November 29 - December 5

This week was the week of our Fashion Show Viewing Party!!!!!

Monday we started out with a morning meeting at Starbucks to go over all of our plans for the week. We lined out who had what responsibility and a timeline for the next 24 hours. It was a great experience splitting up the work and trusting that your work parter will do what is expected from them. After our meeting I went to Party Galaxy to get the decorations, plates, cups and utensils. Then to Target to order balloons for our party. I also confirmed our reservation to use our venue. After I ran errands, I created a Facebook event for our party, and invited all the people we had already invited. It was my first time to create a Facebook event, and it was a great learning experience regarding social media. I thought the Facebook event would be a great reminder about the event, as well as the location and time.

Tuesday was the big day! I went to Walmart and bought the food and drinks we needed for the party. I also order a platter of Chick-fil-a nuggets for the party. Then I headed to Kappa Hall to start setting up for the event. I had to set up over 60 chairs and get the tables set up as well. After I had Kappa Hall initially set up, I went to pick up the chick-fil-a platter, as well as many bags of ice. I returned and finished setting up the food and the smaller decorations. We opened the doors at 8:00 and the party lasted until 10:00. The party was a huge success! We had almost 50 girls attend, we gave away raffle drawings during each commercial break and I think everyone had a great time! After the show everyone stayed around to talk for a while, and then we had to clean up and put up all the chairs. Tuesday was such a long day, but it was such a great feeling to know that all our hard work had paid off! It was the first time I was 100% in charge of planning such a large event and it was an amazing learning experience! It was also SO fun!

Later on in the week I uploaded pictures and emailed back and forth with Caroline about how great our viewing party turned out!

Monday 10:30-11:30 a.m. and 2:00-6:00 (5 hours)

Tuesday 3:00-11:00 (8 hours)

Sunday 3:00-3:45 (3/4 hour)

This week = 14.75 hours

Total = 152.5 hours

November 22 - November 28

Happy Thanksgiving from PINK by Victoria Secret!!!!!!!

November 15 - November 21

Early this week I worked on the different recaps we were doing for our Happy Project. The first recap I put together was a power point presentation with pictures, captions, summaries and our donation numbers. After I uploaded all the pictures I had taken throughout the duration on our clothing drive, I resized the images and then cropped them. Cropping and resizing the pictures wasn't hard but, it was definitely a time consuming process. I carefully chose what pictures to use, and created the slide show around the pictures. After several hours of changing and rearranging, I finally finished the slide show and emailed it to our boss Caroline.

On Tuesday, I put together an essay as a recap of our Happy Project. I just wrote out all that we did to make our project successful, the challenges we were faced with, our final outcome and what I would change or do differently the next time I planned a philanthropy event. After I finished the essay, I also emailed it to Caroline for her to show to the marketers at Victoria Secret. Sharing our recaps allowed for Caroline to verify our work on campus as VS Pink Interns.

On Thursday, I put all our receipts together and mailed them to Caroline for her to have as a verification of our donation numbers. Thursday afternoon Shay and I met to finalize plans for our fashion show viewing party. Since the viewing party was right after Thanksgiving break, we really wanted to make sure we had all our plans outlined and our budget planned out. For food we decided the best idea would be to get vegetable and fruit trays, cupcakes and cookies, and chick-fil-a nuggets. We ordered all that we could in advance, and wrote down prices and where to get the things we couldn't pre-order. We also budgeted in cups, plates, napkins and utensils. From there we decided how much of our left-over budget we should spend on prizes and how much we should spend on decorations. It was a great experience working with a budget and really searching for the lowest possible cost on different items. We set a very detailed outline for our party so that when we returned from Thanksgiving break it wouldn't be overwhelming.

On the weekend, Shay and I both contacted our sororities about the event. We were hoping that those close to us would be especially supportive. We ensured that our fashion show viewing party invite would be printed in the weekly newsletters, as well as announced at chapter meetings. I also created a Facebook event and invited as many girls as I could. We were really doing everything we could to make sure we had a lot of people attend. It was really great practice and experience working with social media and traditional media tools to get the word out about our party. Event promotion is a huge part of public relations, and I was able to get experience planning my very first event!

Monday 7:15-10:15 (3 hours)

Tuesday 3:00-5:00 (2 hours)

Thursday 11:00-12:00 and 4:00-7:00 (4 hours)

Saturday 12:00-1:00 (1 hour)

Sunday 3:00-4:00 (1 hour)

This week = 11 hours

Total = 137.75 hours

November 8 - November 14

Food and Friends Shelter

Sorting Clothes at the Shelter

This week was the sprint finish to the end of our Happy Project clothing drive. Early on in the week I had a phone conference with Caroline to discuss our progress with our project. She was really enthusiastic with all that we were able to accomplish, and with the fact that we were really close to our goal of 2,000 donations.

Wednesday morning I devoted to collecting, sorting, counting and delivering the clothes to the shelter. The process I was quite familiar with at this point still took a long time. It was time-consuming to go by all of our donation locations, and the bags and boxes of clothes were really heavy! It was a task that was much easier done with two people, but unfortunately I had to work alone on Wednesday. Dropping off the clothes at the shelter, however, made all the hard work worth it! At first I was really skeptical to go to the shelter by myself, because being around all of the homeless people in the part of Norman that the shelter is located was really out of my comfort zone. But the more thought I put into it, and the more I went to the shelter, I realized it was a really great reminder that there are people in need all over the world. I too frequently get caught up in my own life, and living in my "college bubble", that visiting to the shelter was a really great reality check.

Wednesday after noon, I met with Shay. We started to really think about our Fashion Show viewing party. Since we already had our location set, we just brainstormed on what to do for food, prizes and giveaways, music and decorations. While we were brainstorming ideas, we were also checking prizes on the internet. We only had a few hundred dollars to spend on the viewing party and it was surprising how expensive food and decorations could be. We spent time working out our budget and deciding how we were going to allocate our money.

Friday was the last day to pick up clothes from the donation spots. I repeated the collection process and brought the last batch of donations to the shelter. We exceeded our goal of 2,000 items and were able to collect 2,007!!!! It was such a great feeling to know that we were able to meet our goal. Everyone at the shelter was so thankful for all that we had done and knowing that we were able to help that many people was such an awesome feeling!

Saturday I spent cleaning up after our project. I went to all of the donation stations to pick up the empty boxes. I also took down all the flyers that we had posted on campus. Lastly, I took the cardboard boxes to a recycle center. It was a great feeling to finally be done with our Happy Project.

Monday 11:15-12:15 (1 hour)

Wednesday 10:00-1:00 and 3:00-5:00 (5 hours)

Friday 11:45-2:45 (3 hours)

Saturday 12:00-1:30 (1.5 hours)

This week = 10.5 hours

Total = 126.75 hours