Trivia Night and Mt Little Joe

We’ve just had a huge Trailwalker-based weekend. Saturday night (14th) was our major fundraiser comprising Trivia Night and Silent Auction. Yesterday (15th) was our second-last training walk over the last leg of the course; CP8 over Mt Little Joe and back to the finish.

Trivia Night

We’d left our run for the trivia night a bit late. If you read all of the documentation from OXFAM, they say “don’t forget your fundraising planning when you start into your training”. We’ll we did. There was a lot of enthusiasm amongst the team in December with our first planning meetings. But as was started with our regular training on every Sunday in Jan/Feb, we had planned on discussing the fundraising during breaks in our walks. But then we didn’t get critical mass on the walks, and the support crew weren’t there, so the planning just didn’t happen.

I think it was about 3-4 weeks ago that we got serious about the Trivia Night. There is a huge amount of effort required to prepare for a night like this, including:

• Booking a venue, and organising all of the logistics for the venue (tables, seating, laptop, projector, whiteboard, powercords, etc.).
• Getting sponsorship in the form of prizes. Fiona did a stirling job of writing letters and visiting stores to get things donated to use as prizes. In the end we had 1 x door prize, 7 x raffle prizes, 1 x winning table prize and 20+ silent auction items. Some companies/stores supplied multiple items (such as Hoyts with lots of tickets), but there was still a huge amount of door knocking and letter writing. There is also the “thank-you” followup.
• Getting the word out. This was an area where we could have done better. We had (small) flyers at the Dojo, announcements from instructors, and a large amount of “word of mouth”. But with less than four weeks notice, we struggled to get 50 people there on the night. With a bit more notice, we could have got flyers into the local primary school newsletters (particularly for the kids who train at our dojo) and larger (a3) posters up throughout the community.
• Preparation for the night also took a bit of work, with a powerpoint show for the night, question (and answer) sheets, pens for tables, silent auction sheets, raffle tickets, table dressing, cleaning products, and bins (boxes) & liners. Also, cash (in sufficient coins and small notes for the coin-based games on the night) and a cash tin. I’m sure there are others.
• Planning for non-cash management on the night. How to handle credit cards? We used the sponsorship books.
• Allocating people to jobs. We had almost all of our 12 people working on the night covering; MC’ing, running the games between question rounds, manning the door and entry tickets, running the silent auction, and running around selling raffle tickets.

Of course just as we were arriving to setup the hall, the heavens opened up. It continued to rain whilst we were moving chairs between buildings and stopped just before we headed home to get changed. Then it returned as we did for the evening!

In the end we had about fifty people which was a good size, but not as many as we’d hoped. The evening went well with a lot of discussion over some of the trivia questions and the games were enjoyed by all participants. At the end of the night we’d raised around $1700 which was a great outcome. Thanks to all who helped and participated.

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