Masterclass 2: Lesson 5 of 5
Prioritize and accept
If you can’t afford it all, or if the partner provided a range of options from low to high, it warrants a final conversation to pare things down.
Just as in the narrowing phase, tell your event your partner what you want and have them do the editing. For example, you can say, “I like the high version, but need it at the middle budget option for stage platforms, what’s the in-between?” This should feel collaborative. To end this course where we began, this is not a contest of wills. You don’t want it to feel like budget battleship any more than they do.
Also, remember to think of your attendee and their experience. Think about your rubric for measuring success. Do you feel confident this proposal will achieve that?
Use the RFP template we’ve offered throughout this course to get your head start on prioritizing what matters.
Download your RFP template
We’ve rewritten the standard one to help you get more of what you want.
Let’s review the highlights (save this lesson):
1. Prepare Less
Want to know if you’ve got a partner who’ll need to be managed, or who’ll manage you? Simply ask, “What do you need from me to start?” If they leap into the details, they are tactical, not strategic.
The best and most helpful thing you can offer them is quite simple: A story.
Fundraiser Story
Seed of an idea
We hold a fundraiser to fight animal cruelty and we know our audience loves their pets, so we’re thinking about having a dog be the cohost to enliven everything and provide comic relief.
a problem statement
The donors who support our animal cruelty nonprofit are hungry for something new and keep attending the same old galas—including ours, year to year.
“If you want your event vendor to pour all their creativity into the pitch and inform you of things you’ve never thought of, just ask them, what’s your process for that?”
2. Say no to budget battleship
You don’t have to share your budget. But then you’re locked in a regrettable game of budget battleship, each guessing and the other shouting “Miss!, Miss! Hit!” Extend the trust you would to a teammate. Give them a number so they can help you plan.
Doing so unlocks all their creativity and a far more effective brief.
If you don’t give your events partner a budget number, they can’t call their people, and you’re locked in a terrible game of ‘budget battleship.’”
3. Dream together
Once you have a budget number, lock it away somewhere and dream big. Some of the best ideas we ever thought up were things people laughed at and believed were impossible, but that spark was proof there was something there—and we found an economical way to do it. Then it blew people away.
Dream like there are no constraints, in a meeting where there are no bad ideas.
“Ask your events partner to explain your dream/concept back to you. It’s the only way to know if they truly understood.”
4. Narrow it down
With your fully fleshed-out vision, invite your partner to concept it out into a proposal. Leave them free to complete it as they please, and judge that proposal based on the goals you set out at the start. The question isn’t, “Does this look like what I asked for?” It’s, “Does this achieve what I’d hoped for my attendees?”
This approach allows you to harness vastly more creativity from your partner’s team.
“Think of the proposal not as a list of products but as a carefully interwoven web of interrelated components. It is fragile, and the easiest way to change it is to tell the partner your needs and have them adjust.”
5. Prioritize and accept
If you followed all the steps so far, you should have a proposal or a range of proposals and now you can pair them down, if needed. But maintain your focus on the attendee experience and let your partner do the cutting. Tell them your constraints, not what to do, so they can preserve that delicate, interconnected web of dependencies, and ensure it goes off as planned.
With that, you’ve completed the course Budget Battleship. If you found this useful, please share it with your team or someone who you know would find it valuable.
In the converge phase, get realistic
If you’ve followed all the steps in this course correctly—prepared less, rebuffed budget battleship by offering a number, dreamt together, and now, allowed that partner to craft a proposal, you should have something that fulfills the spirit of your request and costs what you thought. Maybe even with an exciting extra something tossed in.
From there, you can discuss and adjust. But do the telling and let them do the editing. Otherwise, it’s your attendees who’ll suffer.
