How to be the treasurer for a table quiz

What does a treasurer do?

If you are the treasurer for an organisation that is running a table quiz - or have been asked to organise the finances for a one-off quiz - then your role is to look after the money-management issues, including:

• Budgeting
• Controlling and paying bills / expenses
• Controlling things that might go wrong and lead to unexpected expenses
• Managing the cash / income
• Keeping financial records

Skills

Knowledge, skills and attributes needed to be a good treasurer include:

• Numeracy
• Knowledge about managing finances - budgeting, managing cash, producing reports
• Knowledge of the risks of running quizzes, and the types of insurance available
• Knowledge of any laws that apply to running table-quizzes and other fundraising events in your country (eg limits on one-off raffles, prize amounts, sales tax)
• Well-organized
• Attention to detail

Duties

The specific duties of the treasurer need to be agreed with the other quiz-organizers.   But they may include:

Helping to define the financial goals or objectives of the table quiz, ie is it about

• Raising money (for your own organisation or for someone else), or
• Break-even (ie the costs = the spending), or
• Holding a successful event within a certain budget.

Preparing a budget - and keep it updated as the plans for the event change.

Thinking about the risks that you will have, get quotes and buy any insurance that the organisation needs to run the event. For example, in some countries, it is essential to have public liability insurance for any event you hold - and even if this is in place for your regular operations, you may need to extend it to cover one-off events like a quiz-night.

Getting sponsorship, or supporting other people who may be doing this.

Organising how the cash from the quiz (ticket sales, sponsorship, etc) will be managed.

Organizing a "float" of cash that is used to give people change if there are ticket sales at the door.

Receiving any bills associated with the event (eg for room / venue hire, publicity, photocopying answer sheets) - and paying them as authorized.

Organizing cash-flow, ie a way of paying any bills which need to be settled before there is any income from the quiz.

Keeping records of all money that comes in or is spent.

Preparing a report showing where the money came from, and what it was spent on, and present it to the organizer etc as required.

Submitting the quiz accounts to the auditors (if your quiz is being audited), and do what they say if changes are recommended for future quizzes.

Filing any insurance claims if there is a problem at the event.

Hints and tips for being the treasuer

For a very large event, you may need a line of credit from a bank or similar: this will generally require you to do a business plan and cashflow projection.

Looking after the income and bills will be a lot easier if there is an existing bank account that can be used. But unless someone is running the quiz as their own private initiative, this should not be an individual person's account. If necessary, partner with a club, non-profit organisation - or even a business - that can provide administrative and "back office" support for the quiz. Or if the quiz is going to be a regular event, set up an organisation that looks after the management and open a bank account in the name of this organisation. (Usually the bank will want to know the names of the chairman, secretary and treasurer, as well of details of the legal status, eg constitution or incorporation statement.)

If the quiz is simply one event that your existing club runs, then it may be as simple as deciding whether you want to set up a new account code just for the table-quiz, or if it is just going to be managed as part of your on-going activities. Remember that if you don't have a specific account-code, then it may be harder to track exactly how well the quiz is doing.

Think about security on the night: if most of your ticket sales are at the door, then you may have a very large amount of cash that needs to be looked after until it can be banked.

If there are advance ticket sales, make sure you have a way of tracking who is selling the tickets, and checking that the cash they hand over matches the number of tickets sold.

Make sure that you are involved in discussions about prizes: if the quiz-aim is to break even, then it is tempting to hand over the takings minus expenses in prize money. But if you do this, then you need to make sure that there are no unexpected expenses, especially ones that you don't know about until later.

How to prepare a budget for your table quiz

Why you need a budget

If you are organising a table-quiz, then it is very helpful to understand how the money will work:

• How much it will cost to run the quiz
• How much income you are likely to get from it, 
• How much profit you expect to make or funds you hope to raise.

You cannot be sure what any of these numbers will be until the quiz has happened, because there may things that might vary - eg if it's raining your attendance may be lower than you hoped for.

But in the same way that it's good to write down how you plan to run the quiz (so you can see any potential problems and take action to stop them happening), it's also good to write down how much money you expect to spend, and make, so you can change your plans and do things differently if your quiz might not meet your goals.

This written-down  statement of how much you expect the quiz to cost, and how much money you expect to make is called a budget.

And budgeting is all about making plans, guessing how much they will cost and how much money you will make, and making sure that you are happy-enough with the result.

How complicated should a charity-quiz budget be?

The short answer is "just detailed enough so that you understand what might happen, and can change your plans to adapt".

If you regularly run a quiz, then you probably to have a good understanding of the likely costs and income: you will be able to "balance your budget", ie make sure that your income and expenses line up, without much trouble.   You might not even need to do a separate budget for each event.

But if you are new to running table-quizzes, or you are running an event that is a lot bigger or more complicated than you are used to, then it is good to spend more time investigating likely costs and estimating the overall money.

How to make a budget for your quiz

1. Make, or find out about, the plan for how the quiz will be organised.
   
2. Using the plan, make a best-guess about what you will have to pay for, and how much each thing will cost (see "What to budget for" for hints about this).
3. Make a best-guess about how much income you are likely to get.
4. Review your estimates, to make sure you haven't forgotten anything important or large
5. Add up the total income (what you will make) and expenses (what you will have to pay for), and work the difference.
   
6. Think about the results. If there is a problem then review your plans and repeat steps 2-5.
   Do this over and over again, until you have a plan that you and your team are happy to carry out, and a realistic budget.
   If you are in a very formal situation, then you might even want to get the manager, committee or other officials to formally approve your budget.

How to get the best-guesses about what things will cost

When you start planning to host a quiz, you don't know what things will cost, or what you will need to pay for vs what people will lend or donote. But to get an idea of whether your plans are realistic, you need to make some estimates - which I like to call "best guesses".

To start with, these won't be very good: you probably have no idea what it will cost to hire a hall, print posters, rent a PA system etc. So the first step is to either make an outright guess or - better still - to ask someone who's done something similar for a rough idea about what things cost.

Then, you work on your plans for the quiz, you can get better information by asking people who know, and update your budget with this.

For example:

• You know you will need some posters.
• You have no idea what it will cost to make them, so put $100 into the budget initially.
• Then you talk to Bob who did the publicity for last year's quiz. He tells you that posters cost $200 last year. So you update the budget - and realise that this could cause a problem because you want to charge a lower entry fee this year.
• So you talk to the organizer, who introduces you to Sally who offers to design the posers for free, and says that she can get 30 of them printed for $1 each, and that her friend will put them up around town for $20. So you update your budget to $30 + $20 = $50 for posters.

You will have to update your budget three times.   But each time, the information gets better, so you can be more confident that it will be "about right" on the day.

How to use your budget

Preparing a budget that everyone is happy with is the first step in managing the finances for your table quiz. It's important - but it's not the end of the story.

Next, you have to keep an eye on what happens while the quiz preparations happen.

• How much will things actually cost?
• Do any unexpected costs happen?
• Are the bills being paid?
• Is the sponsorship that you expected to get coming in?

If anything happens that is very different from what you expected, then you might have to review the budget yet again.     Just remember - this is a good thing:  you can use your budget as a tool to keep checking that you will meet the goals of your quiz, no matter how the plans change.

What to budget for

Expenses

What your quiz will cost to run depends on how it is organised, what facilities the venue has, what supplies you need and what you have to pay people to do: even if you have a team of volunteers, you probably need to pay for the materials that they use.

Some things  you might need to budget for are:

• Room hire / rental (if you have to pay to use the location where the quiz is held)
• Quiz-master fees (if you are using a professional quiz-organisign company)
• Prizes
• Public liability insurance
• Refreshments / catering
• Poster design and printing
• Advertising (newspapers etc)
• Photocopying / printing (answer sheets, table number, copies of the questions etc)
• Wages (if you have to hire staff to run the quiz)
• Equipment hire (if you have to rent a sound system or similar)
• Gifts / presentations (if you have volunteers, you may want to acknowledge their help)
• Venue costs (eg rubbish removal, electricity meter, etc)
• Other expenses - you need a category to pick up the extras that don't warrany a category of their own - eg pencils
  
• Contingency - if you think there's a chance that something will go wrong, or that some extra expense will some up late in the process (perhaps after you have paid deposits for other things so cannot change your plans) then you might want to budget for this too.

Income

How much money you take in at a quiz depends on how many people come - and what extra things you do.  In general, your income is likely to come from:

• Entry fees (may be per table or per participant)
• Raffle tickets
• Sponsorship
• Donations

How to raise money at a table quiz

If a goal of your table quiz is to raise funds, then there are thee main approaches you can follow:

• Minimising your expenses
• Maximising attendance
• Getting extra contributions on top of the entry fee.

Pick any approach, or a combination of all three.

Minimising expenses

Controlling the costs of running your quiz can be one of the easiest ways of raising funds from it, especially if you have a team of willing volunteers, because money that is not spent running the quiz is available for the cause you are fundraising for.

Some ideas for keeping the costs down:

• Choose cheaper prizes - possibly even a certificate of achievement. (Use this approach carefully - in some cultures, it may reduce the number of people who are willing to attend your next quiz).

• Use volunteers instead of professional quiz-organizers. If you don't have enough volunteers, look for people who may be looking to get some work experience - eg people studying event management, people who are looking for a job, immigrants who want to practise their language skills or young people who are being challenged to do a community-service project.

• Look for sponsorship for photocopying answer-sheets and printing posters, flyers etc. Some printing companies may offer a reduced rate if they can place advertising in your promotions materials. Or you may have contact in a local businesses who are willing to do some photocopying for free.

• Choose cheaper catering options (again, be careful with this because it can backfire for both on-the-night extra fundraising and for future attendance - but chosen carefully, non-brand-name items often offer very good value.

Maximising attendance

The most obvious way to make money from a table-quiz is the entrance fee:  and the more people who attend, the more money you will make.

Some things you can to do to get more people to attend include:

• Working very hard on publicity, making sure that posters etc are widely distributed, and that you give  plenty of personal contact/invitations.

• Ask the organisation that you are fund-raising for to help: they may have a network of friends and contacts who would be happy to contribute a little more if they get an evening's entertainment in return.

• Use a success-story from the the organisation that you are fund-raising for in your publicity, especially in press-releases and radio interviews: this adds human interest, and makes it more likely that people will feel compelled to take part.

• Choose a location that can accommodate lots of people, and overcome any barriers that people may have in getting there.

• Make the entrance fee slightly different from other table-quizzes in your area. this can encourage more people to attend because they see your quiz as being better than the others.
  (But don't make it too cheap, or you will simply have people who do not have any spare money at all).

Getting extra contributions

You may get additional money from people who attend - and from others who would like to but cannot be there, or ones who support the cause but hate the idea of a quiz night.

Ways of asking for donations, without sounding like you are begging, include:

• Taking registrations days or even weeks beforehand with a non-refundable deposit (you know that some people will not attend).

• Offering "spectator" tickets, perhaps for a donation: This opens the event to people who don't want to take part in the quiz, or who want to make a donation but not a commitment.

• Running a raffle during the tea-break or at another break during the event.

• Selling answers to questions: this can be done either as a one off (the MC announces that the answer will be sold to the highest bidder), or as an all-night thing - you have an person who sells answers at any time. This can be an excellent approach, but it does need to be handled sensitively if some teams cannot afford to buy any answers.

• Asking directly for donations: if someone from the charity that are you are raising funds for is willing to speak, they may be able to appeal for direct donations.

• Give winners the option of donating their prize back. this can be done either quietly, or in a more public way. (Generally a more private way is recommended to start with, so as not to embarrass other winners who choose not to operate this way.   And for this to work, you need prizes, eg cash, which realistically will be valuable if they are re-gifted.)

• Sell sponsorship rights, or advertising space: there may be companies, not directly associated with the quiz, who would like to advertise to the participants, either on your forms, or perhaps just at the venue.  This can be a lot of work - but it means you are not relying on your quiz attendees to contribute all the funds that are raised.

Another option to look at is whether the quiz-night itself could provide some "in kind" (instead of cash) support to the cause that you are fundraising for. This can be harder to measure (eg if you are looking to prove that your quiz really was a charitable-status activity), but it can be a way to cut down the organisation's costs.

What has worked for you?

There is no "best" way to do fundraising:   it all comes down to the amount of time and energy you have, and the generosity of your community.  

What methods have you found to be more effective for raising funds at a table quiz?