Charity golf tournaments are a great thing: a lot of people get involved with good causes and raise tons of money. They can also be very long days for organizers, volunteers, and players. By the time registration starts at say 11 AM some of the people have been there for an hour or two. Then you’ve got that registration period, five hours on the course (we always want less, but most tournaments some group is out there that long), cocktail hour, followed by awards and dinner. When it’s all said and done, you could be there until 8 PM – I’ve seen it!

Today it’s shorting that awards section we’ll focus on. This is obviously a very important part of the event: it’s your chance to thank your sponsors, the people that came out to volunteer and play, and to really solidify the charity with the audience. Here are some tips to save some time without sacrificing any of the things you need to get done:

• If you’re fortunate, you’ve got a LOT of raffle prizes to give away. That’s great! Have volunteers pick the raffle tickets and attach them to the prizes, then let people come up and match their own tickets to take their prize. You can hold back a handful of your big ticket items to raffle “live” but players will thank you for doing it this way!
• Limit the speeches. One representative of the charity and the title sponsor should speak, it’s expected. But anymore than that and people stop listening. It’s actually more effective to limit the number and focus on the message.
• Be prepared! If you’re doing live raffles or awards presentations have someone there helping the speaker hand out the items. Have an agenda to things keep rolling along.

What great (or not so great) things have you seen done?

Categories: Tournament Tips

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 8:11 AM and is filed under Tournament Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.