How to Maximize Your Tournament Committee for a Golf Event
Every successful golf event has a tournament committee. Your tournament committee should be made up of motivated individuals who have more than a casual interest in your cause. Seek out business people whom have contacts outside of your organization’s network, this will help to secure more sponsors.
Below are several tips for running a successful committee:
- Be selective. Don’t accept every applicant for the committee. Choose your committee members based on their network of contacts and past experience with charitable organizations.
- Before accepting an application, tell prospective members what will be expected of them. (e.g. 4 hours per month and regular, mandatory, committee meetings) You might lose a good candidate, but you will know that they would not have devoted enough time to the committee.
Also, when you are together with your committee, consider these tips as well:
- Be sure committee members understand their primary role is to help attract players and signs up sponsor. This is the priority for every committee.
- Prepare an agenda and distribute it to each committee member before meetings. Have extra copies available. This will help to keep the meetings on schedule and will keep committee members’ attention on the agenda.
- Consider more online committee meetings instead of face-to-face meeting. This will allow for more frequent communication with less stress.
- Assign definite, challenging and reasonable tasks to each committee member that will provide benefits to the golf event. Each task should be assigned with a goal and a completion date.
- When assigning tasks to committee members, emphasize the importance of their task in relation to tasks other committee members are working on.
- Committee members must be active contributors. Keep everyone involved with weekly updates.
- Recognize success. Most of your committee members (outside of staff) are volunteers so let them know that you appreciate their efforts as they bring in players and sponsors.
- List your committee members in your event materials. Some players and sponsors will support an event because they know someone on your committee.
A great golf committee makes for a great golf event so work hard to maximize their talents.
Important Tip: Hold a training session for your committee, staff and anyone promoting your event. Help them understand how to present your event to golfers and sponsor packages to potential sponsors. If you do this, you will be in the top 1% of all golf events in the U.S.!