MOST OUTSTANDING SOCIAL EVENT NOMINEE
Ole Miss Vietnamese American Student Association
Botanical Gardens Formal
Provide a detailed description of the event and the population it served. Details MUST include: date of event, number of participants, program purpose (goals, objectives, etc.), use of resources (finances, community support, etc.), and marketing techniques.
Ole VASA hosted its annual formal, this years theme being Botanical Gardens. This event took place Saturday October 29th, 2022 with over 180 attendees from both Ole Miss and the Gulf Coast region. Ole VASA’s formals are thrown annually by the executive board as a way for our members to have fun and connect with each other outside of our general meetings and their family events. This event is also very big in the Gulf Coast region as it’s one of the first major events after Camp Delta and Leadership Retreat. We are grateful to have many people from the GC region drive from 2-6 hours to come our event. Since our Botanical Gardens formal was hosted on Ole Miss campus, as a register student organization, Ole VASA got to use the room for a discounted price, allowing us to use our funds towards catering from Hotbox Hibachi and Mi&Tea. We also were able to allocate more funds to our “formal decorating” committee which was ran by our Social Chair Victoria Van and was composed of 30 Ole VASA members. To advertise the event, we made a graphic that revealed the theme, date, time, and location. We also posted graphics with our ticket prices as well as our caters. We had our executive board members post the graphics on their Instagram stories and many of our general members posted the graphics too. We also reached out to our friends in the Gulf Coast region to repost our graphics to help us promote the event well to the entire region. Ole VASA’s Botanical Gardens formal was one of our most successful and popular events this year!
What efforts were used to motivate and involve the organization's members?
We were able to promote our Botanical Gardens Formal by both word of mouth and social media postings. Many Ole VASA members had high expectations based on lasts years Starry Night formal. We hyped up our members by revealing our caters, which were restaurants that Ole VASA members love. Our general members were very involved in the decor aspect of formal. Many were on the Formal Decorating committee. This committee helped the executive board plan and create decorations, set up, and take down all of the decorations at formal, which ranged from balloon arches, greenery walls, photo booths, and more. Our members brought many new ideas to our decor planning that the executive board did not think of. We could not have had formal decorated as beautifully as we did, without the help of our general members.
Did the organization overcome any challenges that arose while planning and implementing the event? How?
In the beginning of our formal planning process, we could not find a venue due to Greek life activities, weddings, and pre-planned events. We also could not find a date that complimented the executive board’s personal schedule. We ended up having to chose a date where our president would be out of town for days before our formal but would be there the day of to help us with decorating and the event itself. We overcame these obstacles by working together with our formal decorating committee and we were able to set up the event with minimal setbacks. A few other challenges that we had were: not having straws for our boba bar, which we quickly resolved by calling out caterer and getting straws delivered to us. Another setback we had was non Ole VASA EBoard members trying to play music off of our music system. To combat this we had at least one EBoard member at the music system at all times. In the event that we could not focus on the music system, we communicated in our executive board group message to pass on the role. Also, to ensure everyone’s safety, all of Ole VASA’s executive board got sober monitor certified. Since we were all sober monitors, we were trained to be able to react quickly and effectively in the case of an emergency with our attendees.
