Our main fundraiser, the Celebrity Roast, is this Friday. Special events are a necessary evil of the non-profit world and the economy has made this year’s event an uphill battle. My personal view of special events is that something will surely go wrong, I just hope it’s something small and not something huge! One event I coordinated went quickly downhill when an invitee showed up to what was supposed to be a small, sit down luncheon with 12 extra guests. I was grabbing all my staff and yanking them out of the room so we could seat all the guests and pleading with the caterer to come up with more lunches. Ugly, very ugly. Or the special event where 2 guests of our got trapped in the elevator and had to be freed by a fire crew. Good grief, it’s a wonder I am still in this business!
At least nothing I have ever done is as bad as the Aquarium in New Orleans where they let major donors feed the sharks and the platform broke and the donors fell into the water with hungry sharks. I always hold onto that event as my certainty that nothing I do could ever be as bad as dropping donors into a shark tank. Whoever coordinated that event is probably still curled into a fetal position sobbing….
