Events: Number of Invites = Number of Tickets Sold

Robin Evans 3

I have a general special event question.  If your organization does special events that you send invitations for in hopes that people will buy tickets, do you have a guideline for rate of return on invites sent vs tickets purchased?  For example, if you want to sell 125 tickets, how many invitations do you send, 1,000, 1,250, 2,000? 


All thoughts welcome.


Robin Evans

Director of Donor Stewarship

Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona

Angie Stumpo

We don't really have a guideline for event invites because most of our event tickets are sold online or through sponsorships. The invite itself is more of a formaility and will bring in a small number of ticket purchasers, but not enough to warrant tracking this info. As far as invite lists, we will pull past event attendees.

Tom Klimchak

We've been running a number of events for years and we've kind of put together a general rule-of-thumb for certain events.  For our higher-end "printed invitation" events we kind of expect a 7% - 10% response rate.  (3,000 invites, 300 tickets sold)...  


For any other event (lower price point, email invitation only) we will usually get a .05% to 3% return, though its dependent on the event. (3,000 invites, about 30 tickets sold)


Example: Our Alumni Wine Tasting and our Alumni Beer Tasting events have a bit of a following and often sell out. But some of the newer events we're trying to establish for alumni still have seats available.  


For what it's worth:  We have experimented with sending ONLY email invitation vs sending ONLY printed invitations for a few small events and the response rate has, generally, been similar.

 

Robin Evans:

I have a general special event question.  If your organization does special events that you send invitations for in hopes that people will buy tickets, do you have a guideline for rate of return on invites sent vs tickets purchased?  For example, if you want to sell 125 tickets, how many invitations do you send, 1,000, 1,250, 2,000? 


All thoughts welcome.


Robin Evans

Director of Donor Stewarship

Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona