The past three weeks I’ve been really busy with stuff at work.  The museum was preparing for our five year anniversary and I had a lot of responsibilities.  Actually, today will be my 12 day working in a row! Our anniversary week went really well and there was so much in it that I felt proud of both because I love the organization and because I was directly involved in many of the weeks activities.

We had an activity tent up the whole week and I was responsible for:

– Figuring out the logistics of each activity, creating signage for it, and supervising the staff involved in the different areas.  There were accomplishments boards, a complete-the-sentence activity, a community art project, a raffle, a slideshow, handicraft workshops, a touch-and-learn table with items from the collection, selling our book, performances, private lunch events, seminars, and the big party on Friday. This was all very fun! It required many meetings, many hours playing around with designs and brainstorming.  – Designing and constructing the accomplishments boards that we had hanging along one wall of the tent.  There were five boards for our activity areas (community development, exhibitions, research and scholarship, collections, public programs) plus a future board with things we hope to accomplish.  In a place with limited stationery options I felt really proud of the creative workarounds.  For example, I needed the boards to be hard but not translucent.  They have hard boards here, but they let light through so I bought those, cut them to the right shape, then bought very large sheets of thin white cardboard-like paper and cut it to the same size.  I wanted a blue border around the edge so I bought blue tape that doubled as a border and as an adhesive to affix the two kinds of boards to each other.  I also wanted to put the quantitative accomplishments on post it notes and stick them on the boards but wanted everything on the boards to be printed so I printed out the statistics on regular paper, then stuck the post its over where the numbers had printed on the paper and reprinted it.  That way the numbers printed directly on to the post-it notes.
– Creating the slideshow.  This wasn’t just putting photos together but I suggested we also collect quotes from people we had worked with in the past so the slide show combined testimonials and photos.
– Making the invitations. We sent out 250 or so invitations and I got to design them. The electronic invites I also designed and sent.
– Helping to design the special notebooks we gave as gifts to the attendees.
– Updating social media.  There was a lot of stuff going on online with the week of events and I was responsible for updating our facebook with photo albums, reminders, and with the question of the day
– Rewriting the anniversary speech.  One of the most proud moments for  me was being asked to rewrite the speech.  Such a great feeling!
– Designing the raffle tickets.  They don’t sell them here, so I designed our very own special anniversary ones.

I had staff help put some of the accomplishment boards together, cut the raffle tickets, print the invitations and some other stuff, but there was still A LOT that I did.  In the end, everyone came together with their different parts and the week went really really well.

Check back soon for pics! In the meantime you can check out our facebook page for pics.