We are officially five days away from the Walk!

These weeks are devoted to making sure the event runs smoothly.  Volunteers will be contacted with instructions for their assignments, we requested petty cash this afternoon, goody bag stuffing is arranged for later this week, and we gathered various items for the day of the event: banners, signs, shirts, hats, candy, face painting supplies, temporary tattoos, etc.  There is so much to do, and I am so thankful that Christina is in the office all the time to take care of things I can’t!

Christina and I are going to arrive at Rentschler Field at 7 AM on Sunday (that will be a fun day-after-Halloween!) and the rest of the staff will arrive at 8.  I still have to put together a contact list for exhibitors and others providing services or donating food at the event, so I have quite a busy day on Thursday as well.  The rest of the day on Thursday, we will pack up the supplies and make sure things are in order for Sunday.

I also just learned that we are probably going to miss out on around 100 registrants this year due to some large teams from last year that are not going to be present this weekend.  That’s a little disappointing, but we are all set on the financial side of things, so I’m sure it will be a great event nonetheless!

This past week was spent largely recruiting past teams of more than 10 people.  Looking up past participants was actually a little difficult, because the goal was to get in contact with the team captain (so we had to find that person in the midst of all the other information).

I also put in the order for the sponsor board and the goody bags, so it took some time to find high-resolution images to send to both print companies.  I learned that EPS files are high-resolution, and many other common file types are not (learned this the hard way!).

Lastly, I sent out the final details for exhibitors and volunteers.  Organizing the volunteers was bigger project than I thought because there continue to be cancellations, and others have not expressed a need for a certain assignment.  We also need to train our  volunteers, so I created a schedule for their arrival on the day of the event that I’ll be able to work from.  I’m planning to add phone numbers for vendors and people crucial to the event.

This past week at BIAC was a whirlwind!  And it was mostly due to needing to order shirts.

This year’s shirts will be “daisy,” “gold,” and purple (for volunteers).  Of course, it took Julie and I quite some time to decide on colors, and then I had to design a structure for the sponsors’ logos that were to go on the backs of the shirts.  I got some ad lib design experience, so that was a bonus 🙂

Then, we had many people register right before the October 9th shirt deadline.  So, recalculating the number of shirts we could guarantee was also a hassle.  The good thing is we’re over 120 online registrants.  Hopefully that’s due to some of my Facebook promotion posts (as well as forcing the BIAC board members to register haha).

Last week, Julie, Christina and I also visited Rentschler Field for a preliminary walk-through.  I met Ben Richards, the new contact person for our event.  We got along well; more and more I am realizing that it’s about who you know and forming solid business relationships with people.

This week, I’ll focus on putting together a volunteer check-in table, a list of things to bring to Rentschler on the day of the Walk, and other miscellaneous preparations for right before the event.

This blog post will be relatively short because I have finished up my September tasks (right on time!) and will move on to October tasks this week.

This week, I met Christina, BIAC’s new Development Director.  As I mentioned in the recent lab meeting, she and I are going to work really well as a team.  She also has all of the knowledge and experience that I don’t have with things like corporate sponsorships.  I’m hoping that she’ll give me a few pointers on how to ask for money from places like Shoprite.

I now have a full list of volunteers!  The only people I have not been able to reach at all this year are the fraternity at the University of Hartford.  I’m sure I can reach out to a greek life house at Trinity that would love to help out to fulfill community service hours, though.

On that note, I’m sure I will have more questions or concerns next week after starting my October timeline!