Will you donate your booth?

Will you donate your booth?

We’ve all had the call, or more likely the email, “I’m looking for someone to donate their services for lots of great exposure…”

If only “exposure” paid the bills. My typical thought is always something along the lines of “That’s a great idea, and actually I’m looking for someone to call everyone in town to see who needs a photo booth, whaddaya say? I can’t afford to pay someone for this, but it’ll be great exposure for you! Just think of all the people you’ll talk to, surely many of them will be in need of your services!” or my back up, “If the exposure we’re going to get is going to be so amazing, I’ll tell ya what. You pay full price and for every person at your event that books, I’ll pass all the profits on to you. No? But what about the exposure? You trust the exposure, don’t you?”

Well, let’s face it… exposure is a hit or a miss. We all know it depends on the event.

With photo booths there are many different ways you can advertise with the booth. From your contact information on the print, the text/email from the social stand, banners, etc.

We came up with a great practice in our company we came up with a great way for the non-profit organization to make extra money from our booths. Now before going further with the story I will make this super clear, “Pay per pic NEVER works.”

Most of the non-profits organizations have something in common they sell sponsorship opportunities on their advertising and the back of t-shirts. Take advantage of this!

I use to work in advertising at a local newspaper in Mount Pleasant, TX. We had two different rate structures. We would have one rate for a for profit and another rate for a non-profit organization. This is exactly the practice that we follow in my company. It’s roughly about $95 cheaper than what my normal rate is.

We have had major success with this sponsorship practice! We had a non-profit use our booth and went by our suggestions of advertising sales built into their sponsorship packet. They paid us our rate of X amount. They were able to profit an additional $1600.00 over the top of what they paid!

They quickly learned that exposure doesn’t work for us. With this one client we were able to gain another few clients by word of mouth of this practice! Don’t forget that in the service industry that WOM (Word of Mouth) is the best form of advertising.

On a completely different note, you can always use exposure to your advantage with your vendors. Use it at your local networking chapter to show your vendors what you can do.  We all know that our venues, photographers, DJs, PR agencies, and so on are our best form of advertising.

Now if you have a non-profit that is dear to your heart it is perfectly OK to donate your booth for your own piece of mind!