Selling tables to companies for a charity event

I spend 60 to 80 nights a year at the front of a room asking it for money, and I can usually tell within ten minutes which corporate tables are going to give. Selling tables at a charity event is the part of the job that happens months earlier, in an office, over email, and it decides more of your total than the lot list does.

Why is selling a table different from selling ten tickets?

Because a ticket is bought with someone’s own money and a table is bought with someone else’s. An individual decides over a weekend. A company decides through a budget line, an internal approval and usually a person who has to tell their boss what the firm got for it.

That changes the ask. Your supporter buys because they care. Your corporate buyer may care too, but they still need a sentence they can put in writing: client entertaining, staff reward, local profile, a charity partner they already back. Give them that sentence and you have made their job easy.

It changes the timing as well. Companies work to a financial year that often has nothing to do with yours, and the money is allocated long before it is spent. Asking in March for an April event means asking after the decision was made.

What is a company actually buying?

A named table, their logo in agreed places, a mention from the stage, a photograph they can post, and ten good seats at a night that reflects well on them. That is the honest list. Put it in writing and deliver all of it.

Be careful with the stage mention, because it is the one people oversell. I will thank a company warmly and by name. I will not read a paragraph of their marketing copy out in the middle of a fundraising night, and I will not call them a partner of the charity unless they are one. The Code of Fundraising Practice wants appropriate evidence behind any claim likely to be taken literally.

One thing worth knowing before you speak to a finance director. Straight corporate hospitality is business entertaining, and HMRC’s manual says the legislation denies a deduction from trading profits for it, while the VAT notice blocks recovery of input tax on business entertainment. Sponsorship is treated differently, which is often why a buyer wants to call it that.

How should you price a table at a charity event?

Price a table of ten above ten individual tickets, and say why. The instinct to discount for volume comes from commercial ticketing, where filling seats is the goal. At a charity event your goal is the total at the end of the night, and the table is worth more than the seats because it comes with the name, the logo and the mention.

If your single ticket is £95, a corporate table at £1,200 is a clean, defensible number. It reads as a package rather than ten discounted seats, and it leaves room for something real: a reserved position in the room, the company name on the table plan.

A discount also sets your floor for next year. Sell at £850 once and £1,200 becomes an increase you have to justify rather than the price. The table is a product, not a bulk buy.

Is a table buyer the same as a sponsor?

No, and conflating the two causes trouble months later. A table buyer pays to attend. A sponsor pays for visibility and association, and that is a commercial arrangement with consequences.

HMRC says sponsorship payments are different from donations because the company gets something related to its business in return, and can deduct them as business expenses. For VAT, the sponsorship notice says what matters is that the agreement requires you to do something in return, while payments that are freely given and secure nothing fall outside VAT altogether.

Three further points worth raising with your finance team early. Income from a qualifying fundraising event can be exempt, and HMRC’s guidance confirms the exemption covers admission charges and sponsorship payments directly connected to it, subject to conditions. Selling advertising or benefits outside that is non-primary-purpose trading, with small trading exemption limits of £8,000, 25% of turnover or £80,000 depending on your income, which is where a trading subsidiary often comes in. And if a business runs a promotion telling customers that part of what they spend goes to you, that is a commercial participator, and the Code requires a written agreement before the promotion begins.

All of that is general information, not tax or legal advice. Settle it with your auditors and the Charity Commission’s trustee duties guidance, which wants a written agreement in place before fundraising with a commercial partner starts. Our guide to sponsorship packages covers the tier side.

Who do you approach, and when?

Start with companies that already have a reason to say yes: current corporate supporters, trustees’ employers, your suppliers, firms whose staff fundraise for you, local businesses whose customers are in your room. Cold approaches to household names are the slowest route with the lowest hit rate.

CAF’s corporate giving research, read in October 2026, found recorded FTSE 100 donations fell to £1.69 billion in 2025, and that only 18% of non-giving businesses name budget as the barrier. The obstacle is usually attention, not money.

Work backwards from their year end, not yours. Six months out is normal for a table, nine for a sponsor.

The pack, and the second conversation

Keep the pack to one page: the date, the cause, what the table includes, the price, the deadline and a named person to reply to. Attach last year’s total and a photograph of a full room.

The first conversation gets you interest. The second gets you the money, because that is where the buyer asks what they could not ask in front of their boss. Who else is coming. Whether they will be asked for money on the night. What happens if two of their ten drop out. Answer all of it honestly, including the bit about the auction, because a buyer who is surprised on the night does not come back.

Book that second conversation at the end of the first. Never leave it to email.

What do you do about the table that never bids?

Tell the company, in advance, that there will be a live auction and a pledge, and ask them to put at least two people on the table who can say yes to spending money. That one sentence is worth more than any seating trick.

The table I dread is ten staff who were told to attend. They are polite, they clap, and they sit through the whole auction with their hands down, which drains the three tables around them. I learned it the hard way at an event running late, where I started the auction before I had the room quiet. Only part of the room heard the lots, and the total showed it. Whoever holds the room holds the total, and a table nobody briefed was never really in the room.

A fix that costs nothing: ask each buyer to name one person on the table as your contact. Someone with a role behaves differently from someone with a seat.

Where should corporate tables sit at a charity event?

Near the front, in the auctioneer’s eyeline, and not all together. Benefit auctioneers recommend seating interactive donors at the front and reserving whole tables, which is exactly right for a corporate buyer who has paid for visibility.

Spread the two or three strongest tables across the front rather than clustering them, so competitive bidding has somewhere to travel.

Brief your host before they walk on

Give your charity event host a table list with three things per table: the company name, how to say it out loud, and one line on the relationship. New this year, fifth year running, gave the top lot last time.

That lets me thank a table specifically rather than generically, and specific thanks land. At one event I told the room exactly where every pound of each lot was going, and the money followed the transparency. Naming a company works the same way: the true thing said clearly beats the flattering one.

Share the running order too, so stage mentions land where they were promised rather than squeezed into the close.

Turning a table buyer into next year’s sponsor

Follow up within a week, while the photographs are still going round the office. Send the total raised, what it pays for, a picture of their table and the date for next year.

Then ask the question that moves them up: what would make this worth more to you internally? Some say staff involvement, some say profile, some want to meet the people you help. That answer is next year’s sponsorship proposal, written by the sponsor.

Most of the money at a gala arrives after dinner, usually during the live pledge. A company that bought a table and was thanked properly is far more likely to be the one that starts it. If you are building the night from scratch, our guide to planning a gala covers the rest of the structure.

Selling tables well is not a sales problem. It is a briefing problem solved months early, and the room tells you on the night whether you solved it.