Dixons Gala Charity Night in aid of Headway Tuesday 27th July At The Goodfellowship Inn, Cottingham Road, Hull By Lucy Jackson

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Where do I start? Working at Dixons xL in Hull and having being involved in the organisation of two such events previously, I thought that providing all was well planned, what could go wrong? To be honest, right up until the actual morning of the day itself, all had gone particularly well. The organisation begins by contacting the charity which you have decided to support. In my case I chose Headway - the brain injury association.

As well as being a very worthwhile cause, this is a charity is also currently supported by my employers, Dixons Group Plc. which means that any money made on the night is usually matched by Dixons' head office.

Once Headway had been contacted there was the venue to confirm so I got in touch with The Goodfellowship Inn as they have happily accommodated us in the past. The difference with this event was that at previous gala nights it had been my band that had provided the entertainment, but as my band are no longer together I had the challenge of finding alternative performers to help us out.

This also meant that a huge chunk of my bands usual audience and followers would probably not attend, meaning that I really had to go all out when promoting the event and selling tickets.

However, after living in York for 3 years I managed to contact some friends of mine, namely Flamin' Pie, a musical duo who I had seen perform on numerous occasions and were well up for performing at the gala event. This was a fantastic development as I knew that this band were great and would go down really well with the audience on the night.

I also rang round a few local magicians to see if they were also interested in supporting us when I came across Alan Hudson of Mr. Magic Entertainments. Alan agreed to perform for us on the night his new mind-reading cabaret act, and this along with one of my colleagues, Sarah Tomlinson (a solo singer) would provide the nights entertainments.

That was the really difficult part sorted because a night without entertainment wouldn't be much of a night at all! The next challenge was to beg and plead for raffle prizes from anyone who was willing to listen and to sort out the ticket printing and decoration. I managed to talk Prompt Print & Promotions of Hull to print the tickets for me, and after sending out well over 100 letters to local businesses managed to accumulate over 25 raffle prizes ranging from a holiday down south to bottles of bubbly!

Then I had to find someone to lend me some balloon weights, some helium for the balloons to decorate the venue and the other zillion little things that needed to be arranged! This entire process took more than two months and more-or-less consumed most of my free time outside of work, but I was pleased with the level of support that had been offered.

I designed and printed all of the posters and programmes for the evening myself and throughout these two months began to get people to purchase tickets for the event. My colleague Sarah contacted thisisUll.com to ask for their support in promoting the gala night (and they also donated us a t-shirt and attended the event too!) whilst I contacted other local media to get as much publicity as possible.

The day of the event came, all of the hard work that had been put in was about the pay off that evening, when at 10am in the morning as I was wandering to the shops to buy a new dish drainer for my boyfriends kitchen, I received a phone call from my friend in Flamin' Pie explaining that one of the members had been rushed to hospital the night before and there was no way that they could play at the gala that evening.

Dixons Gala Charity Night continued here

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