We Rocked It at Trivia this Year!
After reading this post, I know that you will understand when I say that it takes a tremendous amount of effort and coordination to put on an event like this. Why do all this work? The answer is that all the women in JATC care about the children in our community and their futures, and the funds we raise from this event allow us to finance the many projects that we provide for Taney County kids. Of course, we couldn’t do any of this without the support of a very caring and generous community. It all comes down to the permanent slogan of our organization: CARE TODAY—CHARACTER TOMORROW!
It took hours and hours of work to make this Trivia Night/Silent Auction happen! It all starts with selecting a date, finding a location, and coming up with a theme. Once we have a theme, we start creating “Save the Date” cards and invitations. Then we work on finding emcees, a music maestro, and entertainers that can all work their magic with our theme.
Beginning in October, we start soliciting for the silent auction items by filling out applications online, making personal calls, and asking members to create items. We always have a varied selection for our attendees to bid on, and this year was no exception. We had scuba diving lessons, airline tickets, a new shower enclosure, law services, gorgeous jewelry, food (and lots of it), entertainment, health and beauty products, and the list goes on.
Another important part is coming up with the questions for the Trivia contest. We don’t just look on the internet or go to a book for these questions, but try to come up with different categories. Two of my favorites this year were “Let Them Eat Cake” and “Let’s Take a Ride”. Did you know that “Marzipan is made from almonds” or that “Steve McQueen drove a green Ford Mustang in the movie Bullitt”?
Some of our talented ladies then find the decorations to go with the theme and transform a hotel conference room into something you can only imagine. There are also the more mundane tasks (but just as important) of the publicity and outreach to get tables filled, selling the ads and asking for donations, putting together the program (proofreading galore), making name tags and registering participants as they come in, scoring the answer sheets and delivering them to tables, checking out the participants at the end of the evening, finding one or more photographers to record the event. And we don’t want to forget about finding the raffle items and then selling the raffle tickets. Whew! Time to take a breath! We’ll be starting on Trivia, 2017, before you know it!