Q: When we add hard costs and soft costs (staff time) some of our special events don’t make money at all. Do you think we should cancel them?

A: That really depends on two things: what your development staff would do with that freed up time, and how important those events are for friend raising.

Freeing up staff time is usually important because they always have more work to do than there is time available. But in this case that work should be focused on bringing in revenue in some other fashion to replace the net proceeds of the cancelled event (net proceeds being gross receipts less hard costs).

If you primarily intend the event to be a friend raiser and not a money maker, and it succeeds in doing that, meaning people introduced at that event later become contributors to your organization, perhaps you should continue to have it. If however it’s a money maker that only makes money if you don’t count the staff time element, then I suggest you cancel it.

As always, I welcome your feedback and comments.