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Friday, June 19, 2009
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Friday Night Dress Rehearsals
The 6th and 7th meetings were dress rehearsals which occurred during the two Friday's before the actual murder mystery event. Aside from cutting into our personal after-work lives, these practice sessions were really useful for making the event go smooth and perfecting the action of the evening.
A suggestion to avoid taking up the time of your volunteers is to just figure exactly who is going to enjoy hamming it up and who really wants to be a decision maker with the plot. I'm sure a bunch of people have a vague interest in helping, but they don't all need to come. At the event there were about 50 staff people, which was on the very heavy side just to make sure the 110guests felt comfortable and everything went smoothly. Probably 20-30 of those people were in one of the 10 "clubs" that were meeting after-hours. Even the 10 group leaders didn't need to come to both dress rehearsals, but it doesn't hurt.
A suggestion to avoid taking up the time of your volunteers is to just figure exactly who is going to enjoy hamming it up and who really wants to be a decision maker with the plot. I'm sure a bunch of people have a vague interest in helping, but they don't all need to come. At the event there were about 50 staff people, which was on the very heavy side just to make sure the 110guests felt comfortable and everything went smoothly. Probably 20-30 of those people were in one of the 10 "clubs" that were meeting after-hours. Even the 10 group leaders didn't need to come to both dress rehearsals, but it doesn't hurt.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Writing Meetings
We had a couple of small writing meetings outside of the regular planning meetings, because the writing of the "script" had become a whole new animal from the planning of the event in general.
We have on the writing team 4 people with 4 various backgrounds.
The lead writer is a circulation staff member.
I am one of the contributors.
One volunteer who is a retired teacher of 20 years with an interest in mystery writing.
One volunteer who is a local published murder mystery author.
The mystery author is also a writing professor, so she was referred to in cases of tweaking and planning. The teacher, the circ worker and myself, a reference librarian got together in person a couple of times and compared notes. Each time, having brought various ideas and multiple sketches of what we had in mind.
The volunteer who is a former teacher dropped out essentially during the Xmas break time when her daughter was visiting for a while. But she still communicates with us via email on ideas.
The head writer and myself had a few in person meeting, but the bulk of our editing was done on google documents which is an amazing tool for this purpose. If you have a google email account (Gmail) then you can share a document that you are working on with other Gmail users by inviting them to be an editor or a reader.
The only problems we ran into on this format is the one time he started a new version, but forgot to share with me....
The types of people in this were so different! I think that was a very good thing to help us with a nice blend for the final product.
My own personal style is super-simple.
The head writer's style is uber-complex.
The volunteers style is far-out creative.
None of us triumphed over the other, rather we met in the middle to create a creative, detailed and rich murder-mystery plot!
The basic format was difficult to come up with but once settled upon should work very well. I highly reccommend you copy this format if you are having your first after-hours murder mystery fundraising event for your library:
Ten groups meet in the library for example: The Mystery Bookclub, Gardening Club, the Children's Literature Bookclub. Each group has about ten "members" which are actually ticketholders who are assigned to these fictional or semi-fictional clubs.
That format makes it much easier for mystery participants to figure out who's-who in the plot, by way of having nametags identifying which group is which and where they will meet when not wandering around getting wine and food.
We have on the writing team 4 people with 4 various backgrounds.
The lead writer is a circulation staff member.
I am one of the contributors.
One volunteer who is a retired teacher of 20 years with an interest in mystery writing.
One volunteer who is a local published murder mystery author.
The mystery author is also a writing professor, so she was referred to in cases of tweaking and planning. The teacher, the circ worker and myself, a reference librarian got together in person a couple of times and compared notes. Each time, having brought various ideas and multiple sketches of what we had in mind.
The volunteer who is a former teacher dropped out essentially during the Xmas break time when her daughter was visiting for a while. But she still communicates with us via email on ideas.
The head writer and myself had a few in person meeting, but the bulk of our editing was done on google documents which is an amazing tool for this purpose. If you have a google email account (Gmail) then you can share a document that you are working on with other Gmail users by inviting them to be an editor or a reader.
The only problems we ran into on this format is the one time he started a new version, but forgot to share with me....
The types of people in this were so different! I think that was a very good thing to help us with a nice blend for the final product.
My own personal style is super-simple.
The head writer's style is uber-complex.
The volunteers style is far-out creative.
None of us triumphed over the other, rather we met in the middle to create a creative, detailed and rich murder-mystery plot!
The basic format was difficult to come up with but once settled upon should work very well. I highly reccommend you copy this format if you are having your first after-hours murder mystery fundraising event for your library:
Ten groups meet in the library for example: The Mystery Bookclub, Gardening Club, the Children's Literature Bookclub. Each group has about ten "members" which are actually ticketholders who are assigned to these fictional or semi-fictional clubs.
That format makes it much easier for mystery participants to figure out who's-who in the plot, by way of having nametags identifying which group is which and where they will meet when not wandering around getting wine and food.
Sunday morning dress rehearsal
On Sunday January 13 we had a dress rehearsal at 9am. I would not suggest having a rehearsal at this time because the people who weren't going to church felt like they were being dragged into something other than a good time.
Out of the handful of us who made it here in one piece, a few of us had to be back to open the library at 1pm... But that small group really was a good group to get together for a practice run. The published mystery author gave great input on plot structure, wording of the clues and infused interest and mystery to our current play.
After a while about 10 of us were meeting and talking about how the event would go, so I dodged out to go eat lunch before coming back to work.
The meeting adjourned that morning at 11am.
Out of the handful of us who made it here in one piece, a few of us had to be back to open the library at 1pm... But that small group really was a good group to get together for a practice run. The published mystery author gave great input on plot structure, wording of the clues and infused interest and mystery to our current play.
After a while about 10 of us were meeting and talking about how the event would go, so I dodged out to go eat lunch before coming back to work.
The meeting adjourned that morning at 11am.
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!
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!
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Promotion with Library Public Relations
It's very important to share information about how we are promoting the event! Our head of PR made a special trip to the branch to discuss with the branch manager, the event artist and myself her keen ideas about promoting an event such as this.
Besides being very knowledgable about a successful promotional campaign, she agreed to use her own departments printing budget to get us some really fabulous (200) posters, an oversized poster for the branch, 1,000 bookmarks and 500 invitations to mail. The postage is on the house as well! Who knows how much that would have cost us, sorry I can't provide the numbers.
The people we targeted with the invitations are mostly possible Friend donors, who may be interested in coming to an after-hours fundraising event. This list was generated by the finance department from previous lists.
So we agreed on a date to have the illustration in to the PR department for printing and a date the printing would be ready for distribution in January.
Here we are in January, we had the addresses printed on mailing labels and sent them out asap. Set up several displays in the library, put a 5x5 poster in the main lobby, outreached to several mystery bookclubs around the county and a few bookclubs in our branch by bringing bookmarks and extending a personal invitation.
At this time, we have sold 20 or more tickets!
Besides being very knowledgable about a successful promotional campaign, she agreed to use her own departments printing budget to get us some really fabulous (200) posters, an oversized poster for the branch, 1,000 bookmarks and 500 invitations to mail. The postage is on the house as well! Who knows how much that would have cost us, sorry I can't provide the numbers.
The people we targeted with the invitations are mostly possible Friend donors, who may be interested in coming to an after-hours fundraising event. This list was generated by the finance department from previous lists.
So we agreed on a date to have the illustration in to the PR department for printing and a date the printing would be ready for distribution in January.
Here we are in January, we had the addresses printed on mailing labels and sent them out asap. Set up several displays in the library, put a 5x5 poster in the main lobby, outreached to several mystery bookclubs around the county and a few bookclubs in our branch by bringing bookmarks and extending a personal invitation.
At this time, we have sold 20 or more tickets!
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
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.
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.
