FREE NIGHT at The Eureka Room happened last night. Here’s a recap.
I hustled a lot this week, planning, reaching out to press, and getting things together. Polly helped me plan out the needs, which was a big help.
The WhenWhereWhat gang really likes The Eureka Room and was kind enough to give us a shout out on their ubiquitous royal blue instagram account. We also got the listing up in various other sources. I rustled up some volunteers and made a custom version of “hi 5” for the evening.
Unfortunately, it thunderstormed around 4pm and didn’t really stop until about 6pm when the event started. That plus it’s back to school week for a lot of people created all kinds of traffic issues for folks.
Lessons Learned:
- This is generally an easy even to put on once things are set up. I should be able to throw it together pretty quickly in the future. The toughest part is finding volunteers.
- I need a script. I wasn’t sure what to say to visitors and it sort of came out like, “well here it is” and I did not do any expectation setting. Lots of room for improvement here. Also, I didn’t even tell them if it was 5 minutes or an hour.
- The gift shop continues to be awkward. They go in and it’s small and they look around and then leave. I need a reason for each person to go in there, not just the sticker-getters.
- The back yard gets kind of muddy when it rains. The pavement collects puddles.
- I hate dealing with Meta (Facebook/Instagram). Their tools are terrible and confusing and constantly changing. It was a big headache to deal with. Just giving permissions to Polly took multiple attempts over the whole day. The Messenger app started freaking out on me and I had to reinstall it from scratch.
- Too many signs. I had like 8 asks of people on different signs and all the signs looked the same. I think I need to make it more focused. If they like the Eureka Room, get their email. Then email them with a list of asks. Or multiple emails over time with different asks. It was just a mess.
Other than getting the word out, another good reason to have an event is because the events live out on the internet. And if they are posted to big sites, then you get the good backlinks. That helps for a long time.
I think I might do more events, perhaps starting with the Stationary 5k again. That was a pretty popular one and not super hard to do.