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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
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.