Read more in this series here.

It was getting down to the wire when we had our final meeting before the event. Fortunately, thanks to a great team and a lot of planning, we had most everything done and ready to go — or, at least, as ready as it could be before we actually arrived at the hotel.

There were, however, a few last things to figure out:

• Tipping — it’s customary to tip the staff who works on your event, and we had to figure out how to do that.
• I had to send the corporate card info to a couple of members of the team so we could get our orders in for pizza and snacks.
• We finalized the spanking bench breakdown crew.
• We still needed mock-ups of the decorations for the Saturday night event so we could give them to our volunteers.
• We double-checked that everything was ready for the vendor fair party games area.
• I built the ticket-taking boxes for the silent raffle and reminded everyone that if they had any gently-used kink items they were willing to part with we could definitely use them for the raffle. We had fifty total boxes.
• I updated NotSoKnotty’s title on her badge.
• I wrote the welcome email — which was inordinately long — and put it into Mailchimp to be sent on the Wednesday before the party.
• We reviewed the “badge yanking” policy — which is when someone can pick up a badge for someone else. In short, we said it would not be happening, because we needed everyone to sign the liability release form before entering any party spaces.
• We discussed a post-event survey.
• I created and printed a few dozen blank badges, as well as a few temporary badges for anyone who lost theirs.
• We went over every single event on the schedule and made sure someone was in charge of each one.

And that was that. It was time for the party. I don’t have notes on every single thing I did, nor every single thing the team did, but I’ll do my best to reconstruct it for the next few posts.