Theatre Evening Success

by Rob Hampson
(Eston, South Africa)

As part of my fundraising campaign to attend Film School I held quite a few different fundraisers.

One of them was a theatre evening... And it was a great success!

On March the 3rd 2009, with huge help and planning from my best friend's mom, Mrs. Krause, and my own mom, I held a musical theatre fundraising evening at the Heritage Theatre in Hillcrest (Durban, South Africa).

The heritage theatre is such a great venue. Every Tuesday night they allow charities (or fundraising causes) to use their venue and entertainment to fundraise.

They provide everything, the food and the band or other entertainment (ex. Comedians). And then obviously the charity has to sell the tickets and full the venue. The charity then takes a cut of the ticket sales!

The band that played that evening was called 'The 3rd Eye' and was an old South African band from the seventies.

They certainly provided some interesting entertainment! Not to everyone's liking unfortunately, although many people did thoroughly enjoy them! (It's amazing how different people's tastes are!)

Anyways just from that one night I was able to raise R18, 690 (about $2,400). We had set a goal of R15,000 so I was over the moon happy when we counted up the final amount!

The evening also raised some great awareness for what I was trying to do as many of the people that attended were businessmen I didn't know, but who were now interested in what I was doing!

One of the most successful things of the evening was the raffle that we held.

The heritage theatre provides you with R500 and two complimentary tickets that one can use at a later show, which you can then raffle off during the evening. We added another prize of a basket of wine and eats.

When we were deciding on the cost for the raffle tickets my mom suggested that we should not make each ticket too expensive and should try go for a nice balancing number (like 10 as it can divide perfectly into any amount found on money).

She explained that tickets costing R30 will not raise you as much money as a ticket costing R10...

Reason being that someone with a R100 note would be more inclined to use the full R100 to buy 10 tickets at R10 then only be able to get 3 tickets at R30 with R10 left over. They'd probably only buy one ticket in the R30 case!

Well, she was right!!! The raffle raised way over what we were expecting from it and it really gave me that extra boost I needed from the evening!

You'll find some excellent tips on running raffles through this book.

With the raffle, the ticket sales and the few extra donations I got the evening turned out to be a really rewarding fundraiser. It was a fun, exciting and profitable evening!

It was a great success!

I'd like to give a brief thank you to Mrs. Krause whose idea it was in the first place and who without her help I would not have been able to hold the event!

To Lyle Krause, who willingly and efficiently did the Master of Ceremony duties, and to Mr. Krause for his sound advice and for having to put up with it all.

To my own mom who put in a huge amount of hard work and who has always supported me... And of course to my whole family for all their support.

And lastly to everyone who attended the evening and supported me... Thank you all very much!

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A Twist:

Another twist to this type of fundraiser could be to hold a Trivia Evening. It's a fundraiser that works exceptionally well and is enjoyable for everyone.

You'll need to put a questionaire pack together and you can do that easily through this Wizard.

You'll also get an excellent advisory pack to help you run the evening.