How to sell charity event tickets

JohalaReewi

A charity I am involved with has a disco coming up and to date, ticket sales are poor. I know times are hard but we are finding it difficult to sell tickets. We have got loads of donated raffle prizes (really good ones) but as things stand, there will be nobody to win them apart from us! We have done the local papers and put up posters etc. Anyone got any more tips?

Savvy_Sue

Personal contact. Everyone you know has to be invited, and they have to invite everyone they know, and so on!

But also people often don't want to commit in advance. When we ran an auction for the first time, we were reducing the catering because we hadn't sold many tickets. Then on the night quite a few people turned up expecting to be able to buy tickets there and then, and we'd under-catered.

So you MAY find you make more sales on the door?

JohalaReewi

We have done the personal contact bit too (and contacts of contacts) and facebook (they must be getting fed up with us LOL). A lot of people are at weddings, holidays, etc. so it looks like we picked a bad day.

We are hoping that there will be door sales. But of course, the caterers want to know the numbers before the event, so we have to take a punt on the likely number of door sales. Given that advance sales are not brilliant we are kind of thinking door sales will be too so don't want to spend too much on extra food if nobody extra is going to turn up. On the other hand, if there isn't enough food and lots of extra people turn up....

MrsManda

When do the caterers need to know numbers? Can you convince them to set the deadline only the day or two before the event date?

You said you've done personal contacts, have people spoken to their friends and contacts or have they relied on posters and text messages? it's a lot harder to turn someone down face to face.

Ask your local radio station whether they can advertise it in the week leading up to the event.

How can people get tickets? Is it easy for them to do?

Where have you put up posters?

Is the charity a national or local charity? do they have a newsletter which they can advertise the event in?