 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event. We are a webinar, we are a webcast, we are an online show, calls, whatever you like. We're here live every Wednesday mornings at 10 a.m. Central Time. But if you are unable to join us at 10 a.m. on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record all of our shows every week. And they are posted onto our website in our archives. So if you can't join us on Wednesdays or if you have a colleague who wants to watch a show, check out our site. I'll show you at the end of this show where it is. And you can see, watch all of our recordings from there. We do a mixture of things here. Presentations, interviews, book reviews, mini training sessions, basically anything library related. We are happy to have it on the show. Sometimes we have a Nebraska Library Commission staff do presentations. And sometimes we do bring in guest speakers. And that's what we've done today is a lot of... We have on the line with us is Cecilia Lawrence, who is the director of our North Platte Public Library here in Nebraska. Just a bit west of Lincoln quite a while, quite a bit out there. Just 200 miles. Yes. When you live in a state like this, it's not a big deal. That's right. You drive, yeah, for hours and hours to get where you want to be. Exactly. And she's going to tell us about their jigsaw puzzle tournament they've been doing, which has been around for quite a long time. Yes, 10 years actually. Yeah, and still going strong obviously. Very fun event they have gone down there. And so I asked her to come on the show and tell us how they do it and how actually I think part might have caught a lot of people's attention. The fundraising aspect. Yeah. So go ahead and take it away. Well, thank you for having me. As Krista said, I've been in North Platte now for 20 years and our jigsaw puzzle tournament has been going on for 10. And it's a really unusual fundraiser and it's a really unusual competitive tournament to hold. There's actually been a small movement starting with jigsaw puzzle tournaments and I have to give a shout out to a wonderful documentary that was done called Wicker Kittens, W-I-C-K-E-R Kittens. And you can find their Facebook page and like them and they do post about competitive jigsaw puzzle tournaments that take place all over the country. This particular documentary that was done followed a couple of jigsaw puzzle teams that competed in the St. Paul, Minnesota Winter Carnival and they run their tournament a little bit differently but I was hoping to share this because it is a really different fundraiser and if your community is like my community, there are fundraisers every day of every week by all sorts of different organizations and you need something that will be different and stand out. This one has been great because it's got a lot of staying power because doing a jigsaw puzzle is an intergenerational event. It's also something all abilities, all ages can do this and it's a really fun thing to do especially in a cold winter state like Nebraska is. So I've got a couple things that I always get asked about tournaments because I have been asked to give information to people and this is a great way to share it. But these are some misconceptions that people quite frequently ask me is can you hold this in any type of venue? We're going to go through each of these in the presentation. You can just use card tables. It's a question I always get. Can we use donated or used puzzles and I'll address that. You can throw a tournament together in a month. The big answer is a big fat no. You need a few more months than that to put together any successful fundraiser and this one is no exception. And then the other misconception that people have when they talk to me about this event is that puzzle tournaments are inexpensive and that is not necessarily true either. So let's take each of these misconceptions here. But before we start that I'm going to talk about what is a jigsaw puzzle tournament? Well basically you have teams of individuals or two person teams or four person teams and the goal is for the team to finish the puzzle in the shortest amount of time possible. So they're competing against their peers in the same kind of division. In North Platt we have six different divisions. We have student divisions made up of second and third graders, fourth and fifth grade and sixth through eighth. High school students compete in the adult division. So the adult division is made up of you can do an individual, a two person team or a four person team. So they're competing against the same number of people and they're doing the same puzzle within their same division. So let's talk about the number one misconception. You can just hold this tournament anywhere. Well lighting is crucial. You definitely need to have a venue that has tremendous lighting. You can never have enough light for the puzzlers. A lot of the puzzles have a sheen to the surface. Sometimes fluorescent lights can cause a glare and that can cause problems for competitors. You've got to have a venue that has enough space for your number of teams that you're going to have. So you need space, you need good lighting. The St. Paul, Minnesota one that was recognized in that documentary I mentioned, Wicker Kittens, their venue actually has skylights and a lot of natural outdoor lighting. We are not so fortunate to have a facility like that. We actually are using a church that has really good lighting and it's a very large church that has a very flexible sanctuary space that it's bigger than a regulation basketball court. So that's fantastic for us. But we do allow our puzzlers to bring in extension cords and additional desktop and floor lamp types of lighting to increase their ability to see well because we don't want lighting to be an issue. The first year we started this tournament, I thought we'd have maybe 10 or 20 people and we were going to squeeze them all into the library's 1,000 square foot meeting room. We ended up with about 45 competitors that first year and ended up moving the venue to a hotel convention space about four days right before the event. And of course that came with some additional costs as well. We've also held this event in a school gymnasium. Again, the lighting wasn't the greatest and so we eventually ended up moving to a church auditorium, as I said, and that works absolutely fantastic for us. Interestingly, we have outgrown this space now and rather than trying to find an even larger venue, which would probably be a full convention center type hotel, we are splitting up our divisions. So in 2016, our third and fifth graders and our middle school students will be competing, say starting at 9 o'clock. Second and third graders are coming at 11, adults will compete in the afternoon. So it means a longer day for the event coordinators and volunteers, but we're able to continue staying in a great venue. And once you have a good venue, keep it, because the lighting and number of tables is really what it comes down to. The second misconception I run across is people think, well, I'll just ask all my friends and we'll just get together and we can use card tables. Well, while most of us put together card tables or puzzles together on card tables in our own homes, we really don't provide enough space when you have teams in a very competitive environment. And if you think that this doesn't turn into a competition, you're going to be wrong. This is very competitive. There is a strategy to do these puzzles and the contestants need room to work. So I've got several different types of tables listed here and this is the order of tables that we prefer for our tournament. The six foot by three foot rectangular tables really work great. I mean, puzzlers can open up their puzzle box and they can dump out all the pieces and immediately start turning them over. The venue that was used in St. Paul, Minnesota, they used all round tables. We only use round tables for our four person teams. They're harder to have everybody get around a little bit and they're very large and if you've got little kids competing, you only have two of them. You don't need that big of a space. You can certainly use the old fashioned eight foot by three foot rectangular tables, those really heavy 50 pound ones. We've used those before as well. And then my last choice is a card table and if you're going to use a card table or that's all your venue has, that's fine. I would put students on it because it depends on how big the puzzle is, the number of pieces, but the smaller the card table, the smaller the puzzle size should be. We have actually ended up at one tournament having to use conference tables four foot by two foot in one of our divisions. We made sure that it was the youngest children's division and it was a 100 piece puzzle. So it was less likely to have pieces spilling all over the edges. And I'm going to show you here a moment what our layout actually looks like for our teams. This is from 2015 and as you can see this, we actually did students in the morning. So this was how our church auditorium was laid out. And whenever you're holding a tournament, fairness is the biggest thing for your event and you will see we had more registrations and more people signing up. And so some of these elementary kids, they got stuck on these little tables. And while that's not as big a problem for kids and this was, as I said, a 100 piece puzzle, it wouldn't have surprised me if a parent had come up and said that kids that could spread out had more of an advantage because they could move around and lay things out better. And believe it or not, parents and students and adults will actually have those comments. So within each division, my suggestion is to try as hard as you can to have the same size table. Misconception number three is you can use donated or used puzzles. And can any, just any old puzzle work? And the answer is yes, but no. Believe it or not, there are puzzle manufacturers and certain puzzle images that can lead to a really exciting jigsaw puzzle tournament, but it can also have the opposite effect and quickly have puzzlers and competitors frustrated to the point of quitting. So let's talk about puzzles and puzzle pieces. Puzzle pieces really should be made of a thick cardboard material where the pieces fit snugly together. A lot of times cheaper puzzles are thinner and the pieces don't interlock very tightly. Those do not make good competition puzzles. The size and shape of the puzzle piece can be a challenge to participants. We try to find puzzle pieces that are on a horizontal and vertical cut. And I will say that we have actually had a tournament where they were on a side cut or we also had a tournament where the puzzle pieces were irregularly shaped. They're fine to use in the competitions. However, you need to make sure that all your puzzles are the same and the same skew number and that they are being used in the same division. So everybody, again, will go back to that fairness issue. You want to be fair within each competition category. As you can see in this picture, sometimes puzzle pieces can be very small. The smaller the piece, the more challenging the puzzle will be to the competitors and that's fine, but it also means that it's probably going to increase the time that it takes for the contestants to finish the puzzle. We have found that the puzzle pieces that are anywhere from an inch and larger are much better and children's puzzles will be the largest one shown on the right-hand side in that image. So those work better for the little hands to grasp and they also make it in the adult divisions the puzzles will be put together much quicker as well. If you're talking about just the overall general puzzle, not the pieces, of course you've got your regular square and rectangular shaped puzzles and those are what people are used to and of course the strategy, you know, about the edge pieces and peep somebody other team person can work on the middle part. You can certainly utilize shaped puzzles, ones that are oval or they can be, I had one year we did it, it was a candy jar shape and that's fine for them to use, but it increases the difficulty and most tournaments will have time limits. In our adult division, we give the adults four hours to complete and we'll talk about the rules about what happens when you're not done at the end of that time because you actually have to come up with the first, second, third place and get the order that people finish in. Again, shaped puzzles can be used but they add to the difficulty. I also wanted to talk about the number of pieces here and there certainly is a correlation between the age of the person and the ability to do pieces, puzzles that have more pieces in them. So we start with our second and third-grade division and they are doing a 100-piece puzzle and we go all the way up to our four-person teams that do 600 to 750-piece puzzles. Now, we have tried 1,000-piece puzzles and I wouldn't necessarily rule that out that we wouldn't do that again, but what we discovered is unless the design of the puzzle is easy, they don't finish in our four-hour time limit. So that's our trade-off. So we actually inspire and get a lot more fast-paced competition by doing smaller-piece puzzles. Typically, the two-person teams are about a 500-piece puzzle but again, increase the competition by going down to a smaller number but you can see those listed here and it is something to keep in mind, especially when you start involving children and you will be able to see as kids puzzle their ability definitely changes and when we first started, we only had middle-schoolers and we had younger elementary school kids wanting to puzzle and we only had one division and that was third through fifth and what we discovered was that the third-graders, whatever team they were on, they always lost because the fifth graders, the high-hand coordination was so much more developed, they always beat out the third-graders so we solved that problem and have actually blown up our competition or blown up the tournament by almost doubling our numbers by increasing that division. Still on puzzles here, I always get asked, what puzzles do I use? There's definitely manufacturers that I would recommend. Melissa and Doug is a fantastic Nebraska-based company. If you're doing a kid division, they have 100, 200, and 300-piece puzzles. They are fantastic and they're very reasonably priced. They interlock well together and they're the large pieces. Springbok, as we always know, is a great company for puzzlers. They're a little bit on the expensive side and they're also limited in the number of pieces. They tend to only do 500, 550, or 1,000-piece puzzles. They don't do very often, 100, 200, 300, or 400-piece puzzles. Excuse me. Cobble Hill, Masterpieces, Bits and Pieces, Suns Out, Ravensburger, Buffalo Games, and Schmidt are all fantastic to work with. Suns Out is a little inconsistent and I would suggest that you test the puzzles from that manufacturer because sometimes we've had great luck and other times they don't interlock so well. So I would test those. In the beginning, that was actually what we did is I and some friends who didn't compete in the tournament would actually get together months in advance and we would test puzzles. Now we're to the point that we don't need to do that. You can look at the image and the manufacturer and pretty much determine a pretty decent puzzle. You notice I put Canadian behind Cobble Hill and Schmidt behind German. Typically, when you're putting together your puzzle tournament, you order a bunch of puzzles in advance and then after your registrations come in, you may need to order additional puzzles on a rush basis. We have had to do that. The problem is when you're ordering the quantity of puzzles because again, you're the same puzzle within the same division, it is difficult to find retailers and even online vendors and I've got websites listed there. It's very difficult to find companies that have 20 to 30 puzzles available. And so you end up, when you're doing the rush to get the extra puzzles there right before the tournament, you may end up having to go outside the U.S. to try and get puzzles. The Cobble Hill story is a really funny one because I ended up talking to their manufacturing plant in Canada to try and get puzzles because we were short like seven puzzles one year for a tournament where one of the divisions was a Cobble Hill puzzle. You might be surprised that not to see Walmart on this list. Walmart orders huge quantities of puzzles from all of these but typically very few stores, they may only get three puzzles and it is difficult to order even from Walmart in the quantities that we need. Amazon of course is a great website as well but we run into the same thing to try and, you know, you might be able to find 8, 10, 11 puzzles but when you need 20 or 30 or 50 puzzles, you really start running into problems trying to secure these. Puzzle manufacturers I would not recommend for tournament play and this is nothing against these companies. They produce a product that is probably great for home use but their pieces do not interlock well together. Siaco, I have not even tested in years because their puzzle pieces are identical and when you have, let's say, an area that is all the same, a border around an image or a red apple or something that is all the same color, you cannot tell if your pieces are incorrectly. It is an extremely challenging company not one I would recommend for tournament play. So let's talk a little bit about the images here. These are some of the puzzles that we've used in the past. I get asked that question a lot. What images do you use? The cats on the bookshelf were our very first puzzles that we used in our very first tournament. Again, we only had two divisions and we tested the middle one and it was a great puzzle and same manufacturer, we got the one with the black cat. We did not test it. Everybody who worked on that puzzle finished all of the bookshelf pieces and every single team all they had left was the black cat. And this particular manufacturer, and unfortunately I do not remember which one it was, the puzzle pieces were the shape the same and you could not tell if the puzzle pieces were incorrectly in the black cat. And it took them more than an hour just to do that middle chunk. So, again, strategy comes into play and after that we tried to never do a black cat again or anything that had lots of same imagery. The snowman was a great one. That was one that we used in years past. Sometimes we'll have a theme and so this year we had, I think, sort of an animal theme and so the children's one was the Noah's Ark and the middle school was the jungly one and that one might look extremely difficult but I can tell you that the pieces were extremely large and so there was almost a distinctive color on each one and that puzzle was actually put together very quickly and then, of course, the challenging four-person piece one was the one on the right. One year we did sort of a throwback to sort of old vintage things and the puzzle on the right was a 1,000-piece puzzle with Marilyn Monroe there. Not a single four-person team finished that puzzle in the allotted time. And that was sort of a challenge and that was part of our decision to try and not do 1,000-piece puzzles in that division again. This was last year's puzzles, sort of a fall and autumn and you'll notice that we did indeed in the middle puzzle we used the oval shape. This looks like it was tremendously difficult but it actually, all the four-person teams completed that puzzle in less than four hours. Most of them were about three hours and 15 minutes for that. The one on the very right is the Melissa and Doug image that was used. So definitely take a look at the images and one of the things that I look for whenever I am looking at puzzles are if you think about a team putting a puzzle together and I'll use this one on the right as an example in the kids division, they can start by working on the edge pieces. They've got major sections that they can separate out the yellow sun, the blue sky, the horse, the flowers and the other horses. That is one of the marks of a puzzle that is going to go fairly quickly in putting it together. When you get over to puzzles like the ones on the left here you still have the separate yellow tree and orange tree and green tree but this is going to be more challenging and this actually, we did a 300-piece in the middle school division and a 500-piece of this exact same image in our two-person adult team. So it was definitely a little bit more challenging puzzle and the two-person adult team had no problem with it. Our middle schoolers were a little frustrated. That's okay. It leads to good competition. I talked about fairness and one of the things that we definitely try to do when we do these puzzle tournaments is the title and the image should be kept secret. A lot of times I'll tell our puzzlers, you know, our theme this year is cats or our theme this year is dogs or candy or cupcakes or whatever it is. But most of the years I don't even say that but you'll see this picture and this was from when we were in a school gymnasium that the puzzles are actually all wrapped and that is something that we do. We take off the shrink wrap that is around the puzzle if there is any and we wrap them in brown paper sacks or wrapping paper but you definitely want this to stay a secret before the tournament because, again, you want this to be fair play amongst your competitors. Interestingly, this particular year, this was the last year we were at this school gymnasium, you'll notice that we have those heavy eight-foot tables and you'll see this blue painter's tape across it. We tried to make this table work with two teams competing in the kids division. I will tell you that did not work out well at all because the pieces went across the painter's tape, got mixed into the other competitors' puzzle. The other problem we had this particular year, we actually had some boys that didn't like the girls they were next to and stole the pieces. So it is a competition and competition can get unfair very quickly so I would never recommend to do this. We've never done it again. We learned our lesson about trying to make eight-foot tables work that depending on your situation, you might be able to make it work and sometimes you have to make it work because in our situation, we ran out of room. The next question I get asked quite frequently is how many puzzles should I order? In your first year, you really have to just guesstimate what a number of puzzles you're going to need and you're just going to ballpark it and go with it and then as I said, you're going to have to have a registration cutoff that leaves you time to order additional puzzles if necessary. So I think our first year, again, I had expected 10 to 20 people, we ended up with 40 meaning that I ordered 10 puzzles and ended up needing about 25. So we definitely need to work with that but you just have to kind of get a ballpark and then be prepared to rush order extra ones. Our event is held in January. It's actually held at the same time as that St. Paul Winter Carvel. It's on the same day. It's the last Saturday in January and you need to order your puzzles two to three months in advance. We actually try and take advantage of Black Friday sales in November for our late January event. I think the second or third year we actually waited until December to order puzzles and we ran into so many problems because we could not get the number of puzzles that we needed and ended up actually having to swap the puzzle image for a different puzzle. The other thing we've run into is, okay, we're ready to order extra puzzles in January and I can tell you that Jigsaw puzzle manufacturers work very hard from July to November to crank out as many puzzles as they can and get them to the retailers for the Christmas sales. By the time they come to January, they're doing inventory to see what they have left on their shelves and if they're in inventory mode, you're not going to be able to order any puzzles or they're not going to know how many puzzles they actually have in their inventory and you may end up being short. So it's really prudent to order your puzzles in advance. This particular image, by the way, this is actually from the St. Paul tournament and you can see they only do four-person competitions here and they are using all round tables but they have enough space that everybody can stretch out and work around on the tables. Another question I get asked a lot is, oh, I'll just contact one of these puzzle manufacturers. I'm sure that they will donate puzzles to our tournament. Well, sadly, no, they don't. I've asked every year. I've sent email, I've phone called them, I've sent letters. Usually I approach one or two different manufacturers. I'm going to buy 40 puzzles, I'll buy 20, give me another 20 at half price or I'm going to order 30 puzzles from your company. Can you give me five puzzles that I could use for prizes? They can be rejects or bad sellers, anything, and I get nothing. So it doesn't mean that you won't get a response. You might be definitely ordering more quantity or maybe you've got a personal contact with somebody in one of these major jigsaw puzzle manufacturers. But sadly, no, I've never had any luck getting a manufacturer to donate. So let's talk about the registration form. So you've decided you want to do this event. You really need to have people register for this event. And the key features on the form, contact name, team name, school name if you have student divisions, a payment, registration deadline, the event location, competition time, and entry fee information. I'm going to take you out and show you our registration forms. This registration form is for our adult competition. So you can see we've got the contact information. We also need for them to select which division they're going to be competing in. Again, the puzzle name title is not, or theme is not listed on this, but it does give them an idea of puzzle pieces. If they're going to practice before the tournament and a lot of our teams do, they can actually practice on the puzzle that'll be at least the same number of pieces. We'd like to have team members. I will say that team members can certainly change on registration days. They could have put somebody in there that got sick, and they are allowed to substitute. We only have one caveat with that, and that is in our student divisions. If it's a second and third grade division, they have to be in those grades. Obviously they can't be older, but they could be younger. That would be fine. It's got your return the entry form date. This gives us seven to ten days before the tournament in all the different ways that they can register. Then on our adult form, we certainly have our entry fee payment. You'll notice up here under the adult division, our entry fees, and you're going to see this and go, oh my lord, nobody would ever pay this. Well, believe it or not, they do, but we also look for sponsors. I'm going to talk about that in another slide. The four-person team is $200, the two-person team is $100, and an individual is $50. Essentially, it's $50 a person, and it's the same, it's $100 for our student divisions as well. I know that for most people are just like, I would never do this. That's why we have sponsors that pay for people to compete. It's one of the ways that we've turned this into a really good fundraiser. But we also give people the option to, giving a partial sponsorship. If they've been competing on teams, they might think $20 is reasonable. But what they don't know is when you put all the costs together, the costs of the puzzle, the venue costs, the cost for prizes, and all the fees that go into it, $20 probably just barely breaks you even. So you've got to have an entry fee that is going to more than cover your costs in order for this to be a fundraiser. Our student division, we never want the cost of the entry fee to affect a child's ability to puzzle in a tournament. So on our student registration form, of course we've got the school name. We ask for a team name. And one of the reasons we ask for a team name is because we do post our information on the internet. We do like to protect the names of our competitors. And so therefore, we really like to refer to them by their team name. The only exception is if they happen to be our first place winner, and in which case we will actually name, obviously, who won that division. But that is the only exception. We really try and respect a child's privacy, especially second and third graders. We definitely don't want their names out there on the internet. Student information and division information is all here as well. We do ask for phone numbers. We never used to, but what we've discovered over the years is that sometimes, especially the students, they'll forget that it's the puzzle day. And so we'll have the ability to call a parent or call a team and see if we can't get those people to the actual tournament. You notice that this does not say anything on it about an entry fee cost. We used to always put that on there, scared away not only the participants but the schools. The schools see $200 or $100, and they immediately toss it. So we've taken that off, and you notice we put here, your entry fee will be covered by a local business or company. However, monetary donations are greatly appreciated. So if they want to offset, a parent does. A parent, a lot of times, will put, you know, a five, a 10, or a $20 bill in with the registration, which is greatly appreciated. You'll find local businesses to pay the rest of the entry fee. On your event day, you definitely are going to need volunteers. And our first years, we managed with maybe only six volunteers. Now that our event has grown to the size that it had, we need anywhere from 12 to 15 volunteers. You need a couple of people at your registration tables. You need somebody to show the participants to the competition table. If you think back to the layout of that room, it's a little confusing. So we like to make sure that they get to the correct table, because their table number actually is part of how we know who's who when we're trying to figure out the order that people finished in. If you serve food, and we usually always have food, we do a snack break in the afternoon for the adults, but kids always come for food. You need people to prep fruits and vegetables and put out the food. We need a prize patrol, because as people are winning prizes, and all of the kids that participate in this event get at least a $1 prize, if not a more elaborate prize. But we need somebody to run things out to the people as they win. You definitely need... It takes us about three hours to set up the entire venue for this event. I would always recommend a photographer. We actually use the pictures as a thank you to our sponsors, and I'll show you that a little bit later here. We have an announcer, judges, official timekeepers. So you definitely need a lot of people on that event day. So again, how is this a fundraiser? Your entry fees are what make this a fundraiser, and you need to really be able to get your sponsorships from local businesses. They need to support your event. And we have taken on the burden by our library foundation board. They go around asking for sponsorship money, and over the years, we've really built a great relationship, and they love to support this event. What we have discovered is that businesses have no problem or less of a problem sponsoring a kid team. They are very supportive of students and education, and they really would love to be able to support us. And if you know of philanthropic people in your community or there's a large corporation, ask them to underwrite pieces of or the whole event. If they could just cover the cost of puzzles, which typically runs into the hundreds of dollars, it's really, really helpful if they can do that. So when you do go out to look for your sponsors in your community, you've got to do your approach in person. Cold calling, even though if you're doing a phone call, letters, they're just not effective. You've got to get that face-to-face contact until you build up a relationship with that business owner. Timing is everything. If you're going to go to a fast food business, don't go over the lunch hour. While that might be convenient for you, their managers, if they're there, they are incredibly busy. So timing is really crucial for this. Capitalize, if you know something about your business owners in your community, we happen to know some of our business owners in North Platt and they are Catholic. And so we say we've got six Catholic teams wanting to sponsor, wanting to compete in our jigsaw puzzle tournament and see if they'll sponsor them. We've had great luck in finding people who have a connection or affiliation to our parochial schools and they are very supportive of those teams to do this unusual event. One of the things how you get, not only get a sponsor, but to keep your sponsors is you've got to thank them. And your business people will say, well, what do I get out of this? And a lot of it is a lot of recognition. That is a lot of what they are going to get in this event. We actually create a presentation style board that is very large and we have it at the tournament and the bigger the sponsor, the bigger their spaces on that thank you board. And it's not only at the tournament, then we take it back to the library and we keep it on display for the month following the jigsaw puzzle tournament. We have table signage that identifies the table number, the team name, and then it also has the business logo and business name. We give a business the option. Maybe they want to leave some brochures or business cards at a sponsor table at the tournament. We've taken out thank you advertisements in the past and we always put something in our Friends of the Library newsletter, but if you've got another place where you could get a thank you. If nothing else, if you don't want to spend the money for advertising as a thank you, consider writing a letter to the editor and listing all those businesses there. We also send a thank you letter along with a certificate and we make those in-house and I'll show you those very quickly. Very simple. We print these off on card stock. It's got the business's name. We've got a nice little saying about inspiration and some of our individuals, we did the starfish story. You make a difference to us. You're an essential piece. We've tried to borrow some of these wonderful themes off of some other established prizes that just really work great for the puzzle tournaments. And finally, we actually, we want our puzzlers to thank their sponsors and of course everybody's horrible at sending thank you cards or writing a card. We actually print these off. We do get three to a page on card stock. We put the name of the business and the participants actually write a thank you. This is on their table and while they're waiting for the tournament to start, they can write in a little thank you and then all you have to do is add your address on the backside. It makes it convenient. They get a personal thank you from their puzzlers and we always send these out as a thank you as well. So be sure to thank your sponsors. I know that they have said a lot of times, you know, you have to repeat your advertising message or your thank you seven times before that message gets across and I would say this is no exception and you've got to find a great way to thank your sponsors. We also put them on our library's website and I'll go back and by the way, if you're wanting to go to our website, it is www.npplfoundation.org and you'll go in and you'll see a lot of information but if you get down to the puzzle part of it, at the very bottom you'll see a very big thank you to these awesome 2015 sponsors and you'll see that we tried to pull logos off the Internet and this was a great way to thank a lot of our sponsors who sponsored Jigsaw puzzle tournament teams and then we had all of the businesses listed and all of the personal sponsorships listed there as well. As well as this, your name or business could be here and invite people. We actually have gotten two new sponsorships from new businesses whose kids participated in the tournament. So be sure to utilize that as well. So that's just the same kind of thing as sponsoring like when they do sports teams for the kids. That's the same idea. Yes, same idea, exact same idea. And if you get in no one year or you're asking for that, my suggestion to you is, again, timing is everything. If you wait until November or December, your businesses are going to be tapped out. January or the beginning of the new quarter is a great time. Yeah. Okay. Misconception number four, planning. Just like a good party, you can't throw it together last minute. You really, it is take several months to prepare. I would plan your first year, you need to take five to six months to really get this prepared. Open your registration only three to four weeks. Sponsors, we actually, because when our tournament happens, we don't approach them until January. But if you need to get on some type of a group meeting agenda, be sure that you know when that is and do that. Prizes, everybody gets, and you can see our prizes on this slide here. Everybody gets, at very least, a theater box size of candy. That's about a buck. Fast food coupons that you get donated. Oriental Trading has great puzzle shaped gifts. Bodville is at bodville.com. They are an appreciation promotional company that has puzzle themed gifts. They're fantastic. You can consider ordering custom shirts. Use your businesses. So you go to, we'll say, a place that does oil changes like Grease Monkey. Maybe they can't give you monetary things to support you. Maybe they could give you a free oil change, and that could be part of your prizes. Be creative in what you can do with prizes. Last misconception is that jigsaw puzzle tournaments are inexpensive toast, and you've got to spend money to make money, and this event is no exception. And it adds up very quickly. So you really need to do your financials before you decide to undertake this and kind of figure out where your break-even point is and what point it is when you start making money. Your only profit is going to come from entry fees paid by the puzzler or sponsorships. And then you're going to have all of these costs, puzzles, prizes. Your venue, if you're at a hotel or convention center, they're going to be charging you. Cost of food. Some of this you can get donated. I mean, we've got people that donate cookies and cupcakes, and we go out and buy fresh fruit and vegetables. But you also have correspondence advertising. You can see how the debits, the costs, really do add up for this. For North Platt Public Library, this event raises between $4,000 and $7,000 for our library. Typically, we spent between $800 and $1,200 to hold this event. Last year, I think we spent just over $1,200. Wow. That's a nice turnover, yeah. It's a big event, but again, you've got to have the entry fee that will cover it. Excuse me. Over the years, I've had people say, has anything ever gone wrong? Of course. Of course, there's things. Teams don't show up for the tournament. Parents, meddling, trying to do the puzzles. We had a divorced parents that decided to have a nice big fight, and we had to ask them to leave. One of our ones that was very sort of traumatic was red Kool-Aid. No, we didn't serve Kool-Aid much less red, but somebody had brought, like, crystal white packets that you add to water, and we always have water. And they did the additives and the entire, oh, that was a mess. We actually had the additional cost of getting Service Master out at 7 o'clock at night to clean up the red dye, because you have to have a special cleaner to get that out. We've had kids show up to puzzle, and the parent or the school never registered them, so they're crying. So definitely have had some things that show up. Miscounted the number of available tables, and I said we ended up using, you know, the smaller tables. One problem we run into every single year is kids, they give up. You know, the first through tenth place prizes are gone, even though we give them out to at least a box of candy. They're just, they're struggling. This isn't what they thought it would be. They've been puzzling for an hour, and they just want to quit. So we always have parent-friendly judges who really encourage the kids to finish. They're champions, and we want them to have the success of completing the puzzle. And you need to have those positive people that are kid-friendly working with that. You need to know what to do when teams finish exactly or almost exactly. At the same time, we actually had a team this past year that they were two 100 seconds of a part. We've got an issue with timing, and we used to use stopwatches. We're now using our cell phones because they're much more accurate and are able to start and stop those much easier. We actually had a puzzler manufacture one year that 75% of the puzzles were missing one to three pieces each. They had a quality control issue. That was interesting. So yes, we have definitely had issues happen over the years. So with that said, I would hope that you might consider a Jigsaw puzzle tournament. I would love to come and compete even if I had to pay to come because I never get to compete in these because I'm always putting them on. But if anybody has any questions, I would certainly love to answer any questions you have. And if my contact information is there, if you'd like to contact me directly, I'd be happy to answer any questions. Great. Yeah, thanks Cecilia. If anybody does have any questions, you can type them into the GoToWebinar interface and I can grab them for you. Nobody had any questions during. Just one comment that says, wow, this is a lot of work. Yes, it is. Don't underestimate it. No, it's not. Like you said, it's not just a quick thing. You can pull off on a whim. And the thing, I had no idea there was so much that you could know about Jigsaw puzzles, the size, how they're cut. Yeah, but when you're just doing it, using it for something entertaining at home, I mean, you look at the ages if you're getting it for a child that is appropriate. But beyond that, yeah. And then you go, oh, that's really a really cool image. But when you actually think about strategizing it for a team to successfully put it together, it definitely does make a difference. And we've made mistakes over the years and every year we learn from them. It's one of those things. Do you want the contestants to are having such good luck putting the puzzle together because you've got large puzzle pieces and they've got easily defined images, and it'll go super, super fast and you're going to have teams all finishing at the same time, or do you want to introduce some difficulty to it by changing the shape of it and increasing the number of pieces? And then the danger is nobody finishes the puzzle in time. Yeah. All right, we do have some questions that came in while we were chatting. Oh, this is someone I was wondering about, too. What do you do with the puzzles after the competition? Can you use them again the next year or every other year or what? I would not use your puzzles again because they know the image. So we need to use new puzzles. We actually let the team players, whoever's on the team, decide who wants to take the puzzle and they can just take it home. If they do not take it home, we will save those and we sell them at our friends of the library book sale or we might use them for a prize in a future year. Our adult prizes, you know, we talked about the kid prizes. The adult prizes have been puzzle towers. They get a coupon for $5 off on the friend's book sale. They've gotten things that businesses have given us, things like that. That's a fun idea. I'm surprised for next year that remember this one from last year? Now you can own it if you win, yeah. There you go. Is this your one major fundraiser for the year or do you do other things as well? Our foundation actually does three fundraisers. This is the one in January and our fall fundraiser is a cemetery tour. We have our library staff here. I have a particular researcher and we get local actors to do living history presentations. That fundraiser has actually raised as much as $12,000 and requires a lot less money up front. You have about the cost of the wristbands and some internal printing costs and that's about it. Not a lot of props and things like this one that needs all the puzzles. Our third one that our foundation does is we make book gift baskets, which is a creative one that we do as well, and then our friends do their book sale twice a year. We actually do a total of five fundraisers. That's a good question. Someone wants to figure out how many puzzlers they might get for their community. What's the population of North Platte? Good question. North Platte is a community of 25,000 and we are in a very large county. The county population is 35,000. We have about eight elementary schools in the public school system, plus there's three parochial elementary schools as well. We've never had any homeschoolers compete in the student division, but we've wanted to. One of the things that we've always wanted was to get those elementary schools competing for each other. We actually finally got into about our fifth year because a principal of an at-risk elementary school started a jigsaw puzzle club after school. Once she did it, then other principals, they started a rivalry going, and now we have a great rivalry among elementary schools. Our next goal is to get it to go to the surrounding five communities in our county. I've been trying to get their schools, but those are very small communities of 3,000 people or less, to get their school to put together a team so we can actually have North Platte against Sutherland, North Platte against Hershey. That's our next goal and we continue to work on that every year. North Platte is one of our relatively speaking larger towns here in Nebraska. We have lots and lots of smaller ones as you're mentioning, but yeah. Another library in Western Nebraska Imperial Public Library actually did a jigsaw puzzle tournament. I don't know how many people they had show up for it. They are a much smaller community. I would say that they are maybe 1,500 people. I want to say that their entry fee was $25-ish, so they must have found a way to downsize the cost. I think that that's one of the things that if you're starting out and you're in a smaller community, you've got to find a way to scale down to make it work for your community. You've got to be creative about if you don't have a lot of businesses that you can get sponsorships from, then you're going to have to have your individuals. Most people who like to jigsaw puzzle would probably be willing to pay $25-$35 to puzzle. You get to $50 and people get a little bit high. Even though it is a fundraiser for the library, which is a good thing, it kind of gets up there. It gets up there, but that's how we make the money because this particular one, because of all of the costs involved, you just wouldn't make any money. I think for people who are aware of things like these tournaments that are happening at gaming shops for things like Pokemon tournaments or whatever, that's a typical thing is having an entry fee to get in something. You can do a mixture too, an entry fee that the teams pay that is something smaller and sponsorships to help put on the event from the businesses and the people in town. One other thing I would mention about prizes is that you've got to keep in mind if you're a non-profit, you cannot give out cash prizes. There are lottery and gaming laws in your states and you will need to check with those. The Winter Carnival in St. Paul, I don't know who puts that on, but I think they have a cash prize, but they're private business. They have different sets of rules than non-profits do. Do be sure to check what you can give away for prizes as far as giving that type of thing back to your puzzlers. We have a couple other questions here to get through. Does everyone have the same image in a division or just similar type of puzzles? I know you did mention buying multiple copies of the same one, so I'm assuming... It is the same. So they all have exactly the same puzzle that we're going to work on, right? That would make sense. Within the same division, yes. But it can be different ones for each division, of course. And you'd want that for different difficulty levels as well for the younger kids up to adults. And here's the next question. What about spectators? I know you're talking about parents trying to help the kids. Are there people that just come to cheer teams on or watch? We do. We do have a fair amount of spectators. We have lots of parents and grandparents who come for the kids divisions. They stand at the perimeter around the event arena. And I'll come back to this. So you can see that there is some space. We do go clear up wall-to-wall, but they will stand. We try and have them starting here on one side and on this side. Invariably, what happens is parents are pretty good about that. As the teams we get through about fifth place and the teams are finishing, then the parents start creeping in as the teams are finishing. As the tables are clearing out. Yes, as the tables clear out, then they're allowed to come in. This year in 2016, we are actually probably going to use something like police line tape because the interfering was so bad last year that we struggled with that. And we had three judges on the floor, but this is a very large gymnasium type atmosphere. And it was very difficult to watch all of them at the same time. So next year we're already talking about police line tape. So definitely something to take into account when you're deciding on finding your space is room for the spectators and the parents. Oh, that's the last actual question. We did just have a thing that we usually do to this. Your presentation, can we share that with the people who watched your PowerPoint there? Most definitely. You can either, if you have somewhere you post, if you want to send it to me, I can put it up on library commission site. Sure. And what about the registration forms? Is there somewhere that people can see those online, or can you send those as a document either way? They are on the foundation page, yes. Okay, great. I've grabbed all the links that were mentioned during the show, as I do every time too, so people know that. So they'll all be in our delicious account that we'll have a link to, and I have the Foundations page there as well, so you can find the registration forms on there. But we'll also add this PowerPoint too, when Cecilia sends it to me. Wonderful. Great. So does anybody else have any last-minute questions before we wrap up? I got through all the ones that had come in. We do still have a few minutes here. Some thank yous coming in, and how much work it is, yeah. Wonderful. And I hope you give it a shot, think about it, kind of put it together. Puzzle prizes and puzzles, because the Jigsaw puzzle is now a symbol for autism. It's a fantastic thing that we're starting to see a lot more. We actually had a sibling that was autistic that played next to a sibling that was puzzling. It was a really neat thing to see, and they did a nice newspaper article on this. So it's a great tournament and great event. Excuse me. Yeah, it is. Now, you said that Imperial did it, and there's that documentary about it. So this is something that lots of other libraries across the country are doing, or is it other organizations? I know you said the one that was not a nonprofit, so they're giving me cash prizes. Do you know much about other places doing it? I don't. A lot of places have gotten away from it, and I'm assuming predominantly because of the cost to put them on. But also, as your event gets larger, it's hard to get 30, 40, 50 copies of the same puzzle. That is a challenge, especially when you can't seem to get a good contact. You may find a manufacturer, but getting them willing to talk with you, because their whole goal is to create the puzzle and push them out to the retailers, and then it's your job to work with the retailers to get all the copies of the puzzles. That was what I was surprised about when you mentioned asking the producers of the puzzles to give you some for free or to discount that you've been doing this for 10 years. This isn't some brand-new, fly-by-night idea that you just came up with. It's been going on for a while. I'm surprised they wouldn't want to help and jump on with some of those events. Melissa and Doug, which I said in Nebraska-based company, and I really thought that we got puzzles from them free once, but it was only because they were the manufacturer that had the quality control that the puzzles were all missing three pieces. So we actually brought a problem to their attention and then the following year, but that was the only year. They usually make really good products. They make an excellent product. But anyway, good after that, then their quality control got better, and we've never gotten any free puzzles from them. So I keep asking. You can't always try. Yeah, go ahead. You always try. I have always tried to get the Union Pacific, which is a major railroad in our state to underwrite the puzzle costs. I have not had any luck. I mean, we continue to try working to get one big corporate sponsor, but we're not in a large enough community to make that happen. This is a really neat event, and you will be amazed at how much your participants love it. And we have had people as far away as California come and compete in our tournament. Really? Wow. Wyoming, California, Kansas. I mean, we've had several people who this is their thing or it was on their bucket list to compete in a public tournament. And so we've had them come and compete. So it is a neat event, and I hope you consider it. Call me if you have questions. Yeah, great. Okay. Thank you very much, Celia. Thank you everyone for attending. As we said, yes, the presentation will be available. I'm going to pull back Presenter Control here to my screen. Once Celia sends me the slides, we'll get them up. The recording will be available afterwards as well. It's got a process. Here, as I said, we use Delicious to save on the links. So the different sites that she mentioned also have a couple of news articles that were about this year's, 10 years of doing the tournament. So you'll have links to all of that as well. Let's get to our, there we go. So that will wrap it up for this week's episode of Encompass Live. The archive will be available here on our website. You'll all be sent a link and email letting you know when it's available. You'll have the, let's see if we have it last week yet, the recording presentation and links will all be available as this one from last week was. I hope you join us next week when our topic is the Nebraska Books Project. This is something being done by the Nebraska Department of Education. Christina Peters is going to be with us and talk about this great partnership that they've arranged to do, have apps and iBooks and everything for the kids. So she's going to be here with us to tell us about that. So I hope you sign up for that and any of our other upcoming shows that we have here. New ones are always being added to the schedule, so keep checking back. Also, Encompass Live is on Facebook, so if you are a big Facebook user, please do pop over here once it gets loaded up. And like our page, I post reminders of when a new show is starting up. As you can see here this morning, I let people know they could come in on the fly. When the recording is available, I post on here. So if you are big on Facebook, please do go ahead and like us over there. Other than that, we are wrapped up for this morning. Thank you very much and we'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye-bye.