Handling donations should only be done by someone from the development department or qualified staff. Leave this up to someone who can be accountable. If you have extra volunteers, it's probably a good idea to bring a few laptops and start entering data from the pledges onto a spreadsheet. If you have a wireless connection, then even better. Start entering transactions into your walk software.
The next article will be focus on stuff you need to do after the walk...
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