--- title: Who Is Actually in the Room at Your Fundraiser? description: Why isn’t my charity event attracting new donors? Most of the people in your room belong to someone else. An Australian take on fixing it through event design. image: https://themelbeventco.com.au/hubfs/New%20Blog%20Post%20sizes%20(4).png --- [Skip to content](https://themelbeventco.com.au/the-melbourne-event-company-blog/who-is-actually-in-the-room-at-your-fundraiser#main-content) [![The Melbourne Event Company](https://themelbeventco.com.au/hs-fs/hubfs/The%20Melb%20Event%20(1).png?width=200&height=200&name=The%20Melb%20Event%20(1).png)Homepage](https://www.themelbeventco.com.au) - [Home](https://themelbeventco.com.au) - [About Us](https://themelbeventco.com.au/about-us) - [Services](https://themelbeventco.com.au/services-1) - [Tips & Tools](https://themelbeventco.com.au/the-melbourne-event-company-blog) - [Contact Us](https://themelbeventco.com.au/contact-us-2) - 03 4827 9311 - [Home](https://themelbeventco.com.au) - [About Us](https://themelbeventco.com.au/about-us) - [Services](https://themelbeventco.com.au/services-1) - [Tips & Tools](https://themelbeventco.com.au/the-melbourne-event-company-blog) - [Contact Us](https://themelbeventco.com.au/contact-us-2) - 03 4827 9311 ![](https://themelbeventco.com.au/hs-fs/hubfs/New%20Blog%20Post%20sizes%20(4).png?width=1700&height=800&name=New%20Blog%20Post%20sizes%20(4).png) Fundraising Events # Who Is Actually in the Room at Your Fundraiser? ![Ilan](https://themelbeventco.com.au/hs-fs/hubfs/Untitled%20design%20(30).png?width=48&height=48&name=Untitled%20design%20(30).png) Ilan October 23, 2026 Go and get the guest list from your last fundraiser. Not the total raised. The list. Now work out how many of those people had already given you money before that night. For the events I ran at a small health charity, my honest estimate is about ninety five per cent. That's a guess. The fact that it is a guess, years later, is most of the problem. ## The pattern It went the same way every time. A family gets a diagnosis. Their world tips over, they don't know where to turn, so they turn to the local charity working in that area. Their friends and extended family come in behind them, and they are generous in the way people are generous when they are frightened and want to be useful. Money arrives. If the family happens to be well networked and well off, a lot of money arrives. Then, over a few years, the thing that was a crisis becomes part of normal everyday routine. The appointments get boring. Some of those families stay involved for life. Most taper back, adjust, and end up interacting with you once or twice a year. They might throw a couple of shekels your way for a small fundraiser. Broadly speaking, they're not that attached anymore. And here is the part that makes it hard to see: a new family arrived this year. And one the year before. So the total holds. Your event looks fine. The room is full. Nobody is standing at the back counting the people who stopped coming, because there is no moment where they stop. They just come less, and then not at all, and the gap gets filled by someone whose kid was diagnosed in March. ## The uncomfortable bit The relationship work at that charity was genuinely good. When a family came in raw, they were folded into the community fast by people who knew what to say. I have no criticism of that at all. What nobody was doing was the arithmetic. Nobody sat down with five years of data and asked: what does a new family bring in on average, how long do they keep giving, how many donors are we losing over the same period, and does one actually replace the other? Nobody asked whether there was anything we could do to extend the tail. So the number we reported was total funds raised, and total funds raised can sit flat for a decade while the number of actual human beings behind it falls. Fewer people, giving more, propping up a figure that looks like stability. If you break even year on year and your donor pool is shrinking, you are living on borrowed time. If you break even and your donor pool is growing, you have a short term problem that fixes itself. Those two organisations report the identical number to the Board. ## Why I didn't do it I want to be straight about this, because it would be easy to write it as though I worked all this out at the time and acted on it. I didn't. To do even rudimentary cohort modelling back then, I needed clean data in the first place, I needed to know what I was doing in Excel, I needed to understand the analysis well enough to trust it, and I probably needed a Power BI licence and someone who could drive it. In a sector where a huge proportion of charities run with no paid staff at all, that stack was never going to assemble itself. So it didn't get done, at my organisation or at most others. That excuse has expired. You can now take five years of donor records, load them into an AI chatbot, and ask the questions in plain English. How many donors did we have each year. How many were new. How long does a new donor keep giving before they stop. Which group is holding and which is fading. The paid versions will give you better results, but even the free ones will get you further than nothing, which is where most small charities currently sit. It is a deeply unglamorous advantage. It is also the first time this has been available to an organisation with two staff and a committee. Importantly, however, this isn’t an endorsement to run to your nearest AI and throw in all your donors’ sensitive data. Be smart. Trust is critical, and if you don’t know how, a cursory Google search will tell you how to de-identify sensitive data to protect your donors.  ## What you do with the answer Say you run it and find what you probably already suspect: your growth depends entirely on new families arriving, and everyone they bring has a limited shelf life. The instinct is to fix that with communications. Better newsletters, more thank yous, a supporter journey with automation behind it. Fine, do all of it, none of it touches the actual mechanism. Here is the mechanism. Call her Kate. Kate comes because Steph asks her. Steph's daughter was diagnosed four years ago, Steph takes a table every year, and Kate is on it. Kate has given you thousands of dollars and has never once had a conversation with anyone who works for you. She is not your donor. She is Steph's friend, and you have been borrowing her. The year Steph can't come, for whatever reason, Kate doesn't come either. Not because she lapsed. Because nobody asked her. So fix it in the room. And do not fix it by breaking up the tables. If I had wrangled eight friends into black tie on a Saturday night and you told me at the door I'd be sitting somewhere else, I would tell you to get stuffed and I would not be back. The people filling your room built those tables themselves. What you can move without anyone taking offence is the hosts. Being asked to go and host another table reads as an honour. So build it in as a game: at some point in the night, hosts swap. Not for a course, because people get funny about eating where someone else has been sitting and I don't especially want to argue about it. A moment. Ten minutes, with something to do, and then back. Kate meets someone she would never otherwise have met, and nobody has been managed. Same logic works elsewhere. A trivia round that can't be answered from your own table forces someone to go and negotiate. At a fun run, get every team captain into a photo with a captain from another team, framed as a joke, which it is, and which also leaves you with a photo you have a legitimate reason to send them on Monday. None of that costs money. It costs ten minutes of run sheet and a bit of nerve. The work is to give Kate a second reason to be there before the year Steph can't make it. You won't know which year that is. ## Share this post [mailto:https%3A%2F%2Fthemelbeventco.com.au%2Fthe-melbourne-event-company-blog%2Fwho-is-actually-in-the-room-at-your-fundraiser](mailto:https%3A%2F%2Fthemelbeventco.com.au%2Fthe-melbourne-event-company-blog%2Fwho-is-actually-in-the-room-at-your-fundraiser) ## Keep reading ### [![](https://themelbeventco.com.au/hs-fs/hubfs/New%20Blog%20Post%20sizes%20(2).png?width=1700&height=800&name=New%20Blog%20Post%20sizes%20(2).png) Fundraising Events The Wrong Question Most Charity Boards Are Asking About Event Agencies.](https://themelbeventco.com.au/the-melbourne-event-company-blog/charity-event-agency-or-in-house) ### [![](https://themelbeventco.com.au/hs-fs/hubfs/Gemini_Generated_Image_2q9m0q2q9m0q2q9m.png?width=1457&height=720&name=Gemini_Generated_Image_2q9m0q2q9m0q2q9m.png) Fundraising Events Nobody Trusted the Robot. But Here's the Thing... 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