| My First Ever (and probably last) Fundraiser |
[23 May 2009|08:14pm] |
Last Saturday, I was part of my first ever fundraising event!
Usually I don't try to organize fundraisers when I'm training with Team In Training. Mostly because it's a lot of work, and partly because I'm not sure I could get people to come out. So instead, I do an email campaign. But this season, my fearless mentor M decided to have all of us, Z, C, B, G, S, and me, organize a group fundraising event, an auction. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity for me - I was very excited and nervous.
( Read more... )
Everyone had arrived at Oakwood by time I got there on Saturday. B's BMW i328 convertible for a weekend item was already parked outside. M's, Z's, and B's SOs were there too and helped setup, and stayed for the entire event (I was very envious). S is a bartender so she managed the drinks. M arranged with Blockbuster to have volunteers to come our event and they were awesome, helping with the setup, managing the ticket purchases, providing security for the auction items. Even with all the help and morale support, everyone was nervous. There wasn't enough surface space to layout all the baskets and we had to move tables, find extra tables. I was definitely panicked when B shoved the raffle items at me and said "you're doing the raffle!". Or when I had to go find a printer to made up last minute bid sheets from scratch.
The event itself was slow in the beginning. The band was awesome. B's kids and their friends were there early, as were S's mom and her friends. They even got up to sing with the band! A few of the others friends also showed up and provided much needed calming and morale support (again, I was envious). I was still worried there wouldn't be enough people to make the bidding work. Not enough of the Oakwood members were coming in and we had planned on that being the bulk of the guests. About an hour or two later, some Oakwood members came for the free food after their workouts and bid. There was a lady who came straight in from the pool to eat! And there was the most adorable little girl with her mom. The little girl, with beautiful blue eyes and delicate blond hair, didn't want to go to the cafe because she was afraid she wouldn't be able to hear the music, but the music was too loud for her ears.
To my relief, every item was bid on, most had multiple bids. Lots of people bid on multiple items. There was one lady, she was very carefully examining a few items and their bid sheets - very serious :D. It was interesting to see which were the most desired items. The sailing for two trip by Excitations was very popular, many people came up to ask where it was because they saw it in the auction catalog (yay, people read my catalog!). So were the Italian basket, the Love basket, and the BBQ basket.
We held the auction near the end of the event. It was a big success, but I think it would have been bigger if we had done it an hour earlier, at the peak when Oakwood members were hanging around. And there was a last minute rush to for everyone to pay for the auction baskets and the live auction items. I had setup my laptop for payment directly to our team webpage. There was a small hiccup that caused me to have a small panic attack - the payment wouldn't go through. But I changed the browser to Safari and everything was happy again (shame on you, Firefox!).
It took nearly an hour to clean up. The other's headed to M's place to unload all the gear we had brought for the event. But I had to head home since I had the Bay To Breakers early next morning, plus an extra 5 miles. My feet were sore from standing for almost two days and I was just mentally and physically exhausted. Fell into bed, slept like a log! Nothing like stress for a good night's sleep.
A few days later, I found out we raised over $3000! Big thanks to everyone who supported us! And thanks to M and the Leggies for including me in this. I would never have pulled this off on my own!
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| Lived to tell: Nike Women's Marathon 2007 (Half) |
[23 Oct 2007|03:05am] |
I've had this LJ for years but I never had any noteworthy material to post. School, work. *yawn* I used it to keep up with my friends who lead much more interesting lives running companies, handling great gobs of money and traveling to the ends of the earth, etc. This past weekend, I finally accomplished something worth writing about. I ran my first ever half marathon!!!
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