Unfortunately was not there for until the cleanup- but at cleanup, it was probably one of the smoothest cleanups I've ever been to- we were in and out in less than 20 minutes! The biggest thing I was was an excess of people at cleanup- maybe if there are a lot of people clogging up the den, either send them to do something or just send them home. Good job tonight social, I heard a lot of good things about today's dance :)
Set-up went pretty well, mostly we had people blow up balloons and added them to the balloon arch. Some suggestions would be to have more taco/Mexican colors, like red/green/yellow. Another reminder would be to make sure that carpets are accounted for so the Janitors can bring them for us :P
The lights on the trees added a nice touch and the flags on the backdrop wire were nice; only would've been better if there had been a couple more so it would actually arch, but it's fine. :) Overall, set-up was extremely smooth and organized, in comparison to last time. Great job social!!
I was only there for shift two, but the decorations weren't bad, although making it more geared towards a "taco fiesta" would've improved it. When I was selling food, sales definitely shot up when tacos became a dollar,as one would buy his/her taco, learn that it's selling for a dollar now and bring their friends to buy more. Other than that, everything else went smoothly and the freshmen looked like they had fun yesterday. Way to go social! :)
Setup and cleanup were both petty well. Both were really fast and efficient. The DJ wasn't as good as the link crew dance, but it got the party started so that's all that matters! Many of the freshmen were scared to go out and dance. I think they're could have been some extra activities besides dancing. For example, the ping pong table or some cards in the cove. There were a lot of people in the cove using their phone. The decorations looked really nice!
I agree with Alison about more activities! There wasn't really much to do besides dancing + the photo booth. A ping pong table would have been really nice, I remember it being really popular at the last back to school dance. Also agree with Nick and Lilian about logistics. I wasn't there for setup, but clean up was really quick and organized!
I also think promotion could have been pushed out a lot earlier/more effectively? Facebook profiles pictures are getting a little stale at this point, so it would be good to think about a couple new ways to promote. IE: Posters at the top of the quad, flyers, video, etc. I tend to just ignore posts if I know it's a mass "spam". If we're going to go with mass posts, lets try to do something different (ie: 2017 jp video pf pictures, 2016 jp "I'm going, are you" pfs).
There were a couple of complaints about the soggy tacos, so maybe we can be more cautious about food next time? I think that they were a good investment, and seemed really popular this time around.
It was pretty unclear who was working and who wasn't, and I myself tried to help out outside of my shift. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but it might be good to set stricter rules as to who is volunteering and who is not volunteering, just so that it's more organized. Maybe we can enforce apparel rules the next dance?
In terms of promotion, I can agree with David on this one. PR will definitely be brainstorming more creative and out-of-the-box ways to spread the word about the dance. I'm not sure how effective the balloons were, because they'd deflate overnight and weren't extremely noticeable for me around school. They were definitely a fun idea to try though!
Maybe we could put up a list of tasks for clean-up with the number of people who should help so that people know what to do and can cross off completed tasks. It seems like the clean-up was pretty minimal, so I'd suggest taking less volunteers so that people aren't just standing around.
Once everyone really got into the dancing the whole atmosphere lightened up and it was clear how successful the dance was. For the first half hour/forty five minutes of the dance no one came in to the dance and instead hung around by the Viking boat, and after that it was another half hour before the dancing stated to happen. Maybe brainstorming ideas to decrease the amount of time it took to get people inside and participating would be a good. Maybe having other activities inside the dance to get people inside, or having the start time be when it starts to get dark would help with this. Social did an amazing job and it was a really strong start!
cons: -promotion could've been executed a bit better! In the future just make sure to start promoting the facebook event well in advance (1-1.5 weeks before the event!) I think having posters around the school earlier would've been good too! -more activities!! It seemed like dancing + eating were the only things to do, which is fine, but I'm sure people will have more fun with more activities at future dances, so just keep that in mind!
Overall you guys did AN AMAZING dance so proud of you guys!!!
Way to go for our first dance of the school year! :)
Everything was pretty organized, but we should definitely write that we need carpets on the event form so that we won't need to move them ourselves. We also should invest in more carpets. Jamie, Pranav, Kathryn and I, had to move 4 tables to substitute for the lack of carpets (still feeling sore from setup even the day after!) I also liked the lights that Tech helped set up on the side, it really adds to great ambiance at night!
Attendance can be a little higher, but the students were able to make do with this later into the dance. The freshmen seem like a fun bunch (Aside from the ones who were on their phones the entire time sitting out, but if they had fun, that's great.)
We should also perhaps move the entrance of the dance to the front gate? Most students were hanging out beside the viking boat and not coming in.
Prices of the food seem reasonable (aside from the PMT, but hey, that's the standard price among the school for pmt.)
Promotion material for the dance could be pushed out earlier, like a week before the event. It's great to see that the ASB Snapchat was being used, but we should definitely use that more often this year and having more snaps being pushed out on it. We can also consider using instagram stories! Less people use the instagram platform to uploads stories, that automatically makes our stories on top of others and prevent it from being buried in other stories!
The DJ was alright, wasn't as impressive as the DJ we used for 2017 JP or Link Crew dance.
Overall, it was a pretty successful dance! Goodjob guys!
I was only there for clean up, and I would have to agree with Nick. I think there were too many people at clean up that people were just sitting around with idle time because everything was done.
I would like to take responsibility for the ripped poster that was in front of the school. I did not consider the wind, hence I taped the poster incorrectly resulting in a faulty poster. I know that this reflects poorly on ASB and I will do better. I'm sorry.
As for PR, I was thinking for future dances we can make 3D props to place around the school to remind students that there is a dance coming up.
I was there the whole dance. I thought it went pretty well, setup and clean up went pretty fast, tons of volunteers. I agree we need a better DJ I wasn't at the Link Crew dance, only help set up. I agree with Jennifer, I think we need better promo and could have done more to promote this, but since we had a week that's okay. Great job social!!!
I was there from setup to cleanup and I thought the dance went really well! Setup was efficient and fun. During the dance, after people started dancing, it looked like everyone was having a really good time, and after it was over, cleanup went really fast. I think a main issue other then the DJ(not really in our control), was that since the entrance of the dance was at the front of the quad, a lot of people were just hanging our around the viking boat, instead of coming in. I think for next time we should push the entrance out to the front gate. Other then that, it went really well!
1) DJ: I don't think we should book this DJ again! The songs he played were a little bit out of touch with what I think students listen to nowadays and the transitions were very abrupt and even a bit awkward at times. He also talked over the music quite a bit. I know we were assured by DJ Dave that this DJ would be as good as him so we had no idea what to expect, but I thought of two suggestions for this!
The first is to generate a student song-request list beforehand so that the DJ can tailor his music to our high school. The second is to pay the DJ to actually come on campus and do a "Demo Friday." The DJ could set up for lunch and play music in the quad for 45 minutes. Afterwards, we could poll students and see what they thought about the music that was played. I think that paying ~$100 to essentially "screen" a DJ (while also providing quality music in the quad) is much better than losing revenue and students from future dances if word were to spread that the DJ at the very first dance wasn't very good. It's also promotion for the dance!
2) CLEANUP: Cleanup went very quickly! I mentioned this on the last dance blogpost, but I would really like to see a more organized way of running cleanup. Perhaps the volunteers could all be gathered at one spot and given a specific list of tasks that needed to be done? It feels like volunteers have to track down a social commissioner each time they finish a task to get assigned another one.
3) PROMOTION:! I do think that either more or more effective promotion would have helped with dance attendance. However, you did have a really tight timeline and managed to pull a lot of different forms of promotion together (the balloons, poster at the front of the school). I was impressed with that :)
4) LIGHTS IN THE QUAD: Here's a personal observation: people really don't dance when it's bright out and people can see them. The lights in the trees were a nice touch, but also added more light onto the dance floor. Is there any possibility of 1) turning off SOME of the lights in the quad 2) turning off the LHS marquee on top of the den 3) Turning off the small lights in front of the cafeteria? If not, then that leads me to my second suggestion!
(Part 2 because blogger wouldn't fit everything into one post lol)
5) LOCATION OF DANCE: I don't have empirical evidence to back this up, but from all of the dances I've been to these past 4 years it always feel like the INDOOR ones are more active/engaging. I don't know why that is - perhaps it's a smaller area so people feel like there are more people or perhaps because it's darker and as a result you're less embarrassed to dance. This is just an observation of mine! I would honestly consider hosting the back-to-school dance indoors next year.
6) MOVING THE DANCE ENTRANCE OUT: I feel like a lot of people "scoped out" the dance floor by coming in near the viking boat but not actually purchasing a ticket into the dance because they saw the dance floor was not very crowded. This, of course, becomes a snowball effect because no one enters the dance and as a result no one decides to pay. I think the solution to this is to always have the entrance to the dance out at the front black gates.
7) INCENTIVE FOR STARTING EARLY: High school dances typically don't "really" start getting active until 1-1.5 hours in. As a result, the incoming freshman, who are used to dances starting to ramp up immediately, start to feel like upperclassmen aren't planning on showing up and that not many people go to dances. I would propose that we offer some sort of incentive for people to arrive at the dance floor early - maybe a $1 or $2 off of the admission fee? The more people arrive and the more quickly they arrive, the more active the dance floor feels.
That's all! Overall, enjoyed the original theme and small touches you added (Tacos, the decorations hanging on the backdrop wire) and had fun myself. Would love to hear what your thoughts are on some of my above suggestions!
PS: What did the grade breakdown look like in the dance attendance?
First off well done on your first dance of the year that included the whole school!
1.DJ: From feed back from others outside of the class, people thought the DJ was "weird" and sometimes missed the best parts of the songs which made them not like him as much as the regular DJ
2.Food: Although it was a good Idea to sell tacos, I felt that you guys bought too many for the first time doing something like this. As well, towards the end of the dance, they started to become stale/soggy which caused more people to not want it. As well for the next dances you guys do just keep in mind that people will get dehydrated from dances, and dry food like tacos will only make it worse for them, so maybe something more hydrating!
3: Although I was not there for the full setup time, it seemed like everything was ready and all setup for the dance with time to spare along with a quick clean up which was great.
4. Decerations! They were great the lights and banners on the line that goes across the quad were very pretty
Unfortunately was not there for until the cleanup- but at cleanup, it was probably one of the smoothest cleanups I've ever been to- we were in and out in less than 20 minutes! The biggest thing I was was an excess of people at cleanup- maybe if there are a lot of people clogging up the den, either send them to do something or just send them home. Good job tonight social, I heard a lot of good things about today's dance :)
ReplyDeleteSet-up went pretty well, mostly we had people blow up balloons and added them to the balloon arch. Some suggestions would be to have more taco/Mexican colors, like red/green/yellow. Another reminder would be to make sure that carpets are accounted for so the Janitors can bring them for us :P
ReplyDeleteThe lights on the trees added a nice touch and the flags on the backdrop wire were nice; only would've been better if there had been a couple more so it would actually arch, but it's fine. :) Overall, set-up was extremely smooth and organized, in comparison to last time. Great job social!!
I was only there for shift two, but the decorations weren't bad, although making it more geared towards a "taco fiesta" would've improved it. When I was selling food, sales definitely shot up when tacos became a dollar,as one would buy his/her taco, learn that it's selling for a dollar now and bring their friends to buy more. Other than that, everything else went smoothly and the freshmen looked like they had fun yesterday. Way to go social! :)
ReplyDeleteSetup and cleanup were both petty well. Both were really fast and efficient.
ReplyDeleteThe DJ wasn't as good as the link crew dance, but it got the party started so that's all that matters!
Many of the freshmen were scared to go out and dance. I think they're could have been some extra activities besides dancing. For example, the ping pong table or some cards in the cove. There were a lot of people in the cove using their phone.
The decorations looked really nice!
I agree with Alison about more activities! There wasn't really much to do besides dancing + the photo booth. A ping pong table would have been really nice, I remember it being really popular at the last back to school dance. Also agree with Nick and Lilian about logistics. I wasn't there for setup, but clean up was really quick and organized!
ReplyDeleteI also think promotion could have been pushed out a lot earlier/more effectively? Facebook profiles pictures are getting a little stale at this point, so it would be good to think about a couple new ways to promote. IE: Posters at the top of the quad, flyers, video, etc. I tend to just ignore posts if I know it's a mass "spam". If we're going to go with mass posts, lets try to do something different (ie: 2017 jp video pf pictures, 2016 jp "I'm going, are you" pfs).
I had fun though! Props to social (y)
There were a couple of complaints about the soggy tacos, so maybe we can be more cautious about food next time? I think that they were a good investment, and seemed really popular this time around.
ReplyDeleteIt was pretty unclear who was working and who wasn't, and I myself tried to help out outside of my shift. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but it might be good to set stricter rules as to who is volunteering and who is not volunteering, just so that it's more organized. Maybe we can enforce apparel rules the next dance?
In terms of promotion, I can agree with David on this one. PR will definitely be brainstorming more creative and out-of-the-box ways to spread the word about the dance. I'm not sure how effective the balloons were, because they'd deflate overnight and weren't extremely noticeable for me around school. They were definitely a fun idea to try though!
Maybe we could put up a list of tasks for clean-up with the number of people who should help so that people know what to do and can cross off completed tasks. It seems like the clean-up was pretty minimal, so I'd suggest taking less volunteers so that people aren't just standing around.
Once everyone really got into the dancing the whole atmosphere lightened up and it was clear how successful the dance was. For the first half hour/forty five minutes of the dance no one came in to the dance and instead hung around by the Viking boat, and after that it was another half hour before the dancing stated to happen. Maybe brainstorming ideas to decrease the amount of time it took to get people inside and participating would be a good. Maybe having other activities inside the dance to get people inside, or having the start time be when it starts to get dark would help with this. Social did an amazing job and it was a really strong start!
ReplyDeleteYAAAAY dances!! woo hoo :)
ReplyDeletepros:
-tons of volunteers
-fast setup
-smooth ticketing
-DECS (lights + fiesta flags)
-photobooth!
cons:
-promotion could've been executed a bit better! In the future just make sure to start promoting the facebook event well in advance (1-1.5 weeks before the event!) I think having posters around the school earlier would've been good too!
-more activities!! It seemed like dancing + eating were the only things to do, which is fine, but I'm sure people will have more fun with more activities at future dances, so just keep that in mind!
Overall you guys did AN AMAZING dance so proud of you guys!!!
Way to go for our first dance of the school year! :)
ReplyDeleteEverything was pretty organized, but we should definitely write that we need carpets on the event form so that we won't need to move them ourselves. We also should invest in more carpets. Jamie, Pranav, Kathryn and I, had to move 4 tables to substitute for the lack of carpets (still feeling sore from setup even the day after!) I also liked the lights that Tech helped set up on the side, it really adds to great ambiance at night!
Attendance can be a little higher, but the students were able to make do with this later into the dance. The freshmen seem like a fun bunch (Aside from the ones who were on their phones the entire time sitting out, but if they had fun, that's great.)
We should also perhaps move the entrance of the dance to the front gate? Most students were hanging out beside the viking boat and not coming in.
Prices of the food seem reasonable (aside from the PMT, but hey, that's the standard price among the school for pmt.)
Promotion material for the dance could be pushed out earlier, like a week before the event. It's great to see that the ASB Snapchat was being used, but we should definitely use that more often this year and having more snaps being pushed out on it. We can also consider using instagram stories! Less people use the instagram platform to uploads stories, that automatically makes our stories on top of others and prevent it from being buried in other stories!
The DJ was alright, wasn't as impressive as the DJ we used for 2017 JP or Link Crew dance.
Overall, it was a pretty successful dance! Goodjob guys!
I was only there for clean up, and I would have to agree with Nick. I think there were too many people at clean up that people were just sitting around with idle time because everything was done.
ReplyDeleteI would like to take responsibility for the ripped poster that was in front of the school. I did not consider the wind, hence I taped the poster incorrectly resulting in a faulty poster. I know that this reflects poorly on ASB and I will do better. I'm sorry.
As for PR, I was thinking for future dances we can make 3D props to place around the school to remind students that there is a dance coming up.
Good job social!
I was there the whole dance. I thought it went pretty well, setup and clean up went pretty fast, tons of volunteers. I agree we need a better DJ I wasn't at the Link Crew dance, only help set up. I agree with Jennifer, I think we need better promo and could have done more to promote this, but since we had a week that's okay. Great job social!!!
ReplyDeleteI was there from setup to cleanup and I thought the dance went really well! Setup was efficient and fun. During the dance, after people started dancing, it looked like everyone was having a really good time, and after it was over, cleanup went really fast. I think a main issue other then the DJ(not really in our control), was that since the entrance of the dance was at the front of the quad, a lot of people were just hanging our around the viking boat, instead of coming in. I think for next time we should push the entrance out to the front gate. Other then that, it went really well!
ReplyDelete1) DJ: I don't think we should book this DJ again! The songs he played were a little bit out of touch with what I think students listen to nowadays and the transitions were very abrupt and even a bit awkward at times. He also talked over the music quite a bit. I know we were assured by DJ Dave that this DJ would be as good as him so we had no idea what to expect, but I thought of two suggestions for this!
ReplyDeleteThe first is to generate a student song-request list beforehand so that the DJ can tailor his music to our high school.
The second is to pay the DJ to actually come on campus and do a "Demo Friday." The DJ could set up for lunch and play music in the quad for 45 minutes. Afterwards, we could poll students and see what they thought about the music that was played. I think that paying ~$100 to essentially "screen" a DJ (while also providing quality music in the quad) is much better than losing revenue and students from future dances if word were to spread that the DJ at the very first dance wasn't very good. It's also promotion for the dance!
2) CLEANUP: Cleanup went very quickly! I mentioned this on the last dance blogpost, but I would really like to see a more organized way of running cleanup. Perhaps the volunteers could all be gathered at one spot and given a specific list of tasks that needed to be done? It feels like volunteers have to track down a social commissioner each time they finish a task to get assigned another one.
3) PROMOTION:! I do think that either more or more effective promotion would have helped with dance attendance. However, you did have a really tight timeline and managed to pull a lot of different forms of promotion together (the balloons, poster at the front of the school). I was impressed with that :)
4) LIGHTS IN THE QUAD: Here's a personal observation: people really don't dance when it's bright out and people can see them. The lights in the trees were a nice touch, but also added more light onto the dance floor. Is there any possibility of 1) turning off SOME of the lights in the quad 2) turning off the LHS marquee on top of the den 3) Turning off the small lights in front of the cafeteria?
If not, then that leads me to my second suggestion!
(Part 2 because blogger wouldn't fit everything into one post lol)
ReplyDelete5) LOCATION OF DANCE: I don't have empirical evidence to back this up, but from all of the dances I've been to these past 4 years it always feel like the INDOOR ones are more active/engaging. I don't know why that is - perhaps it's a smaller area so people feel like there are more people or perhaps because it's darker and as a result you're less embarrassed to dance. This is just an observation of mine! I would honestly consider hosting the back-to-school dance indoors next year.
6) MOVING THE DANCE ENTRANCE OUT: I feel like a lot of people "scoped out" the dance floor by coming in near the viking boat but not actually purchasing a ticket into the dance because they saw the dance floor was not very crowded. This, of course, becomes a snowball effect because no one enters the dance and as a result no one decides to pay. I think the solution to this is to always have the entrance to the dance out at the front black gates.
7) INCENTIVE FOR STARTING EARLY: High school dances typically don't "really" start getting active until 1-1.5 hours in. As a result, the incoming freshman, who are used to dances starting to ramp up immediately, start to feel like upperclassmen aren't planning on showing up and that not many people go to dances. I would propose that we offer some sort of incentive for people to arrive at the dance floor early - maybe a $1 or $2 off of the admission fee? The more people arrive and the more quickly they arrive, the more active the dance floor feels.
That's all! Overall, enjoyed the original theme and small touches you added (Tacos, the decorations hanging on the backdrop wire) and had fun myself. Would love to hear what your thoughts are on some of my above suggestions!
PS: What did the grade breakdown look like in the dance attendance?
First off well done on your first dance of the year that included the whole school!
ReplyDelete1.DJ: From feed back from others outside of the class, people thought the DJ was "weird" and sometimes missed the best parts of the songs which made them not like him as much as the regular DJ
2.Food: Although it was a good Idea to sell tacos, I felt that you guys bought too many for the first time doing something like this. As well, towards the end of the dance, they started to become stale/soggy which caused more people to not want it. As well for the next dances you guys do just keep in mind that people will get dehydrated from dances, and dry food like tacos will only make it worse for them, so maybe something more hydrating!
3: Although I was not there for the full setup time, it seemed like everything was ready and all setup for the dance with time to spare along with a quick clean up which was great.
4. Decerations! They were great the lights and banners on the line that goes across the quad were very pretty
Great Job social
Comments from here on out, for this post, will not be graded.
ReplyDelete