Event Directors: Alison McQuay & Susan Rendina
Date: April 20
Click here for 2012 Father/Daughter Dance Documents
Summary
Since our troops are both small, we work together on many things and this year decided to take on the Special Guy Dance. We rented out the Montrose Scout House on a Friday night in January and had a dinner and planning session and one of our troops spent the night there, the other went home at 9 p.m. We chose a date: after Easter and Spring Breaks, April 20 from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. The girls came up with the theme of the dance, colors, ideas to make it fun, etc. Since the dance was going to be after dinner time, we decided to serve desserts, lemonade and water only. This evening of the girls planning became the troop leaders’ map for the dance.
The two troop leaders divided up the jobs; making the flyer, announcing the dance at the monthly leader meetings, reserving the DJ, looking for a place to have the dance, accepting the RSVPs and money, entering both onto an excel document (this took a lot of time). Together we sat and figured out what our financial needs would be for refreshments, decorations, and the rental fees. We shopped and priced things out and came up with a budget which we also kept on an excel document and added things as we bought them. We saved all receipts!
The two leaders and a couple of helpful moms spent the morning of 4/20 at the venue setting up and decorating. We purposefully left some of the jobs for the girls to do after they got out of school. We had each troop mom bring 4 dozen bite-size desserts. We bought lemonade and water. We set 5 cocktail tables on the outside patio, no tables inside. We used the “tea room” as a photo area where we had life-size cardboard cutouts of Justin Bieber, Robert Pattinson, and Marilyn Monroe (for the dads). We had a friend stationed there to take photos.
We had all the girls come with moms right after school to do last minute preparations. We placed all the desserts in baking cups on trays, ready to go. We made all the lemonade, put tablecloths on the dessert tables (3 outside, one inside), balloons, centerpieces, etc. Having moms come with the girls after school on the day of the event was super helpful. We left the venue at 4:30 to go home, eat dinner, shower, dress and then everyone met back at the venue at 6:00. We put out the refreshments, set up the sign-in table, and we were ready for guests – who started arriving promptly at 7:00!
Challenges
Our greatest challenge was finding a space large enough for the dance in or near La Canada. We asked St. Bede to allow us to host it there and we were told only St. Bede’s troops can use their facility, not the public. All other places were either too small or too costly and we were trying to stay on a budget. We had access to the Thursday Club for $400 and chose to go there for cost and convenience. This was a perfect choice for both of those reasons and the event was a huge success, but it could only hold 250 people (per fire code) and in the end we had about 330 people RSVP. We had to turn people away, which was very difficult and sad.
Many people did not RSVP by the deadline and we were sold out before the deadline, and people wanted exceptions made which we could not do, due to fire codes. We booked 265 (knowing that we would have a few “no shows”) and had a waiting list of 65. We announced the deadline at leader meetings and it was on the flyer.
A few people showed up to the dance unregistered saying they never got word from their leaders that they were not registered! We allowed them to come in for 30 minutes because they had their daughters with them all dressed up, but we told them once the dance was full, they would need to politely dash out and they did.
Positive Outcomes
Our Girl Scouts loved planning and executing the event. We split the guest list into four parts alphabetically and used four girls at the check-in table to make the entrance to the dance run as smoothly as possible.
We handed out sparkly halos to the girls and they were a hit!
We have had compliments galore about the organization of the dance, the venue, especially the ability to go outside and onto the patio during the dance, the D,J and we had several phone calls saying this was the best facility yet.
In The Future
We highly recommend using the Thursday Club again. Since Alison is a member, she has spoken to the President of the club and other board members there about having the fire marshal come inspect again and update the capacity of the venue. We really think it easily will allow for 350 in the future.
Alison and Susan