advertising calendar budget template excel

Advertising calendar budget template excel how to#

Fight the urge to make worst case your base case scenario. Take your benchmark data and haircut it by 10%-20%. Lastly, if you have to - or want to - be conservative, try to be reasonably so. Look for events with the same distance, location and size, and prefer data from recent events over data from older ones, as the industry keeps evolving and data from a race ten years ago may not provide the right indicators for your race. To get a handle on participation in the absence of any data from previous events, try benchmarking your event against similar events in their first year. Instead, you should aim for realistic estimates. That is definitely preferable to being too aggressive with your participation estimates, but it does risk putting you off the whole thing, if your conservative participation numbers end up being too low. erring on the side of caution) to avoid downward adjustments as actual participant numbers come in. Get this wrong and you're in for a bumpy ride.īecause participation is such a key variable to building any race budget, many people like to recommend using a conservative number (i.e.

If you are planning a new race - or even if you're not - you should be particularly careful about estimating things like participation, which feed into just about every line item of your race budget.

Advertising calendar budget template excel how to#

Learning how to handle the intrinsic uncertainties in building a race budget is key to avoiding disasters down the line. With all that in mind, let's take a look at some important challenges you'll face during the budgeting process.

Whatever your plan, make sure you know how you will make money from your race and how many participants you will need at a minimum to make money or break even. Perhaps you plan to subsidize some of these costs through sponsorship. Your participants will want their money's worth, which means you'll end up spending a big chunk of their entry fee on swag, event safety, staff and the overall race experience. Make sure what's in your head goes in your plan and put down even the most obvious budget item, however small in value. Obscuring or missing items in your plan is a slippery slope that ends in disaster. Make a point of updating both as you collect more quotes and get a better handle on registrations, even if they don't always turn out the way you expected. But do try to be honest with yourself when estimating costs and revenues. You want to make your race work, so you might be tempted to make some optimistic assumptions about your budget! It's understandable. Make sure you are clear about the correct way to account for all budget items before you begin, if you want to avoid unpleasant surprises. In some cases, how you account for things like in-kind sponsorship, some expenses and your overall profit will depend on whether you organize your event under a nonprofit, charity or private company. Understand how your legal structure will affect your accounting.There are some important rules to keep in mind as you prepare to write your race budget: We are soon going to be releasing our awesome Budget Builder tool! Join our early-user test group Before you begin