By Ted Geier; an Affiliate Consultant with Support Center
Introduction
Your organization is approaching a major anniversary year. It’s time to celebrate! Your team may be eager to pick a cool gala venue and start planning a menu. But you will likely get better results if, as with many other things in life, you take the time to do some careful planning and define desired outcomes before racing ahead to the fun parts.
Nonprofit organization anniversary activities often lose money, alienate participants, and reflect poorly on the organization.
Sometimes they can even destroy an organization. Really!
Done right, however, they can generate excitement and contribute to organizational development in every area — directly and indirectly raising funds, enlisting new supporters, recognizing stakeholders, and enhancing visibility and programs.
What follows is a no-frills, no anecdotes, step-by-step approach to planning and managing a successful anniversary development campaign for your cause.
Step 1: Get Started: Convene a Working Team
Designate a coordinator to manage the anniversary campaign. This person (and it can be a member of the board, a staff member, a volunteer, or an outside consultant) will oversee the whole process – creating a workplan, managing the team, and setting a schedule of regular meetings and check-ins to monitor progress for the duration of the campaign.
Convene an anniversary campaign steering committee composed of skilled board and staff members, volunteers, and consultants who understand your organization’s needs and objectives, know how to secure resources, will take responsibility and follow through on commitments, and will work well with others. Ideally, get this team going well before the period you will be marking the anniversary – there’s a lot to do before activities begin.
Set a regular meeting schedule, and prepare a written agenda for each meeting and distribute summaries of decisions and assignments afterward.
A sample standing agenda:
- Introductions
- Review last meeting summary
- Objectives
- Team
- Steering Committee
- Honorary Committee
- Budget
- Activities/Components
- Special Events
- Publications
- Fundraising
- Promotion and Communication
- Logistics, Administration & Personnel
- Evaluation
Step 2: Research
If you already have activity ideas for your anniversary campaign, write them down, put them in a box, and seal it. Don’t peek until you’ve reviewed the big picture.
Research and prepare a written summary of your organization’s:
- Overall objectives and programs
- Development history, opportunities, and constraints
- Available human and financial resources
Include an assessment of potential market response to the campaign – what kinds of events would be popular with your constituencies, and how much income you can expect to secure through contributions, sponsorships, ticket sales, and other forms – and review similar organizations’ activities and achievements, as well as your own organization’s track record with events and celebrations. Seek input from past, current, and potential participants to ensure accurate and insightful information.
Step 3: Set Objectives
Use your research findings to draft a written, prioritized, and measurable objectives statement.
Include SMART (specific, measurable, achievable (or attainable), relevant, and time-bound) campaign objectives covering fundraising, promotion, the organization’s programs, enlistment, recognition, morale, and any other relevant categories.
Identify a PRIMARY objective for the entire campaign. You should have at least five objectives for the campaign, but it’s important to know which one is the most essential. For many organizations, fundraising will be number one, but for your organization there may be other areas that are more important, and fundraising may not even be relevant.
Review and revise this statement with your steering committee as needed. Keep it at the top of every meeting agenda, and update it as circumstances change. Anniversary special events have a way of becoming the tail that wags the organizational dog, taking on a life of their own but losing sight of goals and priorities. How many times have you heard “we had a great fundraising event, although we didn’t end up raising money…”
Step 4: Select Activities
Brainstorm a list of potential activities that could fulfill your campaign objectives. Common anniversary activities include:
- Award ceremonies
- Conferences
- Fairs or festivals
- Galas
- House parties and cultivation events
- Journals and/or Organization Histories
- Performances
- Open houses
- Receptions
Write a brief description for each potential campaign component, detailing what it involves, who participates, when and where it occurs, what resources are required, and which objective or objectives it will serve.
Work with your steering committee to select a combination of activities that best fulfill your objectives. Schedule them strategically—allowing ample preparation time, avoiding conflicts with holidays or major events, and ensuring facility availability. Consider how they fit together as an overall campaign, perhaps starting with smaller cultivation events and building towards a larger final celebration.
If fundraising is your principal objective, consider whether the organization has access to potential honorees, such as prominent business leaders, whose involvement will motivate donations and other support for the campaign. The most prominent and productive honorees are often booked months or more in advance for larger events.
Prepare an overall work plan headed with the overall SMART objectives as well as SMART objectives for each activity and including specific tasks, assigned responsibilities, and start and finish dates. Update and revise this periodically, perhaps weekly.
Step 5: Prepare a Budget
Prepare a detailed budget for the entire campaign and for each individual activity, itemizing all expected revenue and expenses. Use it to assess financial benefits and risks, ensure consistency with the organization’s goals, and confirm that the risk level is acceptable. Be realistic about the cost of using paid staff time to support the campaign – that indirect cost is still a cost.
Revisit and revise the budget periodically throughout the campaign to stay aligned with financial realities as they emerge.
Step 6: Friend-Raise
Since people give to people—friends give to friends, and peers give to peers—build a team who can reach your organization’s network and help expand it with their personal connections.
In addition to your steering committee, form an honorary committee of people willing to contribute, fundraise, volunteer, and help in other ways. The invitation should make clear this is an honorary, ad hoc group that will not be meeting and that will have no fiduciary responsibilities. Rather, it’s a roster of people who are recognized as the organization’s “family.” Honorary committee members can contribute in many ways – with hands-on “asks”, making connections, or sometimes mainly by lending their prominent names to provide gravitas or buzz to the campaign or event.
Create special anniversary branding and promotional materials featuring your committee lists. Keep members engaged with regular updates and requests for help, using recognition as motivation.
Step 7: Fundraise
Start by reviewing your organization’s fundraising history and the campaign’s objectives.
Analyze fundraising options for each activity, considering:
- Sources of contributions (board, suppliers, business executives, volunteers)
- Types of contributions (sponsorships, ticket sales, journal acknowledgments, in-kind gifts, auction items)
Select sources most likely to respond and match them with appropriate giving opportunities.
Encourage participation by recognizing and honoring major donors, involving board and staff in outreach, and ensuring all appeals align with your objectives.
Step 8: Program
Now, finally, the fun part. In this step, if you have decided to organize a gala, you can finally choose the gala menu! Whatever events and activities you’ve decided on, this is the stage at which many more people get interested, and giving your committee members the opportunity to participate in identifying and choosing these elements will be the most enjoyable and engaging part for them.
When planning the anniversary program, evaluate all options—venues, catering, entertainment, speakers, decorations, and vendors—based on:
- Market appeal
- Cost-effectiveness
- Alignment with campaign objectives
Keep it simple. A few well-executed elements can be far more effective than an overcomplicated event. Make sure your event includes plenty of time for folks to mingle and talk up your cause. And keep any speeches and presentations crisp and entertaining. Above all, do NOT let Ted talk, because Ted talks are worse even than TED Talks.
Step 9: Promote and Market
Revisit your promotional goals and identify:
- Primary target audiences
- Benefits and experiences you’ll offer
Develop a theme that communicates how to participate in the anniversary.Combine word-of-mouth outreach (the most effective and low-cost approach) with printed materials, displays, social media, earned media, and, if cost-effective, advertising. Ask everyone involved to personally invite friends and colleagues. Test and evaluate promotional tactics on a small scale before rollout.
Keep track of how participants learned about the campaign to measure effectiveness and improve future outreach.
Step 10: Execute
Now to make it all happen! To coordinate logistics and operations:
- Periodically update workplans.
- Assign tasks based on skill and availability.
- Set up and use a communications platform to ensure everyone involved is kept up to date and, most importantly, periodically reminded of what they’ve committed to do.
- Double-check every detail
- Have contingency plans in place for everything, such as knowing what you’ll do if weather makes an activity impossible or if any team member is unable to show up.
- Review anniversary-related legal, financial, and insurance matters with trusted professionals.
- And here’s an essential one that is sometimes overlooked: Recognize and appreciate everyone involved at some point in the campaign – enthusiasm and gratitude are the best motivators, but inadvertently leaving someone out is the surest way to alienate supporters.
- At live events, focus on thanking the key people: honorees, major donors, elected officials who are present, and key categories of people – make sure to thank staff, volunteers, and all committees, at least collectively. If you mention ANY names from the podium, just know EVERYONE there will be waiting to hear their name next!
- Also prepare a more comprehensive thank you list to post on your website and include in any printed materials for the campaign or distributed at anniversary events. This will save a lot of angst – remember that no matter how much time you spend on designing a beautiful journal or invitation, the first thing most people will do is look for their name!
Step 11: Evaluate
At the anniversary campaign’s end (but NOT in the middle of the gala, when everyone will want to have the “how are we doing?” chats), assess the overall results and those of each activity. Prepare a comparison chart listing:
- Original Objectives
- Actual results
- Analysis
Discuss findings with the steering committee and use the evaluation to report to leadership and funders, plan future activities, and identify new development opportunities.
Finally
Follow these steps, and you can look forward to a meaningful and successful anniversary campaign.
Remember—the most important measure of success is not how much fun people had or how great the food was, but how the campaign’s outcomes compared to the original objectives. If it exceeds those objectives, you and your organization will truly have something worth celebrating.
About Ted Geier
Ted is a lifelong New Yorker and serial social entrepreneur devoted to building the capacities of change agents to create a better world. Ted founded the nonprofit capacity-building organization Cause Effective in 1981 and led it through 1995, providing consultation and training to more than 2,000 nonprofits, publishing three books on nonprofit special events, and producing more than 500 special events, including seven annual New York Folk Festivals. He then created CineMuse, a unique model for distributing video content from BBC, Discovery, and others to museums and science centers. After the loss of his daughter in 2004, Ted and his family created LOVE, HALLIE Foundation to engage and inspire young people to create positive change in their communities and the world through activism and philanthropy.
For the past decade, Ted has served as an Affiliate Consultant with Support Center, a nonprofit similar to Cause Effective, where he provides organizational planning, board development, and resource development consulting and training to dozens of nonprofits each year. Ted has also, since August 2023, served pro-bono as Executive Director of the Workshop In Business Opportunities (WIBO), the entrepreneurial training program founded by his father in 1965.
In his spare time, Ted is an avowedly amateur writer (he claims to have written seventeen novels, but their average length is about a page each), musician, songwriter, actor, first baseman, and poker/boggle player.
