New Years Eve Meeting

The fourth meeting was on New Years Eve day out of desperation for making our deadlines. Though it was a skeleton crew planning session, there was a special planner in attendance that made this time worthwhile. A neighboring regional library manager visited to help us with the details of planning the night and he gave us a tremendous boost with fleshing out the details!
So, at this meeting we got the minute to minute planning set. Meaning that when the library closes at 6pm the evening of February 8, we have a set plan of what will happen. Here it is:
6pm catering will set up rented tables with food, a bar, napkins and glasses included both upstairs and downstairs.
Thomas & Melanie will place clues, books with clues and maps in their places around the library.
7pm Doors open. Guests with tickets will march right in. Guests with reservations will need to pay at the door. Guests without reservations or tickets will need to pay at the door.
7:30pm Charles Brown, our director of libraries, will make opening remarks....
the mystery begins! and takes approximately 1 hour.
8:30pm Curtain call.
8:35pm Door prizes are distributed.
8:40pm Final remarks, hopefully some Friends leave huge checks behind to thank us for a fabulous evening.
9pm Catering finishes cleaning up, rented items will be stored in the meeting room space and we all go home.

Other details are still in the works at this point, but the guest planner really has a keen sense of planning. He has worked in theater, staging and event planning before. Having someone on your planning team with this kind of experience is very important if you have access to such a person.

He listed several people, other than people directly related to the mystery, that we needed to double check that we have them in attendance that evening.
1. director of libraries
2. Friends liaison
3. public relations staff
4. photographer
5. invite all the library board members.

He suggested we get an email distribution list with all those involved so we can stay in close communication with this event. We still haven't done this, though it is a really good suggestion! We must do that for next year's event.

We set up a Friends of the Library email account, which helps us to field email questions about the event specifically. We hope we've chosen something easy to remember morrisonfriends@plcmc.org. These emails go directly into the interim manager's email account.

Help navigating the library is essential, especially with an event where we are serving wine.
There will be name tags for everyone, indicating which group they are in and a map on the wall telling where all the groups are convening and where the important places in the library are, bathroom, exits etc.

After this meeting we have at least one more script meeting, 3 dress rehearsals planned, promotion of the event & ticket sales, and a meeting with the caterer to figure out how much cheese and wine we will need to keep everyone going!