How Many Meetings Does it Take to Have a Murder Mystery Event?

Here is a breakdown of when our team has met in order to prepare for this fundraising murder-mystery event:

First Meeting: Mid-November. The people who had primary interest in having an after-hours Friend-making, fundraising murder-mystery party had been chatting about it since we got a new branch manager in September. She allows us to do fun things like this. So we set up an initial meeting and shared ideas for about 2 hours.

Second Meeting: The week after Thanksgiving we jumped into a meeting where we all brought updates on our progress with various assignments. Breakdown of specific "roles" will be further described in another post. At this meeting we invited a volunteer who is a retired teacher, now mystery writer with an interest in becoming a Friend! She has continued to be very a helpful non-staff resource for our planning.----Thank you Kella!
The other special guest is our neighboring branch's manager who had a similar after-hours event that was primarily a meet + greet type of gala with nice catering and higher priced ticket. We were awed by her photo album of the event and noted very important info, such as have an extra cleaning of the branch before and after the event, charge staff the same price for a ticket that you charge the public and hire a photographer so you can brag to others about the success!

Third Meeting: Early December. Invited our Friends Coordinator who works at Main Library to attend this meeting, but she couldn't make it. The branch manager had a phone meeting with her in order to find out what we need to do to gain Friends, how the funds are Morrison Library's money, but are kept in the general Friends account etc. We discussed the plot and script ideas, which is mainly being worked on in Google Documents as a shared authorship between 2-3 people. The decision to write the story ourselves was an easy one because the "mystery in a box" is kind of lame.
We have decided to hire a catering firm due to their ability to serve wine and we will also have much better food! The cost seems high, but we are hoping to have 100-150 guests at $20 a ticket. Since this is our first event, we plan to make a little money, but at the very least, we will break even.
The artwork for the publicity is being done in-house by a professional artist on the circulation staff----which has turned out very well!
At this point, in early December we have published a teaser announcement for the February event on our website. We have the date set, so why not?

New Year's Eve meeting and Sunday morning meeting updates in next post.