Beyond Bingo Supplies: How to Manage a Successful Bingo Event Part 3

First, you checked out the licensing requirements for bingos in your state and then you made an estimate of how many bingo players will be in attendance. Finally, you decided on how you wanted to build your bingo program.

Now let's look at determining your bingo prize payouts.

Determining Your Bingo Prize Payouts

For nonprofit groups that have your bingo prizes donated, determining your prize payouts can be easy. You simply take the prizes donated, divide them up in smaller value items for most regular games and bigger value items for the special or jackpot games. However, if you are awarding cash prizes based upon your bingo players' attendance and spending levels, you need to make sure that you are budgeting appropriately.

For instance, if you plan on 100 bingo players attending your bingo event, how much do you expect each player to spend on bingo books? Perhaps, you're limiting sales to one bingo book per player and charging $10.00 per book. This means you can expect $1,000.00 in revenue to pay prizes with.

So, in the above example, if you have a bingo program with 10 regular games and 3 of those are specials (jackpots), you don't want to pay out $100 and $300 for the jackpots (for a total of $1,600.00). Instead, maybe you award say $40 for the regular games and $150 for the specials (for a total of $730).

Your bingo prize payouts should be a delicate balance between the revenue you hope to obtain and prize payouts that will keep your bingo players happy. A good rule of thumb is to try to have bingo prizes totalling 75% of bingo revenue.

Note: In the above example, bingo book prices and bingo prize payouts are not necessarily based in reality. As we said before, bingo games, prices, and prizes can vary dramatically from area to area.

Also, in the above example, some groups limit bingo paper sales to control inventory and keep things equal between players. Limiting sales may or may not be a good thing depending on your crowd. If you have mostly novice bingo players who are there more to support the charity than to play bingo, this may be a good strategy.

However, if you're crowd consists of many regular bingo players, then you will be better off not limiting spending, both from a sales standpoint and from a bingo player satisfaction standpoint. Regular bingo players do not want to be limited on the number of bingo books they can play.

Next: Part 4 of 5, Revenue Generators for your Bingo