5 Golf Tournament Best Practices for Park Districts

Communities thrive when people engage with their local outdoor spaces. Your park district’s green spaces, parks, walking trails, and even golf courses allow residents to enjoy time outside. 

Hosting fun events that showcase all that the department has to offer across your municipality will attract new people to your spaces and help you achieve your ultimate purpose of strengthening your community. A golf tournament is an opportunity for your district to connect with residents and businesses in a new way, allowing you to spread awareness about park initiatives, engage and retain members, and raise money for operations and special projects. 

Golf has surged in popularity over the past several years, which means now is a great time to launch a golf event for your park district. Golf tournaments have many moving parts, but using the right tools and employing the best practices outlined in this guide will set you up for a successful event. 

1. Use Event Management Software

Just as you use software to manage your park, digital tools exist to help you effectively and efficiently manage a golf tournament. A golf-specific solution is your best bet, with functions that are built to handle the unique components of a golf tournament—like hole assignments, team pairings, flighting, tie-breaking, and live-scoring—without time-consuming workarounds or adaptations. Look for these must-have features in a golf event management platform:

• Online registration to streamline the registration process and easily manage participant information.
• An attractive, customizable event website where you can share information about the event, recognize sponsors, and share tournament updates.
• Digital sponsor exposure to add value to sponsor packages.
• The ability to collect donations from golfers, sponsors, and spectators.
• A responsive support team who’s there to troubleshoot issues, answer questions, and provide golf event guidance.
• Communication tools so you can easily push messages to registrants with just a few clicks.
• Live scoring capabilities to keep golfers engaged, provide sponsor exposure, and expedite finalizing the tournament’s results.
• Golf event-specific features that make it simple to coordinate with the golf facility, print preformatted cart signs and other printouts, and handle the golf technicalities. 

Your chosen solution should be able to share data with your park district’s existing solutions, so look for robust reporting capabilities that allow you to track and manage data about event participants, donors, and sponsors.

2. Involve Different Skill Levels

Golf tournaments can involve different skill levels and segments of your community in various ways. Most charity golf tournaments use the scramble format, in which each player in a group hits a shot, and the group chooses the best one. The entire group then plays their next shots from that spot, and so on, until the ball is in the hole.

You might also offer specific flights or rounds based on handicap, skill level, gender, or age range to level the playing field and encourage more participants. Another idea is to hold a mini golf or putt-putt tournament instead of a full nine- or 18-hole event at a traditional golf course. This option caters to families and occurs over a shorter time frame.

3. Sell Sponsorships

Golf tournaments offer sponsors access to an audience they can’t reach anywhere else. They get high visibility to your tournament’s field, high engagement with golfers and other sponsors, and show their support for your park department. Sponsorships typically bring in the bulk of a golf fundraiser’s revenue, so look at the event’s fixed costs and aim to build a sponsorship to cover those costs. In-kind sponsorships also work well for things like player gifts, raffle prizes, auction items, contest prizes, or services (like catering, auctioneer services, entertainment, and more). 

Offer varying levels of sponsorships so you can meet the budgets of different businesses. The sponsorship benefits should be in line with the price of the package. For instance, the Title or Presenting Sponsorship is likely the highest price package and should receive the most benefits, such as their logo on the event website’s homepage and printed materials, the opportunity to speak at the event, a team or two to play in the event, recognition on social media. On the other end of the spectrum, Hole Sponsorships are typically the lowest-priced sponsorship options, with businesses getting their logo on a hole sign on a tee box and on the event website.

Other common types of golf tournament sponsorships include:

• Pin flags
• Lunch, dinner, or snack
• Golf cart
• Hole-in-one or other contest
• Beverage cart
• Player gifts
• Leaderboard

4. Include On-Course Challenges

On-course games and challenges are a great addition to your golf event. Not only do they add fun and excitement to the tournament, but they can also bring in additional revenue if yours is a fundraising event. 

The options are endless for on-course games in terms of themes or prizes. For instance, you might tie a game to a park construction project and have golfers use construction equipment like sledgehammers or levels to putt on a specific hole. Or have a challenge for golfers to name well-known parks in your city for the chance to move their tee-off location closer. GolfStatus recommends trying these on-course games:

• Beat the Pro
• Golf Ball Cannon
• Hole of Fortune
• Roll-a-Score
• Marshmallow Drive

The game's outcome can be a physical prize or gift card, an improved starting location for their tee shot or other shot, or strokes off of their score. The games can be based on luck or skill, so have fun creating your own games.

5. Add a Hole-in-One Contest

A hole-in-one contest is a premier addition to a golf tournament that drives participation and anticipation. It gives golfers the chance to hit the ball in the hole with a single shot, usually on a par three hole (which are shorter yardage holes on a golf course). Hole-in-one contests offer high-value prizes, such as thousands of dollars in cash, a golf destination trip, or a new vehicle. 

Keep these best practices in mind when adding a hole-in-one contest to your golf tournament:

• Secure hole-in-one contest insurance. The odds of a golfer getting a hole-in-one at your tournament are just one in 12,500—but there’s still a chance! Make sure your park department is protected from financial risk by purchasing hole-in-one insurance that covers the contest’s prize or prizes.
• Work with the golf facility to choose the hole or holes. Golf staff can help advise on which holes’ layouts are most conducive to a hole-in-one contest and have the proper yardage.
• Sell a contest sponsorship. A sponsorship covers the cost of the insurance policy and offers great exposure for the sponsoring business. They get to be associated with one of the most anticipated components of the tournament and might even want to run the contest to interact with every golfer.

Next Steps

Start by getting your golf event management platform in place to maximize its efficiency as you plan your events. Fold your golf tournament into promotional email campaigns and on social media to drum up interest and drive participation. Your event management software can help you collect key performance metrics, such as the total number of participants, sponsor dollars raised, and total donations, to help you improve year over year.