Free or ticketed nonprofit events: how to decide

Charge whenever the event has meaningful costs, and hold a stated number of free places for anyone who needs one. Free events do not remove the cost, they move it onto funds given for something else, and they attract people who have not decided to come, which shows up as a high no-show rate.

Free is a decision about who pays, not whether

The instinct in the sector is that free is more inclusive, and it often is at the door. It is also a choice about where the cost lands.

A free event with 900 dollars of costs is an event funded by your existing money, which was given to you for a purpose. Whether that is the right use of it is a real question, and it is one that frequently goes unasked because free feels like the safe default.

Ask it explicitly. If a funder or a donor saw that 900 dollars going on a room and catering for an event, would they recognise it as what they gave for? Sometimes yes, clearly. Sometimes not, and that is the case where charging is the more responsible option rather than the less generous one.

The trade-off in full

The no-show row is the one that changes people's minds. A free list of 120 producing 70 attendees means you catered for 120 and paid for it, and the room felt half empty to the people who did come.

When free is genuinely right

There are clear cases, and it is worth naming them so that charging does not become its own reflex.

• The event is service delivery. If this is the work rather than a way to fund the work, charging for it contradicts the point.
• You are trying to reach people who have never encountered you. A price is a filter, and outreach is precisely when you do not want one.
• The cost is genuinely near zero. A talk in a room you already have, with no catering, costs your time and nothing else.
• A funder is already paying for it. If the event is covered by a grant written for that purpose, charging on top needs a good reason.

Outside those, the default should probably be a modest charge with free places available. The test is whether somebody who gave you money for the work would recognise this spending as the work, and if the honest answer is no, the attendees should be funding it rather than the donors.

The middle path

Price the event at what it costs to run, and hold a stated number of free places for anyone who needs one. This funds the event properly and handles access honestly at the same time.

Say the free places exist, in the listing, in plain language. A concession nobody knows about is not a concession, and one that requires somebody to explain their circumstances to a volunteer on the door will go unused by exactly the people it was created for.

Make it self-selecting. A line saying free places are available with no questions asked, and how to claim one, is enough. Organizations worry about this being abused and it very rarely is, and the small amount of abuse costs less than the people excluded by a means test.

Setting the price

Work from your fixed costs and a realistic attendance, not from what feels appropriate for a charity.

Divide the costs that exist whether or not anyone comes by the number of people you can honestly reach, then add a small margin. If the resulting figure looks uncomfortably high, the venue or the catering is too expensive for the audience you have rather than the price being wrong.

One point on mechanics: where the platform fee is added at checkout rather than deducted from you, the listed price is what reaches your organization. That makes the arithmetic straightforward, and it means the total an attendee sees is a little above your headline figure.

What a ticket is, and is not

A ticket buys admission to the event. It is not a donation and not automatically a tax-deductible contribution, and describing it as one in a listing is a claim you may not be able to stand behind.

Keep the two separate. Sell admission at a price, and make any giving a distinct, voluntary act on the night or afterwards. Bundling a compulsory donation into a ticket muddies your records, complicates what you can say about it, and removes the moment where somebody chooses to give.

That moment matters more than the money attached to it, because a person who chose to give once is far more likely to do it again.

Removing the risk either way

Whichever you choose, the exposure is the same problem: costs committed before you know whether anybody is coming.

For a ticketed event, set a minimum at break-even with a deadline, so the venue and the caterer are only paid once the money exists. For a free event, the equivalent is an attendance target you set in advance and check against RSVPs, so you can scale the catering down rather than discovering the gap on the day.

Either way, decide the number before you commit. An organization that cannot lose the money should not be finding out on the night, and a board that has seen the downside figure in advance is a board that approves things.

What charging does not fix

A reasonable default

Charge what it costs plus a modest margin. Hold six free places and say so plainly. Set a minimum so a quiet response costs nothing. Keep any giving separate from admission.

Then judge the event on whether it brought people into contact with your work rather than only on what it made. An evening that breaks even and produces eighty new contacts has succeeded, and measuring only the money pushes organizations towards formats that are worse at the thing they actually needed.