Ensuring a profitable music event involves planning the event and determining the budget. Danielle Tucker, Founder of the Pandemic-Proof Summit, breaks her process down. This discussion applies to any musician running an event such as a release party, festival, online concert, etc.

Danielle came under my radar because she is doing this amazing musician summit. I have done 2 summits and they are overwhelming. Musicians do a lot of online events like festivals, live streams or a big release party. It’s a lot to handle and a bit daunting. I brought on Danielle so she can talk about the process on how she puts this thing together and how she breaks down her stuff to make sure it will be a profitable music event. I thought this may be useful for you.

She is a professional singer and she works full time for The Mighty Untouchables. She does vocal coaching on the side. She had a lot of time on her hands when the pandemic hit and a soft spot for the community of singers and musicians. She thought about starting a weekly interview series called The Pandemic Proof Singer Series and eventually that spun into The Pandemic Proof Singer Summit.

She wanted to do the Summit because she liked attending online summits herself and got a lot from them. After putting her strategy together, she got two virtual assistants to help her, someone to handle child care for her, and reached out to graphic designers, copywriters, web designers among others.

She set a SMART goal. She identified what her financial goal was, her audience growth, what she wants her audience to get out of it too. Then she did reverse engineering from there. She had a certain amount of money to begin with, had estimates then just needed to do adjustments as they went. Lots of numbers crunching.

You will need to add up your end revenue goal which would include the expenses plus how much profit you want to achieve if you want a profitable music event. So then you break down how much bundles you need to achieve that goal. Then identify how many people you need to purchase the bundle. She has a 1 to 10% rule such as if she had 1000 people, 10% of that would pay. That will determine how much people you need to invite to an event. If you’ve been keeping track of your numbers, you can definitely use that for your future event. You need to come up with some kind of data to start with.

When you find some gaps, consider bringing in sponsors. Local is great because companies love supporting local artists. Online deliverables are different for sponsors. For the Profitable Musician Summit, sponsors basically paid for all our advertising.

Due to time constraint, Danielle decided not to get sponsors but she did have the strategy. The first year of the Profitable Musician Summit, I had somebody reaching out for me but it wasn’t early enough and wasn’t organized. We found out that companies already had spent their budget for the year. The second time, I started talking to people a year in advance.

Danielle also hired a Facebook Ads Manager to help her and she had a lot of success with that. She tried doing it before but she did not have good results so she looked for somebody who knew what they were doing.

If you’re planning a big project, Danielle advises that the way she breaks down an event is WHY, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHO & HOW. Why am I doing this to begin with? What do I expect to get professionally out of it? What do the attendees and the people involved get out of it? You need to know what these are. It will fuel you through the difficult parts and helps you decide the specifics. You also need to consider when you schedule the project. If another artist is having a similar event like yours you might want to space the time out a bit. Then you dive into the what and who — what type of event you want and other specifics of the event. There are a lot of task management tools that can help you.

Danielle and I both had a 90-day timeline to do the organization, just to give yourself enough time to contact all the speakers, set appointments and have allowance when something goes wrong. During my first summit, we had a huge snowstorm and it shut down our power for days. I had to cancel 5-6 interviews and reschedule. You have to get the balance of the time commitment being not too long or not too short to put too much pressure on you. You need to set aside a season of your life to do this. If you can clear away as much as possible, Danielle recommends that. This is going to be a short period of time and you need to put all your time, effort and money so you need to put in all your focus.

The virtual event planning is a such a blessing and is so worth learning. In-person events is exciting but now we also have this virtual event and we can do these both at once. You have the ability to reach beyond your location. Summits and events are relationship-builders. Apart from the financial aspect being great, the intangibles outweigh this — the relationships built, the impact to others and the joy you find. There’s so much to gain from it.  Like Danielle, that’s also my biggest thing with summits.  I gained so many new friends and it’s so great to develop those relationships. Collaborate and do a show. It’s such a cool experience and promotes you as artists and gives you another venue to be out there and connect with fans.

Danielle advises that if you have an idea that has sparked about doing something like a profitable music event and you are overpowered by fear of all the daunting tasks you have to go through, ask for help. There’s unlimited resources out there. You can find anything and anyone online to organize a profitable music event. You can reach out Danielle and ask her questions on how she did it at danielletucker.com.

This episode was first aired on Episode #23 of The Profitable Musician Show”

Links mentioned in this episode:

Facebook group – Pandemic Proof Singer

Danielle’s website – danielletucker.com