Improving your event planning

Automatically generated from the audio, so it may not be perfectly word-for-word.

Hi, welcome to the PTA Podcast. My name is Yvonne, and I've been a PTA volunteer for a few years now. I'm just one of thousands of volunteers up and down the country who all want to make a difference to their schools. PTAs are becoming even more crucial in UK schools to boost budget, and I find it fascinating to talk to other volunteers about the different approaches they take. So please join me in this podcast to share information, generate ideas, debate issues, and celebrate success. And I hope that you can take something away for your PTA today. I've added a box so you can add your email address to my mailing list, and then you can be notified when I release a new episode of this podcast. You can follow my show on Apple or Spotify podcasts and other podcast apps, which will also alert you to a new episode if you subscribe or follow. But I know not everybody wants to always subscribe to everything and get all those notifications, so I'm offering this method as well if you would rather have it. So when I release a new episode, you'll just get a short email telling you it's ready for you to listen to.com has all my episodes listed there, but I've also included some photos of things I've done on the PTA as well as some things I've talked about in episodes of my podcast so that you can see what I'm talking about. And I also try to include some downloadable resources that you might find handy. There's not much on there at the moment, but I'm hoping to build that up. So do check it out and see what you can find on there. Anyway, back to the topic of this podcast. Sometimes we can all run events exactly the same as we've done in the past. And while this can make things a lot easier for everybody, it does mean that you might be missing an opportunity to streamline the process or improve parts of your event, and even making small changes can lead to better results. For example, you might find that you can improve the profitability of a fundraiser, or you could streamline the organisation and planning so it takes you less time, or you may be able to improve the experience of your volunteers so they're more likely to volunteer to take part again in the future. I know that many PTAs will be already planning probably your big summer fundraiser. So I thought this would be a good time to talk about it. So you can see if you can fit some of these ideas into your planning at an early stage. Most of the things I am going to mention can be applied to many different fundraisers. So even if you're not planning a summer fate or a summer fare, I'm hoping that there might be one or two things here you might find useful in other types of events. And this episode might feel a little bit disjointed as I'm going to be throwing a lot of questions out to you and not really giving you any answers. The idea is that I'm trying to encourage you to evaluate your current plans and see if you can make any improvements, however small, to your own school or PTA situation. It might feel a bit overwhelming to think about reviewing all of these suggestions about your whole massive event. So maybe you could just pick one or two to look at right now and consider the others at a later event. The things I'm going to talk about are things that I have reviewed and assessed in my own PTA and some things that I have changed in the way that we organise things over the years. So it's by no means an exhaustive list, and I think there are loads and loads of other things that you could look at in your organization. So if you have other ideas, then definitely follow those through because mine is not an overall comprehensive list, just to give you some ideas of the types of things that you could look at, and hopefully it might lead you into some investigating. So during this episode, I'm going to be talking about something called marginal gains and how PTAs can use this concept or way of thinking to improve events and activities that they organise. So let me just start by explaining what the phrase marginal gains actually means. It's also known as the 1% factor, so you might have come across it called that before. And a simple explanation of this concept is that you make very small changes to various different aspects of what you are doing, and then these seemingly tiny, inconsequential changes actually eventually then all add up when you put the put your thing back together. They all add up to bigger, significant improvements overall. And the most famous use of this idea of marginal gains was in the British cycling team a few years ago. So the team wasn't doing very well. We have a huge cycling culture in the UK, loads of cyclists, but for some reason our competitive team representing British cycling was not doing well. And a new director was brought in who had a philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do. So he examined everything about the British cycling team at that time and made some very tiny changes. He said that the whole principle came from the idea that if you broke ever down everything, if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike and then improve it, each of those items by 1%, you'll get a significant increase when you put them all together. If you want to read more about what he did, his name is Dave Brailsford, and you can find quite a few articles on the internet if you're really interested. So to start with, they did exactly that. They broke everything down, all the different aspects of riding a bike. So some of the things they did were were that they redesigned the bike seats to make them more comfortable. They tested fabrics in a wind tunnel to see which are the best fabrics for the racing suits. They looked at which massage gels gave the fastest muscle recovery on the athletes, and they even that's just I think this is genius. They even hired a surgeon to teach the cyclists the best way of washing their hands to avoid catching a cold. So they literally looked at everything. And um they also um looked at obviously the bikes, the riders, the suits, and the less obvious things, too. And then they having adopted this concept and this principle, five years later, they were winning gold medals and had an extremely successful time and still are having an extremely successful time. So that kind of explains uh marginal gains if you haven't heard of it before. And now you understand a bit of what I'm talking about. I'm going to suggest a few different areas that you might like to look at in the context of your own school and PTA and see whether you can make any improvements at all, however small, because we are talking about small changes here, it's not overhauling everything straight away, it's just talking about tiny things that can be improved. And remember, making the small changes they all add up together to improve the overall event, to improve the experience of your families. They might possibly save you time as a volunteer, and they might lead to increasing your fundraising by just making some tiny changes. I'm going to highlight a few things which have changed over my years in my PTA, and the one thing which will have the biggest impact on your event is the people who are volunteering to take part. All PTA events are staffed by volunteers, as you know, and we all know that finding those volunteers can be very difficult and time consuming. So rather than broadcasting an appeal, just asking for volunteers for an event, have you considered trying a more targeted approach? Sometimes people can respond much better to specific requests. So, for example, I think I have mentioned this in my podcast before, but it's so useful. I just want to make sure you've um heard about it. A couple of years ago, I was, well, the first five years of my PTA work, I was one of those people just broadcasting an appeal for volunteers and feeling really frustrated that nobody was coming forward. And then I heard about this website called Volunteer Sign Up, which is a free website designed to help you to get people to volunteer. And I will put a link in the show notes. Um, but the website is just volunteersignup alloneword.org, and it's completely free. And you basically create a spreadsheet for your event, don't we just all have a spreadsheet? And you list all the volunteering opportunities on it, the time required by the volunteer, and a description of the duties, and you can then easily share the link, and people just click on the link and they look down the list of opportunities, and they hopefully just sign up for something that they feel they can do. So I tried this the for the first time for a summer fate a couple of years ago, and I had a much better response to it than my previous attempts to attract volunteers. So I would highly recommend giving it a try if you haven't already. There are, of course, other ways, other apps and websites and things you could use to um list volunteer roles and get people to sign up. Um I haven't tried the other ones, I just tried this one and I found it worked perfectly fine. It was very simple, and I think that's what I liked about it. You didn't have to um log in and create an account or anything. When people um actually I think I did because I was setting up the sheets, but when the volunteers click on the link and they want to sign up for something, they don't have to create an account. All they have to do is add their name, um, email address, and possibly their phone number. I can't quite remember if it's email or phone number, not sure. Um, but obviously add some sort of contact details so that you can contact whoever it is that's put their name down to do the cake stall or something, so that you can then get in touch and give them more specific details and you know confirm all the all the details with all of them. You can see which slots have been filled, which ones are struggling, and then when you go back again to your parent community to ask for volunteers, you can say, Well, if we we really need volunteers for this particular thing, and if if we don't get a volunteer, we're not going to be able to run it, that can also help people to put their names down. So um, I think it's much better to um show people what they're volunteering for, um, and just to help them put their name down by giving them some details. And it could also be a good idea to appoint a specific person on your PTA team to be the volunteer coordinator. I have thought this in the past few years that it would be a really great role for somebody to do. They could be responsible for finding the volunteers prior to the events, so for example, you know, putting up this list or sharing this list, um, but they could also be responsible for filling any gaps if somebody pulls out and briefing the volunteers on the day. So I've had this happen to me before where I've had a list of volunteers, and then the day before I had two people pull out who just came up to me in the playground and said, Archie, sorry I can't do this stall anymore, which you know pe things happen in people's lives, but it kind of left me hanging with two stalls that suddenly I just couldn't cover, and it was another job added to my list, and I was the main coordinator of the summer fate, and I could really have done with somebody taking that off my hands. So if you have somebody on your PTA who um is good with talking to people and persuading them, or just likes people management, or also happens to know a lot of people, you know, there were some people that just know loads of people, they would be a great person to be a volunteer coordinator, and then if anybody did have to pull out at the last minute, they the volunteer coordinator has to sort that problem out, it's not the person who's responsible for the overall event. So I always thought that this would be a great idea. Unfortunately, I never had enough people on my PTA team to actually have a go with that role, but um I think it would work really well. If you have someone that already does that, let me know. I'd be really interested to hear if that role works as well as I think it would. So do let me know on hello at ptapodcast.com. So, yeah, the volunteer coordinator could be in charge of finding the volunteers, fielding questions, looking after them on the day, because that all takes a lot of time. Um, and looking after your people and looking after your volunteers is really really important, and always remember that the experience your volunteers have at your event is another crucial element in your marginal gains. When we're thinking about marginal gains, if they have a good experience, they are more likely to volunteer again or even encourage their friends to take part. So the way that I have tried to look after my volunteers in the past is just to do some really simple things. Um so, for example, to encourage people to volunteer, I try to split up the volunteers, um, the volunteer roles so that nobody is volunteering for the whole event. Um, so for example, if I had a two-hour fate, I would put an hour slot for each stall so that somebody's only volunteering for one hour, so they have another hour left over to actually experience the fate for themselves or be with their children at the fate. Um it does mean that if you do something like that, it does mean that you're looking for you know potentially double the amount of volunteers that you were trying to get before. But um it's it's a good starting point, I think, because um a lot of people can donate an hour of their time. And then when the event is running, I basically spend my time running around the event offering drinks or food to the volunteers. Um, so I ask them if they want anything from the cafe or the cake stall, and I can go and get it for them. Um, or if they need a toilet break, I will just cover their stall while they go and go to the toilet or or anything they need really to feel comfortable and have a good time and make sure that somebody is almost making sure that somebody has noticed that they are volunteering and is thankful to them because I think a lot of the time volunteering is so invisible, and people might say a quick thank you at the end, but I think I think it needs to be more than that. I think people need to really be seen, and so by going around and asking people and talking to them and seeing if there's anything they need, I feel like that goes some way towards making that person feel noticed. Um I have to be honest though, in the past when I've tried to split sessions on a stall, I haven't always had enough volunteers to do that. Obviously, that is my wishful thinking that loads of people would volunteer if it's just now or something. Um, I just want to reassure you, in case it sounds like I have a lot of people volunteering, I don't have a lot of people volunteering. Um I, as you know, my school's pretty small, so we have about 50 families, so that's potentially a hundred parents, but it's it's it won't be a hundred parents, so um, you know, I don't have hordes of volunteers at all. But I did it to try and just help people sign up for an hour in the hope that it would make a difference, and and I think it did, um but uh so what did happen when I tried those hour slots is that some people signed up for both hours anyway, so they did the store the whole time, other people signed up for just an hour, and then I didn't get anyone uh for the like the second hour. Um, but on the day when people were moving around, a lot of people said actually it's okay, I I can do the next hour, it's fine. So that was really nice. I think perhaps they were enjoying it more than they thought they were going to. Um, so anyway, it all worked out okay. Um, and using the volunteer sign-up website, I did get a few people who have never volunteered before, and in particular one mum who volunteered on the cake stall, and she had such a good time taking part that she even posted on our school parents' WhatsApp group about how much she'd enjoyed herself volunteering, and it was honestly the best advert we could have had as a PTA, and it was really heartwarming. So I think appointing someone to take charge of and coordinate all your volunteers and to look after the volunteers is a very worthwhile job for someone, and I think it would make a difference to your event overall and potentially any event going forwards, so that would definitely help with your marginal gains. And don't forget that your PTA team, including yourself if you're the chair, is also made up of volunteers who may also benefit from a break from a stall, too. Your PTA team also has the chance to make things easier at an event by sharing the workload as much as possible and delegating jobs within your PTA team can help to share things out, but it's also a way of empowering other team members and helping people develop skills which can be used again in the future. Investing time and energy into your PTA team can be a great use of your time at meetings and certainly helps going forwards if more people can do more jobs or know how to do them and be able to share their experiences with others. So, and this all depends obviously on your team and your individual situation. I know that not every PTA team has a lot of PTA volunteers who want to take on roles. I completely understand that, and I have been there. Um, but you could try and be proactive if you are the chair and ask people on your team if there is anything they would like to have a go at or learn how to do, or you could just list the jobs that need completing and wait for members of your team to volunteer. Um the ultimate aim would be to get people able to take on specific roles and even more than one role, and for them also to feel comfortable doing those roles, and I think this leads to a stronger team, and if you can empower people and help them feel successful in the role, then that will mean skills are banked in your PTA for future events. It's always when you invest in people, it's always a longer-term investment, isn't it? Um, so we're kind of looking forward here to to other things. I do know how hard that can be though, and I have struggled with delegating when I was a PTA chair, and please believe me, I know what it feels like when you try and delegate, and nobody offers to help. Not even anybody on your PTA team offers to help. I know how that feels, and I know that some of the things I'm suggesting might not work, or your team might not be open to these ideas, but hopefully there might be one or two easy changes you could have a go at and just see what happens, really. Sometimes you need to try changes. A few times before people kind of get on board, and um I know that can feel like a bit of an uphill struggle, but if you have a vision for how something can work and you think yes, this is going to improve things, then then really have a go at it and try and get some people on board to support you. So, in those moments over the past few years where I have found delegation to be an uphill struggle, there were a couple of ideas I had to help myself with the workload of an event, and both of these were angled towards taking control and doing something to help the event on the day. So the first one sounds a bit obvious, as it's about making decisions on things in advance. Um, this sounds a bit silly because all the planning for an event happens in advance usually, but here I'm talking more about the logistics of an event and how things might work on the day. So, one thing I do, if particularly if I'm organising a fate or an event with more than one station or stall or something at it, is that I will always make a map of where the stalls are or where I think they're going to be, and I'll make that map in advance. So basically, that decision on where things are going to be has already been made. You don't want to get to your event with your setup team, and you don't want your setup time to be used to actually make a decision on where things are going when you could have done that in advance. Now, obviously, there might be times when you have made a plan, but when it comes to setting up, you realise that it needs to change, and that's okay. That's okay to make adjustments to a plan that you've already made on the day because sometimes that's just necessary. But making a plan in advance keeps, I think, any disruptions with a new plan to a minimum on the day, and it also frees up your brain space, uh, which is really important to enable you to make more sensible decisions on the day. So instead of being faced with 12 decisions of where to put 12 stalls, you're instead only faced with two decisions because this particular stall is going to cause um a bit of a bottleneck. So I'm gonna move that one or swap those two around so it does actually make things a bit easier. And when I say I make a map, I I literally draw a map on a piece of paper and I photocopy it and I share it with the rest of my team. Um I obviously just ask people what they think in advance, but on the day I make sure everybody who's setting up has a copy of the map so that it helps to spread out the workload, it allows me to delegate, and um, hopefully, people can look at the map and not have to ask me the question because when you are setting up, you don't want loads of people coming over asking you loads of questions. If I can give them the information, that is much better for our setup time. And another thing which I tried, um, I think this was for my first summer fate. Um, I was finding it pretty chaotic and stressful with all these stalls. I've never organised anything like that before, and I felt like I was losing control, and I'm not a person that enjoys losing control. I like to have control at all times. So most of these tips are from um me trying to regain control over things. Um, so yeah, I was finding it pretty chaotic, and I decided to set up a system of garbage boxes, basically, where we could keep things for each stall as we collected them in the weeks leading up to the event. So, say we had 20 stalls, I allocated each stall a box and each stall a corresponding number, and as we ran up to the event, as we collected items like prizes for games or the equipment for games or whatever it might be, like the face paints, whatever it might be, as we collected them, as people bought them, we put them into the relevant box for that stall. And it was so useful, and it really helped me feel in control, uh, which was much better. So, for example, I could easily put a copy of the risk assessment, instructions for the stall, a sign for the stall, and a tub for the float into each box straight away, and that immediately made me feel better because I had done something positive and proactive and something practical to get the fate ready in advance. I couldn't put out the tables yet, but I could get everything for each store ready in one place in advance, and then we just as I said added the other stuff as we went along. Then on the day of the event, we put out all our tables. We knew from the map which store was going to be on which table, and so we just took the box to the right table, and the things for that store were already in the box. Um, and what I also did, which I thought was very clever, was when people volunteered to run a stall, um, and as for the timings of when they should be there, I got them to be there about 20 minutes before the fate started, so they could set out their stall um from the box that was on the table. So we didn't have to go around and set out the individual stalls, which saved us loads of time when we were setting up everything else. Um we got the volunteers to do their own stalls, we provided all the stuff for them, they just had to put it out and arrange it nicely and all that kind of thing, but but that was fine. Um, and it only took them a few minutes, so it was really easy. And all we had to add in to the stall boxes at the last minute was just the float of cash. And then at the end of the event, we just asked everybody to pack all their stuff back into their box, and we just removed the boxes from the table so we could tidy up, and so everything was then neatly packed into these boxes, and it meant that instead of trying to, you know, put everything away at the end of the fate, and it was all jumbled mess, we could actually just leave the boxes in school, and we spent the next week kind of gradually putting stuff away and unpacking them, which made it all much, much easier. So I really felt that that system helped me as I was able to really get on top of the setup in advance when I was feeling anxious about it, and and and then it really helped to save loads of time on the day. So I feel that that's quite a great example of an easy marginal gain because I didn't actually change anything about the event itself, I just changed a bit of the organization, and in the run-up to an event, I think it can make a massive difference, um, especially with the last-minute organisation going on, and things suddenly get a bit crazy in that last week. So just having a bit more control of feeling more organised can can really help you. And for me personally, I find getting things out of my head and down onto paper really helps. And remember, putting things on paper means you can share it or delegate it more easily to other people, which is really important. It definitely helps with my stress levels and makes my head feel less busy, which does help. And of course, if if any of your key team are you know fall ill or suddenly can't take part in an event, then everything they've organized. If you get them to also put things down on paper and share with everybody or share electronically, whatever you would prefer in your PTA, then at least somebody else um can come in and pick up the reins, and um you know the event is not just gonna crumble and get really difficult because a key person isn't there. So sharing information is um really important. One big area that you might like to go over every so often is the way that you accept payments for your event or payments at your event. Now, there are so many options here that I can't go over them all, and I've personally only tried a small fraction of what's available, so I don't feel like I can talk about all the other things that you could try. I would say that it's definitely worth reassessing the methods you use for different things every so often, as the systems seem to change all the time, as far as I can see. Um, some websites change their terms and conditions, they change what their fee charges are, and um new ideas come onto the market all the time. So, or you know, your parent community might have its own preference, like some parent communities work better with cash, some work better as cashless. So, you really need to um have a careful think about what works well in your school. I think the two most important things um to think about are firstly that you make it easy for people to give you money, very important if you're fundraising, and secondly, that you very clearly communicate how they do that. So if you want to accept payments electronically, then it's worth spending a bit of time talking through and investigating some options. You could even have one person going away just to do some research because there's as I said, there's just so many options out there now. Um, so taking payments electronically would be things like using a website to take payments, like a website like I know a lot of PTAs use something called PTA events where they can sell tickets and things, or you could use a sort of um donation website like Superkind. Um, you could use a card payment system like a sum-up machine, you could use your school's existing payment system where parents pay for school trips and things like that. We have used our school payment system before, um, or you can even use direct bank transfers to your PTA bank account, so there are and there's probably other options as well. Um, so there are lots of choices, and all of the different electronic systems charge different fees. So, as I said, it's definitely worthwhile allocating some time to doing some comparisons and seeing what you would think would work best for your own school community, and it could be a case of weighing up um different options. So, for example, you might weigh up the fees charged against how easy the system is to use. So, because they all charge different fees, but the way you use the system is sometimes less complicated on some sites than others, you might feel that you could swallow a slightly higher fee if you feel that more parents are going to use a particular website. Um, for example, again, there are no bank fees on a direct transfer into your PTA bank account, but that relies on that being successful, I think relies on two things. One, a really excellent person on your PTA team in the sort of treasury team to keep an eye on what's been sent in and check who's paid for and what they've paid for, and it also relies on parents setting up your PTA account, bank account, on their own banking app. And if you're anything like me, it feels like a real drag to set up another payment on my um banking app. But in reality, it doesn't take very long, it just feels like a hassle. Um, uh obviously, once they've set up the PTA bank account, that's all they need to do, and it literally takes five minutes. But could that potentially be a barrier? Maybe it could be a barrier to someone, I don't know, but it's it's something to think about. So there's electronic payments, and of course, another option is cash. But as some people don't carry cash routinely now, this would need to be clearly communicated to parents probably a few times, if we've seen in episode 24, um, prior to the event, so that people would know to be prepared to bring cash and um and get it out the cash machine or whatever in advance. And if you do go for cash, then of course each store needs a float, um so somebody needs to prepare that, somebody needs to count the cash and bank the cash, so there are other jobs involved with cash, but at the end of the day, you can't argue with cash, it is actual real money that's been donated to your PTA, which is great. And I personally think certainly at an event where you have lots of stalls and you have children going around spending money, I think using cash is great for the children to learn about money. Um, and and you might feel that that outweighs the hassle of doing all the floats and everything like that. So um, you know, there's pros and cons to everything, and um you just gotta work out what's best for your own situation. Um so if you have an event with lots of stalls, like a fade, as I've said, you might need each stall to have the capacity to take card payments and/or accept cash for the float, which again is more work for somebody organizing that, or you could choose to use a token system where you have one stall which accepts real money, either a card machine or actual cash, um, and then that's exchanged for tokens, so then each individual stall is actually paid. You pay for your games or food or whatever in tokens. Um, so you just have one store where you have a float and a card machine, and then all your stores just accept tokens, which makes things a little easier. Um, I have tried this at Summer Faye and it worked pretty well, um, and it can be very effective. And you could even look into pre-selling bags of tokens in advance. We I think went with one token to be worth 50p, um, and then that covered everything. Um, and people were buying bags of bags of tokens for £5 or £2.50. Um, and it was it was good. Um, but yeah, like I said, there were just so many options, and since COVID, I think more have sprung up. So you might find that you use a mixture of different payment systems depending on what events you have. So, for example, my PTA, we use we accept cash, we accept card payments on our summit machine. We have used the school payment system for some events, although we haven't done that within the last year or two because of the fees on that are a bit complicated. Um, and we have also used direct bank transfer, but we had we did have a member of the PTA who was very hot on checking who had paid for what on that. Um, so um so because we use a few different systems, we just make sure each time we have a new fundraise so that we make it really clear to parents what they need to do, and I have to say that we have never ever turned down anybody paying in cash because cash is real money right there. So if we have set up a payments thing and for some reason somebody doesn't do it that way and instead hands some cash to us, I would never say no, you have to pay on this payment system thing. Um, unless it's obviously a third-party website that we're using and they're buying something. But um, yeah, I would never turn down cash. But you know, I'm a small school, I can have that flexibility. I know if you're a bigger school, um, that might just really mess up all your systems, so you just have to do what's right for your school, really. And something else to consider, which I touched on briefly, is whether it might be useful to you to offer an option to parents of pre-ordering or pre-selling before the day of the event. This could be really handy for estimating sales on the day and thereby reducing waste and maximising profits. Again, it would need careful management and record keeping, but for some activities it could be ideal and it could make your event run more smoothly. So we did try this um for the first time um when we got people to pre-order barbecue food for our um well for the event that all went wrong, but it didn't go wrong because we got people to pre-order barbecue food. Um, if you haven't heard my episode on the event that all went wrong, uh do go back and listen to it. Um it was an event, it was a colour run event that we organized, um, but it was a bit close to COVID, so it got cancelled about three times, and then in the end we were thwarted by the weather. Um, and because we'd got people to pre-order barbecue food, I explained in the episode that that all went a little bit wrong because people we tried to hold the orders over to the new date of the event, but people got confused and then ordered more food, and oh, it all got really messy. But I think in a normal event that doesn't get cancelled three times, I think that could be really handy. Um, it's always hard to estimate how many people are going to an event, so pre-selling something um means you have more of an idea of who's coming, and you can order more things in uh order the appropriate number of things, it just just really really helps. So, we're going to move on now to think about logistics at the event itself and whether anything could be improved, even by a tiny margin, to to capture these marginal gains that I keep talking about. I would say it's definitely worth spending time on this. Um if you want to book a PTA meeting and just all get together and just have this as your focus for one meeting, just to see if anyone can come up with some new ideas or if you can identify any areas for somebody that's just not working, and you could kind of brainstorm through it, I think it would be really worthwhile. Um, and particularly if your event is one of your larger events of the year. Um, so let's start with setting up your event. So, firstly, setting up can often take longer than you think, and what I have learned over the years is to estimate the time it will take and then add an hour on to that time. If you are the leader of an event, then you'll unlikely be as efficient as you want to be during the setup because other volunteers will be coming to you with lots of questions. So your setup is going to be constantly interrupted by people, and that is why you need more time than you think. Um, and also you may have requested volunteers to come in early to help set up, which is great. Um, in my experience, they often don't arrive at the time that you actually need them to be there, or they're running a bit late or something, and they I think perhaps maybe don't realise how important it is to be there on time when you're setting up. Um, so planning more time in is always a good idea. But uh in reality, it took me a few years to really be able to estimate the setup time accurately. Um, and I know I had got it right at my last winter fair I organised, um which I talk about in episodes 11 and 12, when we had finished all the setup, even my list of bonus items, which which I never have had time to do before. So I always had these bonus items of like nice little touches to an event that'd be oh, it'd be great if I could do that, and be great if I could put that out, be great if I could arrange that. Those are my bonus items, which I often don't ever get to because I'm still working on the basic items. But this time I even managed to get my bonus items done, and then we had 20 minutes left over until the fate until the fair opened, and I could walk around and see it was all ready and have a moment of calm before the chaos of all the kids arriving, and it was just really lovely to walk around and see the potential of this event that was suddenly gonna just unfold in in the middle of winter. Um it was just it was just really great and definitely something to aspire to. You've probably had the sort of years in your PTA, but I haven't, and it took me a few years to really get to grips with it, but I really appreciated it when it arrived. So looking closely at the logistics of your event can identify areas where you may be able to make things work more efficiently. So, a good idea is to try and walk yourself through your event in your imagination as a visitor. Where are you going to go and what are you going to do? And you could think about how the people or the children are going to move around your event. If you really imagine it, do you need to spend Things closer together. If you have a large school site, perhaps you want the stalls not to be so far away, so it creates more of a community feel, or do you want to have spaces where people can linger for a chat and therefore have a great time, stay longer at the events? You might want to spread your stalls out a little bit more or have clumps of them together and spaces in between. What have you noticed when people have come to your events before? Do you want people to follow a particular pathway round? Would the event work better if you encourage people to follow a particular pathway round? Or are you happy for people to just go where they want the whole time? Perhaps you've noticed that people often gravitate to the same area first. Could you encourage them to spread out a bit more instead of all ending up in the same place when they come through the door? Where could you encourage them to go? And you really need to avoid any bottlenecks, bottleneck areas if possible. So, again, thinking about your school site and where you're going to put your stalls and how much space they're going to need. Um, are there any ways you could minimize the bottlenecks? Because obviously, that is also not very safe either if people are struggling to get past, if you know there's an emergency and people need to leave quickly, it's not um good to have um everything very close together. So, how could you minimise any bottleneck areas and ensure people keep moving so they keep circulating around and going to all the places that they want to go? Also think about the different activities you want to have at the event. So if it is a fate, um count up your planned stores and try to estimate how long someone would need to visit all of your different stores and do all of the different things. So, for example, if your fate is two hours, you might want just over an hour's worth of activities so people have time to talk to friends or play games more than once or sit down and enjoy their burger or food or whatever it is and not worry that they're running out of time and have to do everything really quickly. Filling your fate with too many things to do will also dilute your profits and you'll need more volunteers that perhaps could instead be used elsewhere. So it is um really important to really think carefully about your event, and it's it would be such a shame if you had so many stores that people couldn't do them all, and then those stores didn't make a profit or didn't break even, and the volunteers at their stores didn't get many customers, they might end up thinking, Oh, what was the point? You know, I didn't really get many visitors, didn't really have a good time. Um, I have definitely been guilty of this in the past. I always get really carried away when it's the fake time, um, and I get carried away with all the different themes we have had, and I basically get just far too excited. Um, I'd try and cram in lots of things as I was worried people might get bored and leave early, but now I know that I really overdid it almost every time, every single time. I never learnt, I just always really overdid it. And if I was to organise a fate now, then I would definitely spend more time making sure I had the right balance and um making sure it wasn't too frenzied, I think. Um, you know, especially because you know, if it's a summer fate, it's a summer time, it's nice for people to just sort of chill out and relax rather than sort of being rushed around your event. So yeah, it's really important to think how your end user, the children, the parents, um might actually um use your event or what they would actually do at your event. Another thing to consider is to how to minimize people queuing for stalls or activities. So to put it bluntly, um if your event is is there because you are really closely focused on fundraising for a particular project, if people are queuing, then they are not spending their money and donating it to your PTA. So you're gonna have to come up with some ideas of how to avoid queues or or use your cues. There's two options there. Um, so a choice could be to provide some sort of entertainment for them while they're in the queue. For example, you could have a roaming stall which sells raffle tickets or ice creams or drinks, and that um they have a brief to go around the queues where the queues are forming and try and get people to buy raffle tickets while they're waiting or have an ice cream while they're waiting, that kind of thing. So um, therefore, they are spending money whilst they are waiting to spend more money, which is really cool. Um, or maybe you could double up on the stalls, which you think might be popular, you could just add another table, double the table space, double the chairs for a craft activity, or make two tin can alleys so you can have two people play at the same time. Obviously, that requires more volunteer power, but it might not require more volunteers on the day. Um, you know, if I'm stood behind a craft stall, I can definitely accommodate a few children and help them. And you know, kids are often there with their parents, so the parents can help as well, so it's um really not too bad, but the prep involved might require a bit more people power. And of course, you're always likely to have some stalls which are more popular than others, and they might have a steady queue while other activities are less popular. So perhaps you could offer people an incentive to visit all of the stalls. I've seen that some people get a stamp card printed, or you can make one yourself from an A4 piece of paper and list all the stalls on it basically, and each stall can stamp the card when a child visits to show that they've been there and done the activity, and then the children might get a reward or an incentive by completing their stamp card. Maybe um the children could hand in their cards if they get it filled with stamps and it could go in a prize drawer, or I don't know, that there's probably loads of ideas of what you can do with a stamp card, but it might just encourage people to go and visit all of the stalls rather than just get stuck on one stall. Um, helps to spread people out, um, you know, minimise the queuing, minimize the bottlenecks, that kind of thing. And then my final area for you to think about is what happens at the end of an event. I don't know about you, but I'm always mentally and physically exhausted after an event, like literally can't do anything. Um, and I'm desperate to leave because uh I'm desperate to leave as soon as I can because I've had enough. I'm normally getting a headache by that point. I probably haven't had enough to eat or drink myself. Um, before I leave for an event, I always make sure I've put a bottle of wine in the fridge for myself for when I get home, so I can just flop onto the sofa and I treat myself to a glass of wine as my reward for just completing the event. Um, I always often have tired, hungry children hanging around me as well who want to go home and who definitely don't want to hang around any longer while mummy tidies up. So, my suggestion here is to have a separate team which swoops in at the end of an event to do all the tidying up and who weren't involved in any other volunteering on the day, so they're fresh and they have fresh energy to deal with all the leftovers and they won't be too tired to put tables and chairs away, blah blah blah. And I first saw this approach in an event at my village uh run by our church fundraising group. So they phoned me to ask if my older sons would help to carry tables from the village hall across to the church for their event, and of course we said yes because we like to help out. Um we went to the event, and then at the end, I asked my boys when they had to go back and help put the tables away, but they said that another group was doing that instead. And ever since then, I have thought that it was such a genius idea, and I can't believe I've never thought of it before, to have some extra people come in to tidy everything away. It's what we all want, isn't it? Um, someone else to put everything away for us. So I thought it was a brilliant idea. Um, and I think to really make the most of it, you would need a team leader of that like tidying up team, who, as the overall event coordinator, you could leave instructions with if necessary, and um, who the school could liaise with as well, so that you feel confident everything's going to be done um correctly. Um, and another aspect of the closing down of an event is to try and have a plan in advance. Again, that goes back to making those decisions in advance of what to do with the leftover things. Um, for example, secondhand books. So we really struggled to get rid of secondhand books at a couple of fairs that we've run in the past. Whenever we have a secondhand book store, we ask for donations and we get absolutely inundated with donations of books, um, which is great, and it's always the stall always does really well. We make lots of profits on it, but we're still left over with so many books. I mean, we're left over with so many, it looks like nobody bought anything for the whole two hours, but they did, but we just had so many. Um, and I think it would have made it a lot less stressful if we decided and made a plan about the books in advance, but I think perhaps we didn't anticipate having quite so many left over, or well, the problem was we didn't anticipate getting so many donations. So um when we tried to do our normal thing of just taking them to a charity shop, we realised that not all charity shops accept loads of books, and um so it was actually quite difficult to get rid of them, and they were hanging around at school for quite a while, which the school weren't very happy about, but there was it was just a really difficult situation. And having poured all of my energy into actually running the event to having to then try and get rid of these books, which I didn't want and the school didn't want, was just something I could really have done without. So I would definitely try and decide what will happen to any leftovers and who would be responsible for that. Obviously, if it's food, um I think most PTAs know to in the last half an hour of an event to try and sell off that food so that you're not left over with food. Food is really hard, and I'm talking about fresh food here, like fresh cakes or burgers, sausages, that kind of thing. If it's obviously packaged food, you can donate it to a food bank, or people might want to take home what wasn't used. But if you have fresh food, um there's not very much you can do with it, and oh no, you know, none of us like throwing food away because it's such a waste. So if you can sell anything off before the end of the event, do that and just try and get rid of as much as possible so you're not dealing with leftovers. Um, again, at the start of you know, during the planning section of your event, uh trying to decide how many things to buy is tricky. I I do understand that, and um there might be things that are left over that you can reuse at a future event, which would be great. Um, but yeah, try and have a plan for any leftovers and if possible allocate somebody to be responsible for that so that you don't have to think about that as well. Now, this last thing, this very last thing, uh, probably won't make a difference to your profit margins directly, but it does something just as important, which is to look after yourself as a PTA volunteer. Your time and your energy is very precious, and the amount of your time and energy you put into your PTA fundraising is directly proportional to the success of your activities. But what we don't want is burnout of any PTA volunteers. So most of the small changes or marginal gains which I have talked about on this episode do also go some way towards making things more streamlined or efficient, and therefore may reduce some of the stress that is an inevitable consequence of organizing fundraising events. Um, if you can find a way to alter something which takes the pressure off you, then do investigate that as it is worthwhile. You are worth it, your team is worth it, and looking at ways to improve things is a very worthwhile way to spend a meeting, as it could identify a number of areas to look at, and people might bring new ideas to the table, which helps to strengthen your team as well. So, do communicate with your team, do talk about it, and find a way that's going to benefit everybody. So I hope that wasn't all too overwhelming, and you feel like you might be able to pick out maybe one or two areas that you might like to discuss with your team and see whether you can score any marginal gains. Um, it did feel like I was throwing a lot of information at you, so I do apologize, but I I really hope that perhaps yeah, you could just hook out a couple of things. You might decide to just focus on the logistics of this event, or you could decide to focus more on the organization or focus more on the volunteers. Maybe just pick one area, have a go, see if you can improve anything and see what the results are. And and also the results aren't necessarily just the money you raise or the number of people that attend, it can also be how you feel as a volunteer. Did it make things easier for you? And if yes, then maybe that was worth it and you could add that into your planning next time. And of course, I would be so interested to hear if you made any changes, no matter how small they are, and in a way, the smaller the change, the more interesting it is to see if it had an impact. So please do tell me if you um tried any marginal gains and I could share them with other people on this podcast. Um, there's a link in the episode notes if you want to drop me a text, or feel free to email me on hello at ptapodcast.com. Don't forget to visit my website where you can sign up to my email email list uh so you can be notified when a new episode is released. It's PTApodcast.com and you'll find all my episodes there along with some other hopefully uh useful bits and pieces. Um, if you are planning a summer fate, you can find my fate planning document there, which you can download for free. Um, you might find it useful as a starting point, perhaps if you haven't planned a summer fate before, and I talk about how to use or how I use my planning document in episode 11 in detail. So if you are interested in using it, you might like to listen to that episode so you understand what on earth I've put on that form. Uh, and well, that's all I wanted to say really about logistics and event planning and marginal gains today. And I hope that you found a bit of inspiration to take forwards and go and reassess some of your plans to hopefully reap more rewards in terms of more fundraising or less stress on you as a PTA volunteer. Don't forget to tell me if you've made any changes. I've enjoyed having you here today, and until next time, bye for now.