November 5, 2009
Brainstorming and letting ideas fly are great in getting creativity flowing through the veins of your organising team… however you plans need to be reasonable. You need to think carefully about shaping events and ministry around people and not pushing beyond your limits.
Develop the ideal plan, think about the resources: people power, skill, money, equipment, energy & initiative that is available and work out whether the ideal is realisitic and scale back.
i.e This year at our Carols Under the Bridge event, we dreamt that we wanted to get market food stalls (you know the ones at every market… think Turkish gosleme yum!)… So we tried to make it happen. We approached our local neighborhood centre who helps organise our local markets, they couldn’t help out as they will be too busy around Christmas. We could have organised ourselves, but don’t have the man power and financial resouces to do it this year. It is a cheap thing to do as stall owners need to do their own thing, but if we have food we need port-a-loos and bins which cost more money than we have allowed for this year. So instead we are going with hiring a few coffee cart vans and gelato vans that have a fundraisng element to them. We will keep Market Stall Idea for next year and plan for it earlier.
Not all is lost if you can’t do all that you hope to do. Know your limitations and remember it is better to do a few things well than do 1000 things poorly even if they are all brilliant ideas. Keep the brilliant ideas for next year and store them up in an improvement plan for Christmas. What you dont do this year can go towards making next year better, when your ministry, event or avtictivity has grown momentum and support.
And how God plans away without our efforts… stall owners have contacted us to be involved and are generously donating 20% of sales.
So looks like there will be food stalls.