MOST OUTSTANDING PHILANTHROPIC EVENT NOMINEE
vietnamese student association at Louisiana state university
eggroll fest
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.), marketing techniques, and amount fundraised.
Every semester USMVSA holds its semi-annual event, Eggroll Festival. It is an event that has made us a household name on campus. In the spring, we held the event on a Tuesday, March 3rd, after realizing more people will be on campus due to the career fair taking place that day. The purpose of the event is to fundraise money for our CPP since it is our most notable fundraiser. We had about twenty people volunteering their time in between classes. We pour our hearts into creating the eggrolls from the recipe, rolling, promoting, and frying the egg rolls ourselves. Two weeks before the event, we post graphics on social media like Facebook and Instagram leading up to the event. Also, we post mini-flyer and put them on vehicles to promote the event to commuters. We post flyers on bulletin boards around campus and ask student services to include flyers in the campus-wide email to promote to faculty. To encourage members to sell egg rolls, we try to have a grand prize for whoever sells the most and make it fun.
What efforts were used to motivate and involve the organization's members?
We try to instill in our members that we work hard while having fun, so we decided to give away a Nintendo switch as the grand prize. Members in USMVSA have about two weeks to try their best selling egg rolls. We spent about $819.24, including the Nintendo switch, and made a profit of $1541. The preparations require three full days from 10 am-9 pm. We spent hours hand-rolling the egg rolls to ensure our customers have the best eggroll experience. Egg roll Festival is not merely selling egg rolls, but the importance of the process. During egg roll preparations, our members can bond and socialize with one another. We sold 2400 egg rolls, which we thought was impossible. One of our members had the idea of emailing the whole faculty directory of the school, which allowed us to sell the egg rolls in bulk. It allowed us to interact with professors from different departments whenever we had to deliver the egg rolls. Professors loved talking to us and asked us about our organization. Now, students and faculty reach out to us, asking when will the next eggroll be. We raised a total of $2482! It allowed USMVSA to donate a record-breaking $2500 this year to the CPP.
How did the organization overcome any challenges that arose while planning and implementing the event?
Challenges in any event is inevitable, but prior to the event we discussed as a whole board of the possibilities of scenarios that could go wrong and came up with solutions for them prior. By doing so, lessens stress onto our board members due to the knowing how to strike a problem when it occurs. Experiences from past eggroll fest play an important role because the cons are turned into pros in future eggroll fest, which incorporates for the betterment of the event. It is also a nice feature that our executive board members have great sense of urgency, quick witted, and fast on our hands and feet.