Festival and Events

The charity sector is large and growing, and has substantial assets at its disposal. Sport charities today form an increasingly important part for the local economy and also promoting healthy living at the same time (Filo, Groza and Fairley, 2012). Serve your racquets! A racquet sports charity event organised by Starry Family. It is a unique sport charity event as it only focuses on racquet based sports, organised to raise funds to help and support single parents in the State of Victoria, Australia. Serve your racquets! is to be held at major sporting venues in and around the City of Melbourne on the last two weeks of November 2013 with local celebrities taking part in the games to promote the noble cause aimed at promoting family wellness and healthy living.

Serve your racquets! A racquet sports charity event.

While sport participation continues to represent a prominent aspect of leisure and recreation, there has also been a pronounced shift toward support of charitable causes for both individual consumers and corporations (King, 2001). Giving to charity is a complex decision driven by a variety of motives. Research has shown that reciprocity is an important motivating factor for charitable donations among young professionals today (Filo, Funk and O’brien, 2010). Reciprocity involves an individual giving to charity because he or she has benefited from, or anticipates benefiting from, the charity’s central activities. Research has also suggested motives related to inherent needs of donors such as self-esteem and the need to help others (Ritzenheim, 2000, as cited in Filo, Funk and O’brien, 2010).

1. Serve your racquets!

The idea/theme of this sports charity is that it only focuses on racquet sports such as tennis, badminton, squash and table tennis and etc to raise funds for single parents facing difficulties in their everyday life. It is a unique charity event which is open to the public over a period of the last 2 weeks in the month of November 2013, allowing more participation from the public. What makes it exciting is that participants of the event is allowed to wear any costumes they like as long it is not revealing or indecent clothing.

The principle of Serve your racquets!

The aim of Serve your racquets! is to educate the greater community in order to increase their awareness of everyday problems/challenges faced by single parents. To do this, sports is involved as it is the most common activities in the world, with participation in very country and at all levels of society. Sports have a strong history of developing positive citizenship values and of supporting charity and good works at all levels of society which in turn allows both the participants and the public at large to help those in need by means of education and awareness and living a healthy lifestyle at the same time (Filo, Groza and Fairley, 2012).

Here is the general outline of the purpose of the sports charity event concept:

The purpose of this concept is so that once completed, evaluations can be done to see if the event can be delivered successfully within the available timeframe and resources. This process is known as the feasibility study (Allen, Harris and McDonnell, 2008). There are three steps in the feasibility study related to events.

1. The marketing screen

2. The operations screen

3. The financial screen

1. The marketing screen

The marketing screen involves examining how the target audience of the event is likely to respond to the event concept (All et al. 2008). This means that the event managers will need to pay a great deal of attention to media responses and the responses (feedbacks) of those who hear about the event concept.

2. The operations screen

The operations screen will consider the skills and resources needed to stage the event successfully, and whether the event managers have these skills and resources or have access to them (Allen et al. 2002). In this case any resources or skills required for the event are generously available, such as security, medical standby services and food stalls.

3. The financial screen

This screen examines whether the event organisation has the sufficient financial commitment, sponsorship and revenue to undertake the event (Allen et al. 2008). Optimistically the event will have some form of sponsorship support as described in the stakeholder section, and if objectives are reached there will be a profit of over hundred thousand dollars.

The key target of the event

The goals of the Serve your racquets! event is to: 1. To raise funds to help and support single parents.

2. To attract at least ten thousand attendees during the 2 weeklong events.

3. Raise over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in participation fees alone.

4. To earn recognition from all stakeholders (including the public) during the event to formulate it into a major event.

2. The stakeholders of Serve your racquets! event.

I. The organiser Starry Family as the main organiser that will be running the event.

II. Internal staff (or Volunteers) The event will require area managers who coordinate the activities in each area (in and around the City of Melbourne), guidance staff who inform and direct attendees and participants, medics for health and emergency services and security in case of any unwanted activities and disturbances.

III. Event planner/manager Event planner and general manager who coordinates and provides logistics for the event.

IV. Attendees/participants The people who signed up for the event or attending to watch the events. There will be those that come to the event for purely for entertainment reasons, and those who will get involved in buying and selling merchandise.

V. Sponsors In the recent decades, sponsorship is no longer seen as a measure of goodwill, but a primary promotional tool in the market mix (Conway, 2004). Therefore it is very likely that this event will receive some benefits from sponsors.

VI. Media The many forms of media that will be used to promote and advertise the event is through social media websites, radio along with newspaper advertisements with details such as date, venue, participant fees and other important event details that participants may be interested in.

3. Marketing/Promotion

With technology growing at a fast pace, marketing/promoting the “Serve your racquets!” event through certain media sources can result in positive revenue and create more attention to the not only fans of the sports but the broader audience. With the rapid growth in social media websites and the easy-to-access ideal through smart phone apps, this form of marketing can become very beneficial in the long run (Woolf, Heere, and Walker, 2013). The most commonly used websites to promote a sport charity event through social media are Facebook and Twitter. Besides that, advertisement will be made on newspapers with announcements on the radio. Marketing this event through social media websites can be a very handy way to create awareness and recognition as Facebook has received more than 1.6 billion visits a week and twitter receives more than 400 million visits a month (Sullivan, 2012). A website linked by social media application will provide the event details such as date, venue, fees and other important event details that participants may be interested in.

4. Contested Meaning

5. The timing and venue of the event

Other important decisions that need to be made whilst developing an event concept is the duration of the event and the season, days and times when the event will be held (Allen et al. 2002).

The event will be held on the last two weeks of November. Reason being that though it is an outdoor and indoor event the good weather conditions are beneficial as more people would be willing to go out as often as possible. The two weeklong events will start on Sunday the seventeenth of November and it will end on Saturday the thirtieth of November.

The event times are:

Weekdays, 9am – 9pm

Weekend, 10am – 6pm

The weekdays are predicted to attract the seniors and non workers, while the weekend is predicted to attract families and young adults who work on weekdays. The event is expected to be held at the Rod Laver Arena and at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. The reason of the choice of venues is that both host venues has very good access to public transportation and both venues has ample of space to host various racquet games.

6. Community Benefit

At least 40% of the collected fees will be used to cover necessary expenses incurred during the event. Meanwhile, the rest of the 60% of the collected fees along all personal and pledged donations will go 100% directly to Starry Family for the benefits of single parents in the State of Victoria. This will help improve and provide a sustainable path for thousands of single parents. Besides that, the local community has the opportunity to take part in the events to exercise further boosting the image of the charity sport event.

7. Estimated Economic Impact

Starry Family as the organiser will have to rent booths, and tents on venues, generating income for the host of the respective sporting venues. Starry Family will also be setting up booths for sport retailers to sell their sport equipment and merchandise as well as souvenirs for the event. Attendees and/or participants will likely spend money both at the event and in the surrounding community (those travelling to the sporting venues). This will surely boost revenue for businesses located in and round the city as well as making full use of the public transport.

9. List of sponsors

Request for sponsorship has been made to the Commonwealth Bank (Australia’s largest bank), Rebel Sport (sporting and leisure equipment retailer), Mercer (global leader in HR and related financial advice), The City of Melbourne (as the venue partner) and Woolworths (Australia’s largest food retailer).

10. Media and broadcast coverage

There will be media coverage by Channel Ten, ABC local radio as well as the Herald Sun newspaper to report on the highlights and latest happenings during the event.

11. Seeking Government funding

Request has been made to the State Government of Victoria for funds to partially cover the cost of organising the event if 100% of all personal and pledged donations are to be made to SingleMum (Australia’s biggest charity for single parents).

Conclusion

The contribution of recreation and charity motives in the development of attachment demonstrates motives related to leisure including escape, social, competency, and intellectual. With motives related to charitable giving such as reciprocity, self-esteem, need to help others, and desire to improve the charity play a part in a sport event taking on enhanced importance and greater meaning for participants (Woolf, Heere, and Walker, 2013).