Dress For Success

It’s an exciting time at work as we are in the midst of planning some upcoming special events that I suspect will act as great promotional and fundraising tools for our public television network. I feel reenergized by this work because, for many different reasons, special events are a rarity here, and I’ve missed them and what they can bring to the organization.

I look back on my former professional life in Austin and I have to laugh because there, the exception was NOT having an event during a week. I remember one particular stretch where we hosted a station-related event of one kind or another 7 nights in a row. On average, we had at least 1 event a week, and more often than not it was 2 or 3, often on weekends and almost always after 5:00. I must admit I miss the creative teamwork that went into making those events work, as we work more in silos here, but there was an exhaustion factor there that I don’t feel here and in the end, our return on investment on those events wasn’t always worth the effort. I believe there is a happy medium somewhere between my previous and current situations that best promotes excitement, interest and success.

But not-so-gracefully looping back to my point, we have a couple of great events coming up. And they require invitations.

Invitation writing is an art. One reason I like events so much is because each one is its own separate creature, unique unto itself. So what might apply to one event, won’t necessarily apply to the next, and this is certainly true of the language, look, design and tone of the invitation.

As I’m doodling with the invitation copy I’m stuck on that most-dreaded “attire” line. The attire line used to be the bane of my existence. It’s one of those lines that seem to divide people into camps – those who want to be straightforward or leave it off altogether and those who want to be super cutesy with the description. I tend to fall in the first camp, but my experience with special event fundraising has usually leaned toward the second. This was especially true when working with high profile community volunteers or board members on the planning committee. They ALWAYS seemed to think it was really important to be as creative as possible with the attire line.

The problem?

No one ever understood what it meant.

So what did they inevitably do? Call me. I spent numerous collective hours on the phone telling people what to wear to our events.

To prove my point, I looked back through my files and portfolio and jotted down these examples of suggested attire I found on invitations from the past ten years:

Night on the Town
Glitz and Glitter
Jeans and Jewels
Austin City Limits Chic (my personal favorite – you might as well call this one “Anything Goes”)
Dress to Impress
Fabulous Frocks
Hot, Hot, Hot
Boots and Bow Ties
Fiesta

In fairness, there were the occasional classic descriptions, too:

Black Tie Optional
Professional
Business Casual
Formal

The real rub was this; Austin is a very stylish town and the types of folks who came to our events were usually the types who attended every other social event in town so they really knew EXACTLY what to wear. So why call fashion-challenged me? I hated having to discuss with the major donors and beautiful people whether or not “Summer Picnic” meant strappy sandals and a sundress or linen cropped pants and a fancy straw hat. Because really? I didn’t know myself what most of these descriptions meant!

But I lost that battle all of the time. Oh, just thinking about it makes me cringe. If you only KNEW the kind of people I was dealing with on these planning committees you would so feel my pain…

It’s different here and I guarantee the attire line won’t be an issue. I just hope we can infuse our events with a little bit of creativity and enough inspiring moments that people will leave with an exciting impression of the Oklahoma Network, not caring one bit if their table mate was wearing haute couture or shabby chic.