Some 20/20 Hindsight Advice:

If you are going to do a fund raiser for a group of teenagers, you might want to check in with them first to get a feel as to how much they are willing to get involved. To ask them, How do you feel about selling tickets to a show at $25 a pop? Oh, that would be hard for you? Because you only feel comfortable selling tickets to your friends and your friends can’t afford a $25 ticket?

We’d only sold 9 tickets and we were 2 weeks away from the show.

Dana kept asking me when the performers were going to send out their email announcements to their mailing lists. I had already asked them twice and I wasn’t going to ask them again.

Besides, I was starting to get a little pissed. Why weren’t these kids selling tickets? Wasn’t that the deal? It wasn’t up to the singers and musicians to sell tickets; they were donating their time and talent to create a show SO the kids would have something to sell. The kids were the ones that were benefiting from this, not the singers!

It was starting to get scary. What if we only sold a handful of tickets? What if these great singers and musicians showed up only to perform for 40 people, most of whom were the kids parents? What if, after asking my friends to give of their time, services and money, we had a  fund raiser that flopped?

For the first time in this event creation process, I was starting to freak out. And feel resentment and anger. But I didn’t want my sudden plunge into doubt and fear to poison this event so I tried to let it go, to envision a huge surge in ticket sales, to see the event being a raging success. But this dark feeling that the kids weren’t pulling their weight and this resentment that I had laid my ass on the line for nothing kept kicking at me. I had to say something.

I called Dana.

Let me say here that if nothing came of this event other than the
chance to work with Dana Alexander, it would have been well worth it. I
loved working with her. She’s smart, straightforward, honest and
doesn’t put up with a lot of nonsense. She’s also deeply committed to
her students and to the work she does. And when I told her what was
coming up for me around the lack of ticket sales, she totally got it.

We made a plan. I was to come to zero period the next day at 7:30 am
to meet the Chamber Singers (can you believe that they meet and SING from 7:00 to 8:00 every day?) and give them a little ticket selling
pep-talk. See, I hadn’t even met them yet. They had just heard about me
from Dana. And perhaps this was part of the problem. Actually, it WAS a BIG
part of the problem, which was we had taken complete creative control
over this event without conferring with the kids and then expected them to get behind it 100%.

But
you can’t ask anybody, much less a group of high school kids, to feel
invested in something that has been made FOR them rather than WITH them.

So, yes I gave then a little pep talk, encouraging them by holding
up a ticket and $25 in cash and saying, "This ticket equals this, $25.
And when you sell this (the ticket) YOU are the ones who get THIS (the
cash)." But I also made it clear that I wanted to help them sell tickets; I
wanted to hear from them about how we could make it easier.

And then it became clear. Teenagers live in a tiny teenage
world that consists of their teenager friends, family and school mostly. We
had created an adult event with an adult ticket price and expected
teenagers to sell them. But to whom? Their teenage friends don’t have
$25 to spend on a concert featuring a bunch of adult singers they’ve never
heard of.

That’s why candy works! Kids can sell candy to their friends. It’s the right price and it’s something they want!

My 20/20 hindsight started to come into focus. We should
have planned this event with these kids from the get-go. We should have
had a student ticket price from the get-go. We should have advertised that the Chamber
Singers would in fact be performing that night. We should have done many things differently.

But there we were. 10 days away from the show. And we had a lot of tickets to sell.

More tomorrow…