Čikagos Lietuvių
Jaunimo Sąjunga

CLJS—and its New Year’s Committee—wants to thank everyone who attended and helped with what was, by seemingly all currently known forms of measurement, an overwhelming success of a New Year’s Eve Banquet and weekend. We just covered our costs—losing only a little of the seed money with which we started out the whole process. Considering the last-minute upgrades to the menu and bar that our financial flexibility provided, we think it was a pretty small price to pay.

CLJS is undergoing some changes this year. First, Auksė Grigaliūnaitė is leaving her position as president. If you get a chance, thank Auksė first and foremost for the success of New Year’s, as well as the success of CLJS since she took the reins (officially) almost exactly five years ago. She’s masterminded five Turkey Weekends and numerous other events over the years. Furthermore, New Year’s was her baby through and through—she put in more work than anyone else, and without her desire to make a splash as a final gesture, we’d have never thought we could possibly throw an event like the one we’re all still recovering from. Auksė’s been diligent and thorough, and I can only hope that her replacement, Justinas Andriušis, keeps up the same level of engagement as Auskė has.

I (Moacir) am still sticking around in some capacity, and I am pretty excited about involving CLJS (via JAVLJS) at Kongresas this summer, and look forward to another successful year.

In case you want to thank people in specific, here they are:

Auksė Grigaliūnaitė (President): in charge of everything. Main liasion with hotel, and the one with the most to lose

Me (Iždininkas): in charge of the db, keeping track of money, and publicity

Justinas Andriušis (the New Guy): in charge of the band, party favors, press, security, and learning the ropes

Dainius Dumbrys (the Relief Pitcher): secondary hotel liasion/legal beagle, also in charge of the desserts (donated kindly by Racine Bakery)

Ingrida Latožaitė & Erikas Mikaitis (The Couple): Recruiting, centerpiece design, errand-running, assorted legwork

There were others who helped us out through the year with various tasks, who weren’t active members of the Committee. I run the risk of leaving people out by naming anyone in specific, but if you helped out, we appreciate it—either by assembling tables, pressuring friends, helping work at our other events, distributing publicity materials, or offering advice. It wasn’t five people who put this together. It was hundreds. And a giant hotel.

After the jump, I’m going to ruminate a bit on the New Year’s process, offering some insights to other LJSes, etc., should they want some tips or ideas or something of the sort.

The biggest innovation, by far, that we developed with New Year’s is already gaining steam: the use of PayPal to pay for the banketas. Already the cruise for LT Days used this, and Detroit’s Mardi Gras will, too. PayPal is great because it doesn’t punish you with fees transferring money across borders ($1 per transaction, it seems), and it lets people who are lazy (like me) to use our debit cards to pay for something, instead of cutting a check, finding an envelope and stamp, etc. CLJS reached a point where we were literally pulling in over a thousand dollars a day via PayPal, and a strong majority of New Year’s participants used it in paying. Fast, easy… what’s there to not like? The only downside is that PayPal charges around a 3% fee if your account is enabled to accept credit cards. That’s why there was a price differential for New Year’s, at first. The added great thing about PayPal was that it allowed us to have an all-online registration process. Fill out a form, which gets dumped into a database, and pay right then and there. Quick and easy. Please try to replicate this, other LJSes!

The second thing I think we did that was new was the level and scope of advertising. I don’t mean that we bought tons of ads in Draugas. I mean, simply, that we were already pushing New Year’s in Chicago in January of 2005—12 months before the event. Our website, with rudimentary information—but already including the hotel name—was up in early Spring, and we started getting our first wave of registrations in June. Sure, months of “it’s too early for me to think about new year’s” was disheartening to hear from friends, but it also set a baseline. By LT Days in October, it seemed that “everyone” had heard about New Year’s already, and that they were all considering it in some capacity. We were persistent, and we kept it simple (or so I think). Stickers, cards, often with little more than a catchphrase and a URL.

Third (these are starting to descend in terms of success), the website got a lot of compliments for its clarity and thoroughness. Thanks. Sadly, along with the emails, I felt a lot of it went unread, which was too bad, especially when it led to arguments and fights. I know it’s tough to read a lot of text, but I’m also, by nature, very wordy, so it was hard for me to strike a balance. The “summary, then content” model of emails and web posts seemed to be the most successful format of conveying information, though I hope the FAQs got a lot of love, too.

Fourth, the price ladder and incentives seemed a bit of a mixed bag. We certainly got rushes of payments before the prices jumped each time, but the lottery for a free room did not seem to be as much of an incentive to register and pay early. I don’t think we’d change it in the future, but it wasn’t the big hit I had hoped it would be.

Fifth, sponsorships were a complete bust. I think maybe our prices were too high (we, in fact, were warned of this), but also, I think our committee wasn’t really in a salesy mood.

Other things:

* If you can do it yourself, do it. Ingrida Latožaitė designed beautiful centerpieces for pennies. We can’t even imagine what the Westin would have charged for their complex floral arrangements.

* Know your crowd. The Westin really pushed us to have more deserts and appetizers during cocktail hour. They also encouraged us to move bars into the ballroom after dinner. We resisted, saying that Lietuviai wouldn’t care about apps (and would rather have the money funnelled into better booze—the appetizers were very very very expensive), would enjoy a raguolis or two and some cookies but nothing else, and would prefer having the bars away from the dancing. I could be wrong, but I think we predicted our guests better than the Westin would have on all three counts.

* Be honest. We were always straightforward with the Westin about everything. We told them we’d be noisy. We told them we were into booze. We told them there would be minors. We told them the crowd would be largely in their 20s. Personally, this made me feel more comfortable in my dealings with the hotel—especially when I had to cut a check for $19k at 10:30pm on 31 December (to close up the payments to the hotel). I know a lot of minors were upset that we were carding as hard as we were, but honesty was the best policy. If anyone didn’t have fun at New Year’s and can convincingly lay 100% of the blame on their having a wristband with balloons, please contact me (Moacir), and I’ll make it up to you somehow.

* Don’t put shit off. We had the Westin locked up and under contract in March. We booked the band in September. We had the party/wristbands lined up at Howl at the Moon in early November. Personally, I think that was a crucial part of the whole process, and it’s a testament to the organisation that we had (provided mostly by Auksė). I know a lot of LJSes are always undermanned and can’t delegate everything out, etc. But organisation cannot be beaten. The entire committee was able to coast through the weekend, having a ton of fun. We had about 3–4 hours of work during the last four days of the year—which is like nothing, considering how much stuff was going on. We had it all locked down ahead of time. Sure, this may sound boastful, but it’s something I’m pretty proud of, and it’s something I encourage other LJSes to try to keep in mind.