Event Costing

1.34 Event Costing - Ticket costs and quotas

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Tickets, being a source of revenue from the event; need to be priced at the right rates so that they attract a larger audience and make up a good chunky profit for you.

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1- There are a number of tools that you can use to set the ticket quotas and price-points for your event. Some of it requires researching on the prices and expectations of similar events. Refer to ticketmaster.com for similar events and ticket exchange rates.

2- You can also refer to TicketLeap.com to see the rates of similar events and to decide whether you would want to use it to sell your tickets as well. Also, you will have to decide your ticket types (e.g. front row seats vs back seats etc) and price them accordingly.

3- Once you have researched on the prices of similar event tickets, measure the likely attendance number for your event. How many people are you expecting to turn up based on the opt-in forms on your event page and on actual RSVPs. You can use EmailLabs.com for optimized email opt-in pages.

4- Once you have the ticket prices figured out, add the expected ticket revenues and costs into your overall event cost sheets. Use docs.google.com to go to the spreadsheets of the event expenses. Calculate your break-even cost per ticket type along with your desired margins.

5- Before locking down your ticket prices and quotas, do a thorough calculation of its impact on the profitability of the event. If small changes in ticket pricing have major effects in the profits, then you need to be careful before you lock down the rates. Go to MarcommWise.com to check out your marketing profitability calculators.

1.33 Event Costing - Social marketing budget

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Although most social media platforms are free, you still need to plan out a budget for online social media marketing and advertising for your event.

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1- If you plan to market your website on Facebook social adds (check your targeted audiences use it first), then you can go in and check out their advertising options, if you go through the process of setting up an add it filters the exact number of people they have on data base within your niche & region. It also tells you how much you need to pay for the clicks. Simply go to facebook.com/ads/ to find out more to determine the cost of attracting this traffic.

2- Most internet users spend a considerable amount of their time finding information on search engines. If you are planning on drawing attention to a specific audiences using adwords.google.com, then do take a look at their advertising platform before deciding on the amount of money that you need to put aside for it.

3- Advertising aside, if you are planning on leveraging the power of online networks, then you you will need to be active on most social networking sites and also the blogosphere on the whole. If you can’t find enough time to allocate on social media marketing, why don’t you get a team on board to split up the work for you. Hiring teams from across the globe is as simple as going online and finding the perfect match - try using elance.com to estimate the costs of blog writers, SEO experts or new media marketers.

4-To integrate all of your social presences on different platforms, you may have to procure certain online applications to help execute your social media marketing strategy. I would suggest you to add these tools to your budget as well so as to keep your cost estimates as realistic and achievable as possible. An important social media expense to jot down at this stage is the cost of setting up a reliable auto responder services for managing your prospect lists. Aweber.com costs approximately $19/month.

5- When calculating your advertising budgets, its good to see the impact that it can have on your overall ROI calculations and event profitability. We use seochat.com to calculate our event’s ROI based on the estimated online advertising costs.

1.32 Event Costing - Vendor cost estimates

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Vendor costs constitute the basic expenses in your financial sheets. Make sure you add the costs for entertainment, catering, sound, light, decor, printing and venue.

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1- Most of the costing work involves research. If you exploring different vendor options online, you can keep saving the ones that you find interesting to look into later. Theres a free scrapbook plugin for firefox users which is incredibly easy to use. All you have to do is highlight the stuff you want to save and add it to your scrapbook. You can search for the “mozilla scrapbook” plugin using Google.

2- When estimating the costs of the different vendors for your event, you can use a desktop alert widget to see the changes in rates of different vendors at “widgets.yahoo.com”.

3- If you are outsourcing part of your event team or vendors, you can check out the prevailing service rates on the online outsourcing website odesk.com. You can look for reputable service providers there and pick and choose the right vendors for your event.

4- When calculating costs of vendors, don’t forget to add the costs of managing vendor relations. These costs often go unnoticed and are difficult to record later, so its best you have them budgeted beforehand. One of them is to get yourself a good email response system to keep the vendors up to date with your event plans. MyAutoResponderpro.com is an option to work with.

5- If you are getting new vendors on the board, they may ask you for RFPs (requests for proposal) before sending you their detailed pricing structures. You can visit RFP-Template.com and download a FREE RFP templates tool kit that you can use as a baseline for creating those RFPs.

1.31 Event Costing - Preparing event expense sheet

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Preparing the numbers is one of the most important steps of event planning. Everything revolves around the budget and revenue forecasts that you build. Having the right tools in our hands to rely and depend on is crucial for preparing the event expense sheets.

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1- First of all, instead of using desktop applications for creating your spreadsheet, why don’t you try out Google’s spreadsheets at docs.google.com. Once you open it up, use the “new” option to create a spreadsheet and then later you can even share it with your team. Its great to have a common online spreadsheet which the whole team can view and update.

2- If you want a reference to work with - try using a basic event budgeting worksheet as a checklist. You can find a budget calculator at eventageous.com/planning_guides. It suggests budgets for sub-categories based on your approximate quota and estimated audiences.

3- If you’re planning smaller scale parties, do check out Evite’s Party budget calculator at “evite.com/app/party/calculator” . They suggest budgets based on the type of parties you are planning.

4- Before deciding upon how much to disburse to your event committee, refer to simplyhired.com to get an idea of where average event committee salaries are at.

5- Once you have all your basic budgets in place, try using Cvents Event Budget Management System. This budgeting tool shows planners a single and multi event analysis of budget performance and profitability. You can find it at “cvent.com/resources/event-budget-management.shtml”.