4th Avenue Spring Fair

Friday was really fun, I got to take a trip to Tucson with my boss and another co-worker to see what we could learn about the 4th Avenue Spring Fair. The event is celebrating it's 40th year- with nearly 300,000 attendees! The event is run by a the 4th Avenue Association, a small office of 3 people that produce more than 24 events a year on 4th Avenue, a street in Tucson with a lot of unique shops and restaurants. We were invited by the event producer as guests to learn how they do things at the event. Here is a picture from their website, this is exactly what it looks like, only the tents continue going! (http://www.fourthavenue.org/)

It was interesting to walk through the event with Nikki, Glendale's vendor manager and see the fair through her eyes- she noticed so many things that I didn't see- an empty spot where a vendor didn't show up, signs placed on the ground, how to spot a good vendor, etc. Although we came away with a wealth of information, we won't be able to implement all of it since the 4th Avenue Association is private and has a lot more flexibility than a city event does. My assignment (from my boss) for Monday was to come up with a list of 5 thing I learned from the event, here it goes...

1. Latex signs on the pavement are a great way to give directions AND get sponsors involved.
2. Charging a higher base price for vendor booths (rather than a lower price PLUS percentage fees) keeps things simple without the stress of implementing a new method to track vendor sales.
3. Small groups of street vendors (like 2 high school violinists) are a way to incorporate the community and keep activity going in all places of the event as you move away from the main stages.
4. A great way to get rid of pesky groups trying to take advantage of the event and not pay the vendor fee is to place a terrible musician next to them!
5. Be wary of giving a vendor several different spaces throughout the event- if they decide not to show-up, you'll have a big hole!

Bummed

Today was my first day back at work after taking off Wednesday-Friday last week for a short vacation (and using up most of the overtime hours I got from working on Chocolate Affaire). Unfortunately, I got some bad news Tuesday afternoon. My internship was originally supposed to continue on past graduation till July 4th, this is because fall interns with the City get to work on 6 events and spring interns only get 3- so they made the internship longer so spring interns could do 4 events. Due to the poor economy and some budget cuts my department can only keep me long enough to fulfill my granduation requirements- so now I'll be finishing up around April 20th. I am dissappointed because I love working with Glendale and was so excited to help with their 4th of July event, but at the same time I am just grateful they are letting me stay on to fulfill my internship so I can graduate in May! With this change in the length of my internship I am feeling a bit like an outsider, and it is so strange to think that roughly a month from Friday will be my last day! With this change I am also feeling quite distracted wondering what is going to happen to me a few months from now due to the bad economy and a rough job market-while I am excited to graduate, it isn't exactly feeling like the best time to do so either. This wasn't exactly my most cheerful blog entry, but I am sure things will pick up later this week as I get busy working on projects for the Jazz and Blues Festival- and continue being hard working and trying to generate some more connections so I have some options upon completeing my internship :)

Down Time

My first few weeks "on the job" were very fast paced because we had 2 events close together, these past couple weeks have been much less hectic since the next event isn't until April. Due to the slower nature opf my job lately, I've been getting to work on all sorts of odd projects...

• One day I organized 3 boxes of folders that had been left by the woman previously in charge of permitting events for the city. There were all sorts of events held by the city, private organizations and other area groups. It was so internesting to read through the different events people planned and see their thought process. The folders also contained e-mails between the special events committee and notations on the progress of the permit- great communication insight!


• Another day I got to generate and send invoices to vendors for the upcoming April festival, which I discovered that I really liked doing, it felt therapeutic.


• Another time, I worked on writing up vendor "infractions" for people who perhaps didn't pay their fees on time- a less fun side of events, discipline.


• I've also been doing a ton of research on everything from custom USB's, renting bath towels and companies that rent or sell tents to things like how other events classify their vendor applications!

I am off the next few days-using up my overtime from the last event, when I get back I am sure I'll be doing a lot more Jazz & Blues related activities- here is a picture from the Blues stage last year.

Internship Networking Lessons

On Monday I attended a meeting for the local chapter of the Association of Bridal Consultants, and there was an educational segment on the use of Facebook, Twitter and Blogs for professional networking. I was astounded when the presenter asked how many attendees were on Facebook, and nearly everyone in the room raised their hand! Up until that point I had looked at Faceboook as a mere social avenue- I was aware that many companies out there might look up your Facebook page and therefore you don't want to put up anything that you wouldn't want a future boss to see- but I didn't realize how popular it now is among every generation! My immediate reaction was so run home and update my page and start 'friending" anyone else in the association I can find as they could all be possible business and employer connections. It is also a great way of reminding someone who you are, bridal meetings are once a month, it is easy to forget someone's name in that time but if your friends on Facebook, you can look them up for a quick refresher.
The same speaker also discussed the benefits of a blog. Starting out this semester, I honestly wasn't eager to blog once a week and have had trouble keeping up with it, but now I am glad to be practicing! According to the speaker, who owns a wedding photography business, her website gets about 30-40 hits a day, but her blogs gets anywhere between 300 and 500 hits every day!! Not only does more traffic go through her blog site, but it is an avenue for her to talk about her experiences and offer tips- which in turn gets other photographers asking her questions on the blog and makes her look incredibly knowledgable to potential clients.
Now, when I make another blog post or listen to my co-workers at my internship talk about their Facebook posts on one anothers pages, I'll be looking at the big picture, networking :)

Research

I mean this in the nicest possible way to ASU, but I never thought all those library classes on reareaching and using databases was ever going to benefit me outside of writing research papers for classes, turns out I was wrong!
A food vendor wanting to operate a booth at a City of Glendale event has to pay a specified amount (that ranges on the size and length of the event) plus 20% of their gross sales. Until now, the City of Glendale has been using the honor system and counting on the honesty of the vendors in reporting their actual gross income from the events. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who aren't as honest as they could be, so the time has come to look for an alternative method in determining gross sales of our food vendors. On March 20, I get to take a little road trip to Tucson with several of my co-workers to attend the Spring Fair held on 4th Ave. there, the producers invited us to attend, get a backstage look at what they do, and most importantly, learn about register tape and how they use it. Here is a link to the Spring Fair map http://www.intucsonnow.com/4thave.html
Register tape is simply a long list of transactions and amounts printed from the register once transactions are complete for the day, obviously someone not wanting to report all their income for the day simply doesn't have to enter a chunk of their transactions into the register. That being the case, I was asked to research what other festivals that require a percentage fee from their vendors are doing to ensure they get accurate counts.
I began googling "festival percentage fee", "vendor percentage", "vendor fee" and so on without any luck. I asked my supervisor for some help and was given a few more phrases to work off of. Google wasn't helping, so I tried Google Scholar, surely methods for obtaining accurate vendor incomes is something as important as counting crowds at an event, and I was convinced someone had to have written an article on the topic. With still no luck, I decided to put my education to good use and hit up the ASU Library web site and tried my luck and searching skills with LexisNexus and Ebsco Host- unfortunately I never found anything, but how cool would it have been to have turned in a peer reviewed article from a scholarly journal on proven methods for obtaining vendor totals!?!?!
As a final shot I began googling vendor applications and reading through them to find out who else out there is actually charging their vendors a percentage fee, then finding their contact info and actually e-mailing the person in charge to ask them how they do it! I sent 7 or 9 e-mails and one person wrote back right away about how they use register tape, and I had a phone conversation with someone in Frisco, Colorado this morning about how her event uses tickets to keep track of consumer spending. I am still hoping a few more people will write back before Tuesday when I'll present my findings at our weekly event meeting- I'll let you know how it goes.
In the meantime, check out our website, www.glendaleaz.com/events, we have the 26th Gendale Gibson Jazz and Blues Festival coming up April 4th and 5th so mark your calendars!

Chocolate Affaire

Now I’m really exhausted! The weekend before last I had the pleasure of working on the Glendale Chocolate Affaire- preliminary estimates are saying nearly 100,000 people attended during the event’s 3-day run. Physical set-up began that Wednesday, and Friday and Saturday I had to work 14 hour days and Sunday was only 9 hours, but that included tear-down (which goes quickly but feels long because you’ve been on your feet all weekend)! So, what were some big things I actually did! Let’s see…
During the event we needed 3 mini-buses to run between the main event site and Cerretas Candy Company to transport participants to free tours of the chocolate factory. I couple weeks prior the shuttle company Glendale had planned on using decided they would no longer be using mini-buses as of February 6th, forcing us to find a new company. I was given the task of calling bus companies and getting quotes and basically choosing who to contract with, a bit stressful since there was a lot of money involved. I took my findings to my supervisor and with my input, we decided which company to go with and I set things up. Well, day of the event, instead of sending us 3 mini-buses, the company sent 1 mini, 1 normal, and a really huge coach bus- my supervisor was furious! Luckily, it wasn’t my fault as the contract stated that we wanted 3 mini-buses and the company has probably just decided to “over-deliver”, which is fine and dandy in some situations, but we didn’t have enough room to line up the large buses. In the end things worked out, but this was a good example of when one shouldn’t over-deliver; more isn’t always better.
Another huge concern the weekend of the event was the potential for rain. The tents, although heavy and strapped down with sandbags have the potential to lift off the ground during a storm should there be gusts of wind- which would mean the staff would have had to run around unfastening the back of the tents so the wind could escape. Magically, it never rained during event hours, and all day that Sunday, one could see clouds in different directions surrounding the Chocolate Affaire, but the rain held off. However, it did rain overnight that Saturday- so Sunday morning we had to dry off chairs and tables- and while doing so I kept thinking to myself it didn’t matter because probably only a few people would show up and they surely wouldn’t want to sit down, but before the event started people were pouring into the park and some even gathered napkins and finished drying off the chairs themselves! One really interesting trend I noticed during the Chocolate Affaire was how early people showed up every day. The event is held in the middle of downtown Glendale and although some surrounding streets are closed, the public park where the event held never is and people can walk through whenever they please. The event opened at 10am on Saturday- which everyone thought was a mistake (and that it shouldn’t start till 12p), but early as 8:30am people came strolling through the park and soon as vendors arrived at their booths people were asking if they were serving food yet! Overall the event was a huge success and I loved being a part of it, I worked hard, and I got to try some new things, like chocolate covered potato chips!

Internship Exhaustion

I've completed my 3rd week of my internship and I have to say, I'm exhausted! I have a 50 minute commute out to Glendale and work on all sorts of different tasks throughout the day that use different parks of my brain and by the time I get home in the evening, I'm ready for bed! To answer Marni's comment, I found this internship on the SCRD E-Update and I have to say, I lucked out! For the past year I'd been planning on completing my internship as the JW Marriott Desert Ridge and Spa with the Social Catering department where I'd been working as a Spa Coordinator. After finding out in November that due to these difficult economic times they couldn't take me on as an intern (even though it was unpaid) I was devastated. I applied to about 10 other placees and not a single person answered me except Glendale. I'd been interested in the city of Glendale since taking Special Events with Vern Biaett who made it sound like such a wonderful community and really reminded me of Connecticut where I am orginally from. And even though I am exhausted, I am grateful to drive to Glendale every day and be given this opportunity to expand my horizons.
This wasn't an incredibly exciting week, it was filled with mailings and envelope stuffing- preparing packets for the vendors, sponsors and partners of the upcoming Chocolate Affaire that contained information on set-up and parkng passes and thank-you letters for their participation. On Friday I went with the Vendor manager, Nikki, to personally hand-deliver some of the sponsor and partner packets along with event posters. As all of us have been told in this major, networking is key and Nikki emphasized just that to me and I have seen first hand just how many people she knows! Being a lot more outgoing is a skill I am defintely going to have to work on if I want to get further in this industry.
My highlight of the week was the completion of a sign inventory. The City of Glendale has hundreds of signs that they put up throughout the year at their events and I was tasked with the job of taking an inventory, and in the process, I came up with a new organization system for the signs. I've recevied a lot of positive feedback on my sign inventory from my co-workers, boss, and my even boss's boss!
The next week will be filled with preparation for the Chocolate Affaire and some really long hours this weekend. As I said in my interview for this internship, my favorite part of event planning is the running of the actual event- and I can't wait to see how I handle a 3-day long event!