Cooking Up A Storm: How Restaurant Association of NZ raised $370K for Cyclone Relief

“In my previous role at a large not-for-profit organisation I first came across Humanitix. When you work in that industry, you're looking for the best opportunity to do right by people's money. We're asking people to give buy a ticket that's essentially going to a charitable cause, and you don't want to then say pay an extra $20 on top of that, just to line someone else's pocket.”

- Emma Henderson, National Events & Sponsorship Manager

Host with the Most: Restaurant Association of New Zealand

Restaurant Association of New Zealand is a membership-based organization to link good business and good food together. Currently there are 2,500 members across New Zealand, which are predominantly restaurants, cafes and bars. They provide everything from first aid training all the way through to legal advice and contracting.

The Restaurant Association holds events to promote and support the hospitality industry, most notably the Lewisham Awards, which is one of the largest hospitality awards in New Zealand, as well as 10 other regional awards and an annual conference.

Emma Henderson, the National Events & Sponsorship Manager for Restaurant Association of NZ used Humanitix to host 156 events in one night and brought together the hospitality industry nationwide to raise $370,000 for cyclone relief.

Together with chef Al Brown, Emma had to create and sell tickets to 156 events all happening on one night within the space of a week.

“We had this idea of hosting NZ's biggest dinner party. If restaurants could open their doors and people could come and share a kai and how they were feeling about the situation and donate money towards the Mayoral Relief Funds, that would be our way of being able to do something.”

With our intuitive platform, Emma was able to jump on with her team and create events for each restaurant in a few clicks as registrations flowed in.

“I have a new person in my team and she'd never used Humanitix before. I showed her the basics because we get a lot of help and support from your team, but also a lot of things we could just learn ourselves. And she picked it up so fast and was just amazed at how easy it was to use.”

“In the end, we had 156 restaurants who opened their doors on a Monday night to 6,500 ticket holders and we raised $370,000 which was phenomenal. We also collected an extra $16,000 in donations just by adding that one thing to our ticketing page. And I loved being able to pull one reports across 156 events in one click - that saved me hours of my life.”

“When we're working with Humanitix, we know that (besides the usual suspects of bank fees) the money collected goes towards something good. I like it for that reason, but I also like it for how user-friendly it is, so it ticks both boxes. On Humanitix it’s so easy to get on with stuff, pull reports, and have visibility across all my events. I’m trying to shift everyone over to Humanitix, but obviously I don't control all the different departments. They’ve started to dabble in Humanitix though, so I'm trying to get them all over to the good side.”

Quick stats:

• $370,000 raised
• 156 events on one day
• 6,000+ tickets sold

We asked her what her favourite things about Humanitix were. Here's what she said:

Reporting

“The reporting is definitely a huge drawcard for us, particularly because we host a lot of similar events but in different regions. You can pull one report across these multiple events which I love. When you've got 156 events, and you can run a report that shows all of their data, it's hours of your life that you get back. That’s probably the most important thing for me.”

Marketing analytics

“We can easily compare when people bought tickets in comparison to our marketing and PR activities, because I can see the spikes on the graph on my Humanitix dashboard. My PR manager thinks I'm amazing because I tell her that we sold the most tickets between 6pm and 7pm on this night and she'll know that it’s because we were on the news at 6 o'clock that night.”

Tours page

“I set up a tour page on Humanitix in two clicks and added all the restaurants as they came through. It turned out to be a godsend because it broke down barriers between different organisations - there were other associations that work alongside us but wouldn't want to send their members through to our membership website. I was able to share the tours page which shows all the events in one place, and it made it really easy to work together on an event that crossed over organisations.”

Swap tickets

“We had instances where restaurants released extra tickets because they'd sold out really fast. And so there were people who had already booked at a restaurant but wanted to swap to another restaurant. It only took two clicks to find the person press swap, and they got sent a new ticket straight away. Those were things that I fell in love with throughout this process. The swap function is heaven for this kind of event. I no longer had to cancel their ticket, give them a refund, then ask them to buy somewhere else. When I first saw the swap function, I thought it cannot be that easy. I was blown away.”