More Questions
for Activity Planners
by
Clark L and Kathryn H. Kidd
In our last
column, we talked about some of the questions that activity planners
should ask themselves before sitting down to plan a ward or group
activity. The first two on the list included identifying your target
audience and knowing the purpose of your activity. But there are
other things to consider before scheduling a party for your auxiliary
or your ward. If you can answer these additional questions, you’ll
be well on your way to planning a successful activity.
WHEN
SHOULD THE ACTIVITY BE SCHEDULED?
You’ll
soon find that choosing a date for your activity is far more complex
than simply pointing to an open spot on your calendar. Every family
in your ward uses a different calendar, and the success of your
activity will depend on whether the date you've chosen is available
on all these calendars. More than one ward activity has been ruined
because the planners didn’t realize parents would be tied
up with a Back-to-School night during the particular event in question,
or that the local high school prom would strip the ward of any available
babysitters. If your ward covers an area that is served by more
than one high school, you may have to take several school schedules
into account.
Other things
to consider are school vacations, local holidays, possible weather
complications, upcoming weddings that could involve large numbers
of ward members, stake or regional activities, and community celebrations.
We can’t give you a list of these, because they vary from
area to area. For example, ward activities in our area come to a
standstill during the month of August, because so many breadwinners
work for the government, and August is the traditional vacation
month for government workers. When August comes, half the people
in our area aren’t available because they’ve left for
the annual pilgrimage to Utah. Anyone who plans an August activity
for a large group is doomed to failure, because the numbers aren’t
there to support a successful event. You can avoid such surprises
by having an informal panel of “activity consultants”
through which you pass the dates of any proposed activity. These
should be ward members who are involved with schools, with the community,
and with other ward and stake events. You might also try to get
a copy of your stake calendar if your stake publishes one. As more
wards and stakes start using the calendaring facilities on the new
ward and stake web sites, this should be easier to coordinate.
As you’re
doing your scheduling, make sure you take the hours of the event
into account. More than one ward activity has been cut short because
the planners scheduled an event to last until 10 p.m., never considering
that babysitters needed to be home no later than nine o’clock
on a school night. Try to look at your time frame from all perspectives,
and you’ll be less likely to end up with unhappy surprises
on the day of your event.
WHERE
WILL THE EVENT BE HELD?
The location
of your event will be determined by how many people you’re
planning to involve. An activity that is planned for ten people
can be held almost anywhere. On the other hand, if your activity
is open to the whole ward membership, you may be limited to holding
that activity in the ward cultural hall or in the great outdoors.
If you use any part of the ward meetinghouse, you’ll need
to schedule the building to make sure you don’t conflict with
others who may also be planning to use the building. The more wards
that share a building, the greater the potential for conflict between
them. But even if your ward doesn’t share a meetinghouse,
you’ll have to schedule the building anyway. Otherwise you
may have several groups vying for the same facilities at the same
time, with the Relief Society claiming the kitchen for an Enrichment
meeting, the Young Women learning how to bake bread, the missionaries
trying to organize refreshments for a baptism, and a frenzied mother
trying to decorate the cultural hall for her daughter’s wedding
reception two days hence.
If you don’t
know the name of the person who is in charge of scheduling events
in your building, the ward executive secretary should be able to
tell you. If several wards share a building, your activities may
be limited to a specific ward activity night. It doesn’t do
any good to complain if the day you want isn’t available to
you. Don’t even think about asking for exceptions unless the
atmosphere between your wards is extremely congenial, because messing
around with a building’s schedule is a common cause of bad
feelings between the members of sister wards.
If you decide
to hold a ward activity outdoors, contingency plans should be made
in case the weather intervenes. You may think of the ward meetinghouse
as being a back-up site in case there’s a thunderstorm, but
you can’t use that meetinghouse if someone else has scheduled
it first. When you’re trying to decide where an event should
be held, never take anything for granted. You can’t have the
meetinghouse just because you want it, and you can’t have
the activity outside without taking the weather into account. And
don’t expect that someone who has a nice house or a great
weekend cabin should just give you the keys for an activity you’re
planning. Using someone’s home for a ward activity is a privilege,
not a right.
HOW
MUCH WILL THE ACTIVITY COST?
Back in the
good old days, many wards seemed to have an unlimited budget for
their activities. If you wanted to serve stuffed Cornish hens at
the ward dinner, all you had to do was write a check and spend the
money. But those days are as extinct as the passenger pigeon. Ward
budgets have been stripped to the barest essentials, and the bishop
will probably determine that paying this month’s electric
bill is more important than giving you a lavish budget for your
ward party. In most wards, it is probably typical for an auxiliary
to get a $50 - $250 activity budget for the entire year.
So don’t plan to have caviar and prime rib at every activity.
When you’re
assigned to organize an event for your group or for the ward as
a whole, the first thing to do is go to your auxiliary leader or
to the bishop and ask what your budget will be. You may be appalled
to learn you’ve only got a $25 budget for a ward dinner, but
this isn’t an insurmountable obstacle. Celebrations can be
planned on a shoestring. It takes a little more creativity to work
within a budget than it does to spend money as if there’s
no tomorrow, but there are ways to work around the lack of funds.
Just be careful not to overwork your ward members, who already spend
a lot of time and money as members of the ward. We’ll explore
this subject in greater detail in future columns, but if you’re
desperate and need advice now you’ll find an explanation in
chapter 10 of Ward Activities for the Clueless.
HOW
CAN YOU INVOLVE MANY PEOPLE IN THE EVENT?
In order to
have a successful activity, you’ll need to involve as many
people as possible. A party with 200 participants may be a wild
success in a ward with 250 active members, but it’s not as
big a triumph in a ward with 450 active members on the roster.
Here’s
a tip for you to remember: No matter how well you’ve planned
your activity, people are inherently lazy. Our lives are so
busy that by the time we’ve gotten home from work or school,
or have spent the day dragging children from one soccer game to
another; even the most exciting ward activity may not sound as appealing
as a nap in front of the television. You can combat this human tendency
toward inertia, however. One thing to keep in mind is that people
tend to support events if their participation is crucial to the
success of the event in question. Even if you can organize the entire
party yourself, you’ll get a wider base of support if other
people are involved in the process. Delegate, delegate, delegate
… and then delegate some more. If some people are bringing
food and others are setting up the decorations and others are helping
with the entertainment and still others are ready to clean up afterwards,
those people will probably be attending your activity.
There’s
one other way to guarantee that ward members will support your activity,
and it’s something that is largely overlooked. In order to
have a successful ward activity, your bishopric must be supportive
to the point that they attend the event and bring their families.
(If you’re planning an activity just for a ward auxiliary,
you’ll need the same type of support from the auxiliary leaders.)
It is impossible to have a successful ward activity, no matter
how well you plan it or how excited you are about it, if your bishopric
doesn’t support you.
The members
of your ward tend to follow the lead of the bishopric in determining
which activities are important. This places an unfair burden on
the bishopric members, but it’s a burden that cannot be avoided.
If your bishopric doesn’t attend ward activities, this sends
a signal to everyone else in the ward that your activities aren’t
worthy of being supported … and your ward members will not
attend. Do not underestimate the importance of this. We speak from
bitter experience. If you’ve got the support of your bishopric
members, you’re home free. If you don’t have the support
of your bishopric, you might as well cancel the activity and save
yourself the aggravation and the embarrassment of failure.
If you find
yourself with an unsupportive bishopric but have to host ward activities
anyway, try issuing personal, handwritten invitations to your bishop
and his wife. Or you can delegate a small but crucial part on the
program to the bishop or one of his family members. After all, if
the bishop’s nine-year-old daughter is singing on the program,
the bishop is far more likely to rearrange his schedule to attend
the event.
HOW
SHOULD THE EVENT BE PUBLICIZED?
No matter what
event you’re planning, the answer to that question is, “As
vigorously as possible.” A wise man once said that people
forget the things they subconsciously want to forget. This may be
true, but people also forget a lot of things they want to remember.
If your activity has been publicized so extensively that people
can’t forget it even if they want to, your event will be far
more successful.
Some of the
avenues you can use include the ward newspaper, a meetinghouse bulletin
board, flyers or invitations, a ward calendar, “telephone
trees,” the Sunday bulletin, the Relief Society newsletter,
or a ward web site. Word of mouth is another effective means of
publicity. If someone has been personally invited to your event,
or was called on the day of the event with a gentle reminder, he’s
far more likely to attend. Perhaps our experience is atypical, but
we have found that trying to use the home teachers and visiting
teachers to publicize events almost never works. But there is a
real temptation to do this, because it is so easy. If you decide
to do this, make sure to use other publicity avenues as well.
Remember –
people tend to go where they’re needed and wanted. If you
let individuals know that they, specifically, are both wanted and
needed at your ward activity, they’re far more likely to attend
the event you’ve so carefully put together than they would
be if they believed their absence would never be noticed.
One thing that
will sabotage even the best of activities is to schedule it on a
week following a Sunday when your ward does not meet – for
example, the week after General or Stake Conference. People need
that reminder on the Sunday before the event, and if they don’t
have that, a good percentage of them will forget. You can avoid
these problems by not scheduling events on those weeks, or by using
tools such as “telephone trees” or post cards to remind
people a couple of days before the event.
Pulling off
a successful activity is always a gamble, and there is no guarantee
that it will be a success even if you follow all the rules. But
your probability of success is much higher if you ask the right
questions as outlined in these past two columns. Don't let hours
of planning go to waste just because you failed to answer a few
simple questions designed to avoid activity catastrophes.
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