The Day After Your Gala — What Happens Next?
You’ve been working for months and the day of your gala arrives. It goes spectacularly: all your guests arrive as planned, sit in their perfectly assigned seats, enjoy their meal, and everyone gives to the pledge appeal. Congratulations! Hopefully a weight has been lifted from your shoulders and that knot that’s been in your stomach for the last week and a half has started to unwind, but the work is far from over.
Here are four tasks you should add to your day-after-the-gala checklist:
Say Thank You. The first 24 hours after a donor makes a gift is your prime window for making them feel appreciated for their support. The difference between your individual giving program and your gala is that at your gala, potentially hundreds of people showed you their support all in one evening. Even if you’ve already thanked your ticket and table-buyers individually along the way, set up some messaging to go to all your gala attendees that thanks them for being with you last night. Let them know that by showing up to celebrate, they’ve made themselves counted among your advocates and supporters, and that you value their contributions to your work.
Double Check Your Work. If you collected pledge cards last night, go through your entire stack again to make sure you’ve correctly sorted out the filled cards from the blanks (don’t be that organization that accidentally misses a $5,000 pledge!) and tallied your numbers so that you can report back to your staff, leadership, and potentially even your audience on how you did.
Aggregate your notes. Review your list of attendees with your entire team (including your senior staff!) to get everyone’s notes on the conversations they had with donors and their guests the night before, especially while those conversations are still fresh in their heads. Make sure to take notes and upload them to your CRM for reference later.
Turn your notes into an action plan. Okay, so this one doesn’t have to happen the next day, but don’t let it slip through the cracks! In reviewing your notes on the donors and guests who attended your gala, you may decide that some of them are likely to only ever engage with your gala, and that’s fine, but some of them might be ripe for deeper engagement with the organization. Go through your lists to formulate next steps for those donors – maybe they need to be invited for a 1-on-1 coffee meeting, or a site visit to one of your programs, or another event that you are organizing. Perhaps your next step is to do some more research on the person so that you can better strategize about what comes after that. Whatever the plan, give it a deadline and assign it to a team member to create accountability for getting it done.
Of course, we all know that the scenario above never happens—even when galas go spectacularly, people show up (or don’t show up) unexpectedly, one of your vendors has a miscommunication or makes an error, or something else in your plan goes slightly awry. The days following your event are also the time for a post-mortem on the logistics and the sales process. What worked, what didn’t work, and what do you want to try differently next time? And don’t forget, depending on the popularity of your venue, this might also be the time to start looking at dates for next year!