A Night of Make Believe

Last night was the big night for my PR Event Management classmates and I. It was the final event we’ve been planning for over a semester now – A Night of Make Believe. We had to choose a non-profit, then plan and host a fundraising event for them. Fortunately the class isn’t graded on the success or failure of the event…but on all the little aspects that go into the planning stages, such as contracts, food, theme, entertainment, and sponsorships/donations, etc.

Since this is a yearly thing the PR students do there is also some competition to see if the current PR class can out do the year before. Last year the PR students raised $8,000 for their non-profit so that became our minimum goal for this year. However our class secretly hoped to make about $10,000 since no PR class had ever made that much before. At the end of the night, after all the calculations we done and even after we subtracted all the expenses…we made over $10,000! However this didn’t only come from the event, we’ve done mini fundraisers all semester, had a couple cash sponsors and we even did a bake sale.  From the event evening we made proceeds from our substantial collection of silent auction items, ticket sales and even a candy table where you could buy bags of candy, or make a donation to guess how many jelly beans were in the jar (There were 536…we counted!) We were also fortunate enough to have Mark Madryga from Global TV as our speaker for the evening!

We wanted something child-oriented since Small Talk is a school for pre-school aged children. Initially we started off with the theme of “Back to your childhood” but when we settled on the event name of A Night of Make Believe the entire theme shifted to that. We wanted it to be about the fun and fantasy of youth, of reminiscing about playing games and make-believe. The picture to the left is of the finished poster the PR Marketing team made up for the event.

To go along with the theme the dress code for us was to all wear black clothes and then either wear a top hat or tiara…the guys wore tops hats and some of the girls managed to find very cute, small top hats too. I, however, wore a tiara. (right)

 

The following pictures are of the silent auction tables and the candy table.