For community theaters, schools, churches and nonprofit organizations
A Christmas show can raise serious money for a nonprofit. Most of them do not, and the reason is almost always the same: the group planned a play and hoped the money would follow.
Plan the fundraiser. The play is how you deliver it.
Where the money actually comes from
Four streams, and they are not the sizes people expect.
Sponsorship is usually the largest and it has no ceiling. Local businesses buy visibility and goodwill, and a holiday show full of their neighbors is an easy thing to say yes to.
Tickets feel like the main event and are capped by arithmetic. Seats times price times nights. Work out that ceiling early, because it tells you whether the whole plan is realistic.
Program advertising catches the businesses that said no to a sponsorship. Smaller money, and a second ask to a list you have already built.
Concessions and the intermission ask are small and nearly free. Worth doing. Not worth planning around.
Do the arithmetic before you commit
Four hundred seats, three nights, twenty dollar tickets, seventy percent full. That is $16,800 in ticket revenue.
Against that: royalties, music licensing, venue, printing, costumes, insurance. Call it $3,000 to $6,000 for a modestly staged show.
So the play itself clears perhaps $11,000. Add 15 sponsors at $250, and you have added another $3,750 for work that happens on the phone in June.
Run those numbers with your own venue and your own prices before your board approves anything. If the answer is not worth the effort, find out in June rather than in December.
Sponsorship is a product, not a donation
Groups undersell this constantly. They ask for money and offer a logo.
Build tiers, and make each one worth its price. A name in the program is the bottom rung. Above it: a program ad, a mention from the stage, a block of tickets the business can give to staff or clients, a sign in the lobby.
The strongest offer is one the sponsor cannot buy anywhere else in town. A show set inside a 1950s radio broadcast can hand a sponsor a period-correct radio advertisement for their business, written for them and performed live in front of the whole theater. That is not a logo. That is two minutes of their neighbors learning about and laughing at their business in the best possible way, and it sells for a great deal more than an ad.
Sell sponsorship in June
Not October. Businesses set marketing budgets early, and by autumn the December money is spent.
Start with your own board. Every board member knows three business owners, and a warm ask from a familiar face closes at a rate cold outreach never will. Give each of them a one-page sheet and three names. That is your whole sponsorship campaign.
Price tickets like a fundraiser
The instinct is to price low so everyone can come. Reasonable, and usually wrong.
Your audience knows this is a fundraiser. $15 or $20 for a two-hour show filled with their friends, family and neighbors reads as fair, and the difference between $12 and $20 across 900 tickets is $7,200. Keep a handful of free tickets for people who genuinely cannot pay, and do it quietly.
One price for the whole theater is the easiest. That said, consider a VIP section of 20 to 30 seats, front and center, at double the price. Keep it to no more than 10 percent of your seats, and give it something worth the money: a soda and popcorn at intermission, a meet-and-greet with the cast afterwards, an invitation to the cast party. Invent your own. Beyond that, every tier you add is another thing to explain at the door.
Count the second currency
A show does what a gala cannot. For every person on stage there is a group of their friends and family who will buy tickets, and many of them have never given your organization a dollar. You can build them into donors.
Capture that. A signup sheet in the lobby, a line in the program, a simple ask from the stage before the second act. Some of the people who came to watch their niece sing will still be donors in five years, and that is worth more than the ticket revenue you counted.
About this guide
Written by Curtain & Cause. We write original plays for community theaters and work with the nonprofit organizations staging them as fundraisers. Christmas on the Dial is an original full-length play staged as a live 1950s radio broadcast, with the audience as the studio audience.
Questions about any of the above are welcome, whether or not you are looking at this show. booking@curtainandcause.com
License the show · Book it as a fundraiser · Questions and answers
