Event hosting

As well as being able to display and staff an information table at events hosted by 3rd parties, Animals Taiwan occassionally hosts our own special events. In order to do this effectively, it is necessary to establish an Event Hosting committee each time. Thus, this committee tends to change in membership and purpose frequently.

The committee may be chaired by different people at different times, but its basic function is overseen by the Events Coordinator.

Currently, two kinds of people are desperately in need:

1. Driver: Help to transport the merchandise and dogs to fostering place. It is better to be able to drive manual car.
2. Event host: Contact to the host of the place, and understand what rules in that place. For example, some places are not allowed to place donation boxes and some places are not allowed to have dogs. Find some volunteers to help, probably through mailing list system. Arrange the schedule of every volunteer. Also, need to go to the holding center first to check the merchandise. Help to setup. Prepare the change. When the event finished, calculate the money, contact to the driver, and ensure everything is fine, dogs all on the car. Finally, check all the new sponsors' data, and give the money to Liza.

目前最缺的兩種人力是：

1. 司機：協助搬運以及載商品 & 狗狗到會場, 最好是能開手排車.
2. 活動主辦人： 接洽活動主辦廠商, 了解有什麼規矩 (有些場所不能放捐款箱, 不能帶狗狗…etc), 尋找志工協助(可能透過寄信的系統), 安排志工的schedule, 也要提前先去收容所盤點商品, 協助 setup, 準備零錢. 活動完畢時, 得要算錢, 連絡driver, 確保商品都收好, 狗狗都上車, 整理活動所找到的新sponsor 資料, 把錢交給Liza.

I thought I'd post this to share with you northern folks, how we managed to raise over 100K in one single event a few months back.

It all started during an adoption event. This girl Nancy seemed to have a lot of suggestions and ideas about raising money, and we basically told her that ideas are excellent, but that putting them into action was far better… This was said politely, of course , in the midst of a long conversation. Her response was short but sweet: “OK” she said, “I'll see what I can do.”

From there she made a plan to put together a big raffle. Later down the line, we changed the raffle idea into a animal bash/party/raffle. It worked out, and we raised a lot more funds than we were hoping for initially.

Anyways, here's how we did it:

1-Put together a proposal for local businesses. This had to be professionally printed so that we looked organised when asking support from the local community businesses owners. We offered to add a logo of the participating businesses on all our publications for that event. The publications were basically huge posters designed to look neat and professionally made. The minimum we asked for was 4000NT in merchandise or gift certificates. The support we got was unbelievable! We could not raffle all that was given to us because it was too much and the raffle would have lasted about 8 hours! We ended up having to contact some businesses back to explain this surplus of support and to ask if it was OK to use their donations to raised funds in other events. All were fine with it, mind me we only contacted businesses that we were more acquainted with the owners… We also used many of the surpluses prizes as door prizes during the event itself. We also used one of our biggest prize as door prize to draw the crowd. It worked, the place was packed all night.

2- Once the proposal was ready it was time to contact businesses, and ask for support. Shops, restaurants, gyms, travel agents, etc, you name it. Once that was done, it was a matter of creating the posters/event announcements-promotion. Note that we also had to create logos for some of the participating businesses because they didn't have any available. That's something we offered included with the advertisement we would provide on the event announcement posters.

3-Once we knew what the prizes were, we put together another publication which promoted the raffle(we waited to have 100 000NT worth of raffle prizes to do that)Note that this advert was a smaller one, not the actual posters that we put all over the city, but smaller adverts which we used to sell raffle tickets. Basically, we had big posters posted around the city, and we had smaller ones that volunteers used to show people what the raffle tickets were for.(A list of prizes) Note that we also had to have raffle tickets professionally printed with ATK logo, etc. We could have sold more tickets, but we were late getting those ready. Best would have been to sell tickets for 2 months…The door prize tickets were just the regular rolls of numbered tickets available in stationary stores.

4-We sold raffle tickets for one month. We asked all of our schools to help out, and some of our bosses even let us put adverts in the students communication books! We sold 100k worth of tickets. The price was 100NT per ticket, or 200 NT for 3 tickets. Every volunteer had to recruit volunteers to sell tickets. This was a bit of work to synchronize, but with a decent spread sheet, numbered tickets and one person in charge of distributing the tickets to all volunteers, it worked out well.

5-We found a venue/bar/pub, that was willing to hold the event and give us a part of the proceeds on sales of beverages. There was no cover charge, and everyone who came got a door prize ticket/a chance to win prizes and even a return flight to Macau.

6-We asked local djs to help us out drawing the crowd, and three of them volunteered. We had djs entertaining the crowd from 10pm until 4am. We raised an additional 25k with the drinks sold that night.

Once the event was done, we had to contact the winners and distribute the prizes, as well as send thank you cards to all the businesses who supported us.

That's it!

We are now waiting to have our legal status, and then we will plan another event such as this one. Except this time we will go after the big guys… Sony, Nike, Louis Vuitton, Panasonic, etc… The goal is to raise 1 million NT, half of which will be donated to the local orphans in Kaohsiung.

Special thanks to all our volunteers for their outstanding help, and extra special thanks to Keith and Dale- founders or connectkaohsiung.com, and to Nancy for being the spark-plug of the most successful fund-raising event Animals Taiwan has seen to date. Cool

Cheers! Chris