Jun

Organizing a Golf Scramble Fundraiser

Since I’m in the middle of this process right now, I figured it was a good time for this post.

Aside from the bureaucracy that your event or cause or benefit or organization must go through, here are the steps I use to duplicate Golf Scrambles over and over.

Step #1 You can’t do it all yourself. Find a small team maybe two or three others who can help. It would be best if everyone brought different personalities or skills to the table. For instance in the scramble I assist with every year, we have one person who knows a lot about food/catering and likes to hustle for door prizes and hole sponsors. We have another person who can get a lot of teams together. He has a large Rolodex and a good relationship with a lot of that Rolodex. I act as the organizer, planner, and also do my share of hustling for teams, prizes and sponsors. I also MC the event the day of.

Step #2 Pick the right course and the best date. If you pick a course and pro that is easy to work with, your scramble will go much smoother. Make sure you spot check your date with big events and other large scrambles. You’ll never steer clear of everything, but the last thing you want is to schedule it the same day as another large organization or on a major holiday weekend. If you’re looking at a weekday versus a weekend, just remember that during the week you’ll draw more business teams and serious golfers. On the weekend you’ll capture more of the family and friends crowd.

Step #3 Focus on 3 main things- Teams, Door Prizes, Hole Sponsors. I have a cookie cutter system now after 5 years. I have flyers for prospecting and each year I can just change the info. We use our website to link up the forms and to collect online registrations. We used to just get a paper form turned in. Either way will do. We have forms to track teams, hole sponsors and lots of forms for instructions on the day of the scramble.

With Teams here are my tips.

Don’t allow individuals to register as this creates a communication and logistics nightmare.
Sell 4 somes and collect the money up front, this way the team captain becomes responsible for securing his players and not you. This is especially important because players will drop and things will come up. If you don’t get the money up front; rain, a bad hair day, lack of coffee or a good show on TV could cause a team to not show up.
You can handicap of flight the event or just have each team for themselves (this is what I prefer but not every organization is the same and some will want to make it fair-life’s not fair though)

With Door Prizes here are my tips.

Make sure everyone gets one.
We like to give out gift certificates in $10 increments and restaurants are willing to give them, although golf balls, shirts and other like items work well.
Make sure they are equitable, don’t have one guy get a foursome to a nice club worth $160 and the next guy gets a mesh hat or umbrella. Since this is not based on performance I think it makes sense to make this equitable.
Offer a nice sign in exchange for a $50 to $100 donation (this depends on the price tag of your scramble- it’s just math so adjust the numbers based on your ticket price)
Door prizes are the result of walking into restaurants or businesses giving them information, following up and following up some more. It won’t just happen- trust me.

With Hole Sponsors here are some tips.

Try and engage businesses in your area. For our scramble we prospect in Middletown.
Don’t try and pit all kinds of businesses against one another. Use that as a selling point. The first widget company we get will be the last widget company we approach.
Offer signage (don’t skimp), a link on your website for a period of time and the ability to include sales literature in packets for each golfer. Be creative or encourage them to be.
Patronize your sponsors- we really believe in and live this one out. That’s probably why we get little resistance from our sponsors each year.

As a side note to these tips, I recommend developing relationships with vendors and using them each year. Sure you can always find someone cheaper, but cheaper doesn’t mean better and it doesn’t mean smoother. I don’t shop our vendors unless they give us a reason too.

Step #4 Rehearse the flow of the event in your mind and in your notes. Visualize people showing up and registering. Visualize people playing and having fun and this will help you to remember the small details that sometimes slip through the cracks.

Hit a home run, and have fun with it by all means.

Categories : Organization

2 Comments

Terry Kennedy
June 30th, 2009 at 10:27 am

This explains it very well and our scramble that you ran was a lot of fun (everybody took something home). Thanks, I know its work but you do a great job.