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Oct 28, 2007 - Trunk or Treat |
 Bayside Church's Trunk or Treat event was a huge success. Considering we put together the event pretty much in three weeks, it was God's grace that it all came together as well as it did! (We completed the Arco Arena event and went straight into working on Trunk or Treat.) The "Bayside Big Top" theme brought an exciting and fun atmosphere to the event as 116 cars filled the parking lot and gave out thousands of pieces of candy.
The colors were red, white and yellow. We had a huge tent (20 feet tall) that was decorated with red and white fabric and had a welcoming banner hung across. This made a huge first impression and also served as double duty providing shade in the courtyard.
The courtyard had booths: info, lost children, tattoo booth, radio station, first aid. The biggest surprise was that the biggest hit was a reptile den, complete with live lizards and snakes. Kids loved them. Go figure!
There were many inflatables, including an 80-foot long Kraken ship that looked like a big octopus had split it in two. The Euro-bungee was another very popular attraction (left), as well as two Tiki climbing walls (right).
In the parking lot, people showed their creativity by decorating their cars as circus tents, cages with wild animals (one person was dressed up as a leopard and reached out between the bars to hand out candy.)
This was a creative but simple solution: circus animal crackers, complete with candy dots!
Indoors was live entertainment. A pair of circus clowns did juggling, story telling, and crowd participation, to the delight of the audience of all ages. In the background you can see the 10-foot paper mache elephants that we rented!
In all, we gave out about 500,000+ pieces of candy, had an attendance of probably 10,000 people, and dentists in the area will be very happy in the year to come!
Lessons learned:
• It IS possible to put together an event for 10,000 in 3 weeks! My events team is awesome - they worked so hard and were really organized! It also helped that we started discussing ideas earlier, although we didn't actually start implementing anything until the 3 week mark.
• Give setup leads radios so that when people check in to help, they can go directly to the leader. We had a lot of lost, wandering people.
• Have a check-in, check-out list for floaters. We could never find our floaters because they disappeared and never came back.
• Double check your sign sizes. The biggest laugh I had of the day was when we picked up all our signs which were 18" x 6 feet long. I picked up the information sign which was 18" x 6 inches long. It was so small it just sat on the table. We laughed so hard at the misprinted sign that was the wrong size all because of a missing apostrophe mark on the order form!
• For everything rented or borrowed, have a plan on where to return things at the end of the event. Then you can take advantage of all the volunteers at the end and let them know exactly where everything goes, saving you hours of work!
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