[Bikesdelpueblo] Fwd: [FBW] Fundraising 101: How to Organize a Benefit Concert (by David Rovics)

[Kelly Dancer]

I just got this from my old bike co-op. I wish I had read this a long time
ago. Maybe we can use it in the future? What would you guys say to putting
on an alley cat to raise money for shelving and building racks for garage?
Another stand? It could also get our name out.
We could have an 18 and under portion of the race too!! The kids could race
trikes!
Also...I think we should build a bicycle powered carousel.
And get some veggie powered rocket shoes...and wear our underwear on the
outside.

Think it over, I'll see you guys tonight,

~Kelly
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Laurel <laurel.leckert at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 10:07 PM
Subject: [FBW] Fundraising 101: How to Organize a Benefit Concert (by David
Rovics)
To: FBW Organizers <fbw-organizers at googlegroups.com>


hey guys, do people know who david rovics is? well he's a cool anarchist
folk singer and sends out awesome essays as well as tour info to his mailing
list. this one is about how to organize a successful benefit show. it's a
little long but has a lot of good advise. see if you can find the time to
read it.
LL
----------------------

When only a few people show up or the band sucks, a benefit concert can be
demoralizing. But when done right it can accomplish a number of important
goals. It can raise much-needed money for activist groups, energize and
inspire your community, help your group do more outreach and networking with
the broader community, and they can even help support artists! By my
informal accounting, at least 90% of the progressive community could really
get something useful out of this article. Please feel free to share it! You
can also find it on my Facebook pages and at:
www.songwritersnotebook.blogspot.com

Fundraising 101: How to Organize a Benefit Concert

Everybody loves to practice many different forms of social networking, but
when it comes to the kind of networking that might allow you or your
organization to make money, many people are terrified. In much of the
progressive community specifically, people are scared of money. This is a
big problem, since we need money, too – whether you're trying to pay the
rent on your infoshop, feed the homeless, buy a plane ticket so you can be a
delegate to that conference or participate in the next caravan to Gaza,
whatever it is, money is required. In some countries in Europe folks can get
on welfare and be full-time activists while the state pays their rent, which
is fantastic, but it doesn't work here in the USA.

I make a living traveling the world and playing concerts, almost all of
which are organized by local progressive activists of one kind or another.
There are lots of great organizers out there who are able to consistently
put together events that allow me to make a living, raise money for their
projects, and bring together the local progressive community and leave them
feeling inspired – all at the same time! Sometimes, though, the efforts
people make result in badly-attended events that leave people feeling
discouraged or sometimes well-attended events that, despite good attendance,
fail to raise money for the performers or for the cause.

Aside from blizzards, volcanic eruptions, police raids and other things that
are pretty hard to control, there are three main reasons why a benefit gig
fails to be a benefit gig: fear of money, lack of effort or lack of
knowledge about how to do a good job of organizing one. Lack of effort
usually is tied to a lack of understanding of what's required to make the
thing work, so I won't say anything more on that one, but I'll just run you
through what's involved with doing it right.

But first, a promise: you never again need to utter phrases such as “we
don't know how many people might show up,” “we don't have any money,” “we
tried to get the word out but we're not sure if it worked,” “there are a lot
of other things happening in town tonight so we don't know what's going to
happen,” “I'm so nervous because I don't know if we're going to get a
crowd,” etc. Whether you live in a big city, a college town, or even an
economically-depressed town of a few thousand people somewhere in Appalachia,
a few people each putting in a few hours a week of their time for a month
leading up to an event is enough to result in an event that will raise
between one and three thousand dollars and be attended by fifty to two
hundred local people – consistently.

Symbiotic Buzz and Enthusiasm

The steps I'm going to run through below mostly pertain to some aspect of
publicity. There are two things underpinning these different forms of
publicity. One is that it all must be done in order to work – these things
work best in symbiosis. By themselves they won't do as much, and most
crucially, they won't generate the ever-important buzz. You are trying to
create a situation that sparks the powerful phenomenon known as word of
mouth. You need this to go viral, and you can make it do that, every time.
Along with not skipping anything, you need to do it all with enthusiasm.
This is an exciting, community-building event you're organizing. The
performer(s) are fantastic and come from far away. You will meet your next
best friend as well as the love of your life at this gig, etc., it is
undoubtedly the place to be this week.

Charging a Cover

By passing around a bucket and asking for donations, in most cases, you will
raise a small fraction of what you could raise by charging a cover. If you
let the bucket sit somewhere without passing it around you'll usually raise
even less. You can have a sign saying “no one turned away for lack of
funds,” and people with no money can still come. But, you worry, this may
make people feel uncomfortable and it's less intrusive for those folks if
there's a bucket which they can quietly ignore. And this is true! However,
if you want to do it right you have to charge a cover. What this means, to
be precise, is to sit in front of the entrance with a cash box, look
everybody in the eye, and ask them for $10 (or whatever you're charging, but
in most of the US $10 is a good minimum amount to charge for a benefit
show).

Advance Tickets and Sponsors

One of the advantages to charging a set cover is that you can sell advance
tickets. Advance ticket sales can be your biggest way to make money. The
money is raised, and most of the networking happens, long before the actual
show. It's a win-win situation. In terms of advance ticket sales to
individuals, the individual gets to support the cause whether or not they
show up to the gig. Most people who say “I'll definitely be there” mean “I'm
not sure if I'll make it but I think it's really cool that you're doing
this.” Let them show their support by buying a ticket – then they'll feel
much better when they don't make it to the event.

Another advantage is it can be a great networking opportunity and can be an
important factor in the word on the street going viral. Here's one way to do
it: go talk to people who work for a nonprofit, who run a small business, or
who are involved with an activist group, a church, a union, or any other
such grouping of people. Ask them if they want to cosponsor your event by
buying 5 advance tickets for $50, and if they'd like to have their name on
publicity materials as cosponsors. They can re-sell their tickets, use them
themselves, give them away to their members or volunteers, etc. Talk to 30
people involved with different groups and you've raised over $1,000 -- weeks
before the show happens!

Venues, Artists and Conventional Publicity

Three very common mistakes people make when they're organizing shows are:
relying on venues, relying on the performer(s), and relying on the local
newspaper to do much publicity – it's almost a certain way to make sure the
gig's a flop if you focus too much on these traditional methods of
publicizing events. Having said that, they are all still important potential
ways to get more folks to come to your event.

In terms of the venue, aside from looking for a nice place that's free or
cheap to use and will let us charge a cover, it can help a lot if the place
is well-known and easy to get to for local people. Good music venues,
whether it's a club that focuses on live music, a cafe that sometimes has
performers, or a church coffeehouse series, will have an email list and
contacts with local press.

While the venue may get your gig listed in the paper they will be unlikely
to get you a cover story in the Arts section, which is the only print
publicity that will really make much difference in terms of attendance. The
possibility that the paper will run a story is of course completely
uncertain, but the chances can be helped immensely if you send in a
pre-written article about the artist coming to your town and other
information about the event so they can run the story without having to pay
a reporter to write it. They do this all the time – for better or for worse
it is the norm at this point. The main problem with any publicity the venue
or the local paper does is that it is not targeted to your organization's
constituents nor to the artists fans, the two groups of people most likely
to attend the event. It's great to get publicity out to a broad audience,
but only a tiny minority of the general public who hear about an event will
go to it.

In terms of the performer(s) and the publicity they might be able to do,
there are several factors to bear in mind. If the musician is a local they
probably perform locally too often to be able to help a whole lot with
publicity. If the performer(s) are from far away, even if they have a big
following, make a living as touring performers, and have many thousands of
people on their email list altogether, they probably don't have more than a
few dozen contacts on their list in any given city, and even if they only
perform in your area once a year or less, probably not more than 10% of the
people on their local list are going to come to a given show.

Social Networking, Facebook and Community Media

Effective social networking is very important and it mainly happens
off-line. It seems terribly old-fashioned these days and it may not seem
very attractive because it involves a serious time commitment. I'm talking
about talking to your actual, real-life friends, acquaintances, neighbors
and coworkers, giving them info about the show, encouraging them to come and
encouraging them to help get the word out, sell advance tickets, etc. Use
the phone, talk to people in person, and send emails to individual people.

Online social networking is also of great potential importance if you do it
right. These days, doing it right means one thing in particular: having a
Facebook account and knowing how to use it. One important way to use it is
to create an Event page for the show and Tag everybody you can think of in
your area, or people who know lots of folks in your area, including the
performers! Share that on your Profile page regularly, keep putting it on
the top and weekly reminding other people to do the same.

In terms of community media, on the one hand I'm talking about email lists
and websites related to local groups with constituencies that are relevant
to your event, one way or another. Bear in mind that even with a popular
email list less than 10% of recipients will even open a given email, let
alone read it. So as with most other forms of publicity, don't rely much on
this avenue, but use it as much as possible and make sure any lists that are
remotely relevant to your event are covered, hopefully on multiple occasions
in the weeks leading up to the event.

On the other hand I'm talking about your local Pacifica affiliate or other
community or college radio station. Get the show listed in the community
calendar and try to line up phone or live interviews with hosts of relevant
local programs. Don't expect much from this, but it's good to hook up the
performers with the radio hosts in order to try to facilitate what you
really want to line up, which is for someone at the station to create a PSA
(Public Service Announcement, or cart) to plug the event, which, if all goes
well, they will run during the breaks in the most popular program on the
station (probably Democracy Now!) daily for a couple weeks leading up to the
event. If they do this, this will bear fruit, far beyond anything else
a community
radio station might do for you. If there's any chance of getting them to do
this it will only work if the show is a benefit (preferably a benefit for
the station itself).

Outside of the US, including in most of Europe, there's not much in the way
of community radio but there are mainstream local stations and even national
programs you have a good chance of getting on to promote your event if you
make an effort.

Posters and Handbills

Unless the performers at the event are very, very famous, posters are the
least likely way to get an audience because it's not a targeted form of
publicity, unless you put them up on popular bulletin boards in places where
people look for info on events like yours, in which case the poster will get
covered up within a few hours, so you have to return to the coop every day
in many cases for this really to help. All forms of publicity are good,
especially because each one reinforces the other and helps a little in
getting that all-important viral effect happening, so do put up posters, but
bear in mind that by themselves they're unlikely to have much impact.

The idea with handbills, on the other hand, is to use them in a more
targeted way, and this can be very effective (but, as usual with effective
things, more time-consuming for you). What this means is going to events
that are likely to attract supporters of your organization or fans of the
artist(s) and handing out small fliers about the event. Putting one on
everybody's chair before the event begins and handing them out as people are
leaving the event is the idea.

Artist Compensation

How you and your artist(s) deal with this question is up to you, but I
encourage you to consider that if you're working with professional
performers, even relatively well-known ones, they are probably quite
low-income and may very well be wondering how they're going to pay next
month's rent. Whether or not you make a guarantee of a certain payment with
them, consider paying the musicians as part of your overhead along with
other expenses involved with putting on the event. Bear in mind that
hopefully your goal in putting on this event is to network and build your
organization, raise money for it, as well as to foster a sense of community.
Artists are integral to this process and need to be paid if they are to
continue to share their talents with the public.

Other Odds and Ends

The causes that people will most readily get enthusiastic about are
generally situations where there is a tangible, immediate project at hand
that you're trying to raise money for, whatever it may be – raising money to
send people to a conference or protest that's happening in two months,
raising money to buy a new computer for your local pirate radio station, or
to pay the rent for your local community theater, etc.

In your publicity materials don't say what time the event ends – just say
what time it begins. Just trust me on that one.

Hopefully your event is going to be big enough that you'll need to have a
sound system. Don't assume that the venue has one or that the artist is
traveling with one – just ask them. If you need to rent one you can usually
do this cheaply at a local music store – or see if they'll cosponsor the
event by loaning you a sound system for free (and getting 5 advance tickets
in exchange). A local musician may have a sound system you can borrow as
well, whereas a traveling musician may have left theirs at home (if they
have one).

Along with good sound, lighting can make a huge difference in terms of how
the event feels. Even if you're having an event in a sterile lecture hall
with fluorescent lights you can turn off those lights and bring in a couple
of tall lamps to light the stage area instead. If there are no real stage
lights in the venue you're using be creative and figure out how to light the
event in a cozy way, without fluorescents or bright lights everywhere.

Keep your event short – not too short, but leave people wanting more. Don't
schedule so many performers so that you risk people leaving mid-way through
the night. A little over two hours is a good maximum length. Have breaks in
between acts where people can freely mingle. Make sure the main performers
on the bill are really good, and preferably have a significant following. If
they're not good performers, then your publicity efforts are less likely to
go viral and people are much less likely to come to future events you
organize, or to feel particularly inspired the end of it.

Having a raffle at the event -- after attempting to sell raffle tickets to
everybody who walks in the door, raffle prizes somewhere nearby and visible
– is a great way to raise still more money at your event, sometimes a lot
more. A lot of people will gladly buy multiple raffle tickets if you're
doing a raffle, regardless of the prizes, but most people will be encouraged
by knowing what the prizes are. They don't need to be terribly impressive
though – a bottle of wine, a bottle of Palestinian olive oil, relatively
little things like that will do the trick.

Summary

Doing a good job of organizing and publicizing a fundraiser is a lot like
doing social change generally – there's no one way to do it, but by using
lots of different avenues people get the sense that something is happening
that they want to be a part of. People need to hear about your event in at
least three different ways that seem to be independent of each other. Then
they'll get excited about it and start telling their friends to meet them at
the show.

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-- 
Kelly
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