What Is A "Non Event™?
Websters defines an event as:
- something that happens : occurrence
- a noteworthy happening.
- a social occasion or activity.
- any of the contests in a program of sports.
The Charity Navigator Event Study found that in event fundraising, $1.31 is spent on expenses for every $1.00 raised. In other words, if you ran a marathon this year for a cause you believed in and raised $500 from you friends and families to help people in need, it would have done more good to take 500 x $1 bills and set them on fire on a New York street in the dead of winter to keep a few people warm than it did to "cure cancer."
Events cost money, foundations cost money, fundraising costs money, but what if you actually took a critical view of the situation and asked yourself a few simple questions? The same questions whose answers formed the ethos of Sportsgrants.
- Did you ever give to someone doing an event because of what they were doing, or was it because you knew they were putting themselves out there to help?
- If you ever fundraised by doing an event for a cause, did you ever stop to think that while organized events are fun and challenging, your fundraising dollars are putting it on. We're pretty sure you didn't send out emails telling people you were raising money to pay for the police overtime to close the intersections.
- Is there a better way?
Yes there is, and we invented it. We call it the Non Event™, and this is how it works:
- There is no event. We gather together groups of people who participate in the same activity and ask them to dedicate one day of either playing or training to a cause that the community of people in that community are passionate about.
- The Sportsgrants Non Event cuts out almost all of the traditional expenses. As opposed to a .31 loss on every fundraising $1.00, we deliver .73 of every one of your fundraising dollars right where you intended it to go, to the people who need help.
- The nature of the Non Event allows Sportsgrants itself to operate at a tiny fraction of the scale of Foundations delivering far less in services.
We've raised $8 million in four years, never with a staff of more than three people and delivered more than $7.2 million directly to programs and services.
