Logbook Entry: List consideration for pricing your product. Consider promotional activity and discounts. When, where, and how will these be implemented? How does “place” influence pricing decisions?
This is definitely a question we should have considered before marketing the event this year. In past years, the price has been a $5 entrance fee that includes 2 drink tokens and food. However, we had a higher fundraising goal this year. After going over the numbers, I realized that we’re probably not going to hit our goal if people don’t either buy a lot of alcohol or spend at least $20 on each art piece. So, we decided to make the entrance fee just include 1 drink ticket. However, we had our event last night and while it was fairly successful (150 people attended, around 70 artworks sold, good reviews), we did not meet our fundraising goal.
I believe part of this is due to the nature of the event. There’s a limit to how much it can grow and how much people are willing to bid on art. However, I did learn last night that $4 was too much to charge for beer. Halfway through the night we realized that we weren’t selling that much alcohol, so we cut the price in half to $2. Though I think it was too late and maybe too cheap. Therefore, I think $3 would have been the perfect price. Cheaper than your regular bar, but still brings in revenue.
One thing we discussed was raising the entrance fee for next year. I’m thinking $8, although I don’t know if that would be too high. Danielle suggested we could sell pre-sale tickets for $5 and charge $8 at the door. Although collecting $8 is always difficult when you are a cash only venue. We need to invest in getting a credit card option for next year. People would be willing to bid a lot more if their bid was not dependent on the cash they had on them.
Overall, if we want to raise more money, we will have to change some pricing. The places we have the event at often limit the number of people allowed in the building to 100, so we can’t increase the attendance, but we could charge more to attend. Through the question still remains: how much to charge at the door? Or should we make money another way?