Event Marketing: How to Successfully Promote Events, Festivals, Conventions, and Expositions

86 Chapter 4 Funding the Event Marketing Program

manipulate your budget to cover expense overages or revenue

shortfalls. A budget is fluid, but the adjustments should be made

after careful analysis of the entire project.

To help in this analysis and in developing specific budget

points for the marketing activities, there are some basic ideas that

must be kept in mind initially. First, and foremost, everything has

a price attached. Although this premise may sound elementary, it

is often the small financial details that are overlooked that will

have a huge impact on your marketing activities. Forgetting the

price of postage to mail your 5,000 invitations can quickly erode

any profit margin. Price doesn’t necessarily have to be a monetary

outlay; it could be an in-kind contribution or a barter/trade-out.

Regardless of the type of transaction, the price has a value associ-

ated with it that impacts your budget on both the revenue and the

expense sides.

The other two basic ideas to keep in mind while developing a

budget are equally important to one another: price and cost. As

you develop your budget, remember that priceis the value placed

on a good or service, while costis what you sacrifice in the future

by paying the price for a good or service today. An example would

be if an organization pays $5,000.00 (the price) for a one-time print

advertisement for an event, which may render the cost as insuffi-

cient funds to pay for radio spots in the future.

When developing the event marketing budget, there are several

major financial categories to consider:

■Advertising

■Printing

■Postage

■Public relations

■Auxiliary opportunities

■Promotional printing

Each of these categories can, in turn, have many components, as

shown in Figure 4-1. As you can see in Figure 4-1, there is over-

lap in the budget subcategories; several of the categories have

postage and creative expenses related to them. To help identify

these expenses, it is important that each category be assigned its

own account code. Figure 4-2 helps clarify expenses in terms of

category and type.