How to Budget a Golf Tournament
Golf tournament budgeting tools | Charity golf tournament budget template | Average cost of charity golf tournament | Budgeting for charity events
Planning a charity golf tournament is all about balancing fundraising and fun. Unfortunately, without a clear budget, even the best intentions can land in the rough.
If you’re managing a charity golf outing, or any other kind of fundraising event, you’re likely considering how to establish and maintain an effective budget.
In this article, you’ll find some examples of expenses and revenues to identify and track, as well as a fantastic automated budgeting tool to make your event management process as straightforward and streamlined as possible.
EXPENSES
An important starting point to establishing a budget is identifying your expenses. These can vary widely, from greens fees to auction items. Accounting for and categorizing expenses is a great starting point for your budgeting process, as it will effectively outline the revenue needed to turn a profit for your outing.
Registration & Promotion
From an online registration platform to printed material, consider the cost of promoting your outing.
Venue Rental
Do you plan on renting out the clubhouse after the tournament? Does your outing require you to rent the entire space?
Prizes & Gifts
Do you plan to offer your golfers incentives, check-in gifts, and/or goodie bags?
Contests & Activities
Do you plan to offer a Hole-in-One or Longest Drive competition? How are you paying for the prize when someone wins?
Tournament Swag
How much are those tournament tee shirts, golf towels, and caps costing you?
Auction & Raffle Items
Consider the cost of providing your own auction and raffle items.
Food & Beverage
Don’t forget to feed and provide drinks for your golfers!
Greens Fees
What does it cost you to get your golfers on the course to play a round?
While your own event will come with its own unique set of expenses, it’s good to assess some common expenses, and some you may not have thought about.
Once you have your expenses summarized and categorized, you’ll have a good baseline for your fundraising goal. The sum of your expenses plus the excess funds you’d like to raise will equal your overall goal for the event.
REVENUES
It’s a great idea to plan and track your streams of revenue in addition to your expenses. This will allow you to establish a goal and estimate the funds you’ll raise after covering your expenses.
The key to maximizing revenue is to ensure it exceeds your expenses. This, in essence, is a simple concept. When applied to a golf outing, ensuring solid revenue can look something like this:
Registration Fees
Charge your registrants in excess to what the greens fees cost you, since you’re trying to raise funds.
Sponsorship Packages
Offer a wide array of package options, so many different kinds of companies can consider sponsoring your event.
Auction & Raffle Tickets
By encouraging bids and offering raffle tickets for purchase, you can drum up some extra revenue in an exciting way.
Non-Golf Attendee Options
Don’t let a lack of golf prowess discourage people from supporting you. Offer dinner tickets and spectator access for a small cost.
Add-Ons
Offer exciting add-ons to boost profit and excitement for your event. Click here for some add-on inspiration for your tournament.
Merchandise
Tournament merchandise is a great way to raise extra funds and send your attendees home with a keepsake from the day of fun.
Contest Buy-Ins
Consider offering buy-ins to contests like closest to the pin, longest drive, or Beat the Pro to excite golfers and raise more funds.
Physical & Monetary Donations
Ask for in-kind donations to raffle and/or auction off, and make sure you have a platform to accept monetary donations. Consider recognizing donors online for added incentive.
By offering a wide variety of ways for attendees, registrants, and sponsors to bolster their experience at your event and contribute to your cause, you can ensure that your revenues exceed your expenses, thus maximizing your fundraising efforts!
We understand that this can be more easily said than done, which is why we’ve implemented a comprehensive and automated budgeting system for you, built directly into the BirdEase Event Management Dashboard.
There is no extra cost to use it. Simply enter your pre-existing expense and revenue sources (like listed above), and your BirdEase site will track both revenues and expenses associated with your event’s registrations, sponsorships, donations, and auction items.
BIRDEASE BUILT-IN BUDGETING SYSTEM
With BirdEase’s Budgeting Feature, event organizers like you can easily view and manage total revenue, expenses, and automatically calculate net income across all categories, from registrations to sponsorships, outright donations, auction items, and more.
You can also manually add custom income or expense items that aren’t tracked by registration (i.e. rental fees, merchandise and swag, prizes, etc.). Plus, you can assign the cost of goods to individual items, giving you a more accurate picture of your overall event profitability.
You’ll also find dedicated tabs for each attendee type—golfers, dinner guests, and even multi-sport participants—with detailed contact information, assignments, and custom data fields to make tracking your attendee turnout as easy as possible.
AFTER THE EVENT
Once your event has concluded, you can finally exhale! Planning, coordinating, and executing an event of this size is no easy task. Using the BirdEase budgeting tool, you can easily check on your overall net profit to calculate funds raised. No more juggling invoices, finding old receipts, or reaching out to anyone last-minute.
At this point, you’ll be in a great position to assess your fundraising total to your goal, gather feedback from your committee and tournament goers, and begin formulating a plan for next year. Each tournament you run will come with its own data, which should give you some great ideas for maximizing profitability for the next one.
By calculating your expenses, sources of revenue, net funds raised, and overall attendee, sponsor, and donor satisfaction, you’ll be sure to run a successful tournament year after year.
