 Our final speaker for the big talk from Small Library 24 is going to talk about Farmer's Day fundraising. Sounds like fun. Amber Sweetland from another Nebraska speaker. Yay. And in Kimball, they have population surfed about 2,500. Is that still as accurate? Yep. All right. So, Amber, tell us all about what you've been doing in Kimball. So, Farmer's Day is our annual fundraising, or it's our annual Farmers Day, Founders Day celebrations. So, to start, let's just talk about Kimball a little bit. We are a, hold on, my slides are not working correctly. So, we are a relatively small community. We're relatively easy to not know where we are. So, we are 20 miles from the Colorado border and 20 miles from the Wyoming border, right there in the corner. We're right off to 80. So, we get a decent amount of people going through, but it were a small community. So, we needed to fundraise because we ended up losing $30,000 in projected revenue. So, how that ended up happening, there was a half-cent tax reduction. That half-cent tax on sales tax had been in place forever and it was up for renewal to be voted on. Well, there wasn't great communication as to where that money was actually going to the citizens in the community to the extent that I didn't even realize that we were getting a portion of that funding. So, because no one knew where the money was going, nobody wanted to pay it. So, it did not go through. So, when it came time for budget season, that's when I found out that we were losing a whole lot of money. I hate going over budget. I hate spending more than I actually have. So, thankfully, though, the city council didn't actually reduce my budget. So, that was good, but I still didn't want to spend more than I was going to have. So, we knew that we needed to start fundraising. So, Farmers' Day, like I said, it's our founder's day celebration. So, it's a three-day celebration that is always the last weekend in September. There's activities and community events and things like that throughout the entire weekend. We knew we needed to get involved in the actual planning process for Farmers' Day because in years past, there had been just a lack of communication, some not great advertising some confusions in the actual scheduling. There was a lot of issues that we knew we could help out with. And because we wanted to really do a fundraising push during this weekend, we wanted to make sure that there wasn't any conflicts going on. So, my assistant director and myself both ended up on the Farmers' Day committee, and we were able to really help out with a lot of the aesthetics with the flyers, the actual scheduling, just all kinds of different things that it was helpful for the committee and the events and us. So, everybody has a book sale. This is something we've always done. It's annual. It's always a hit. We have to do it. It clears space, but it's tons of work. We all know this, but we don't have a choice in the matter. You have a captive audience when people are coming in to look at these books. So, we knew we could take advantage of all of those people being here and run the other fundraising events. So, during the year we have, all year long, we have friends of the library gift shop. So, everything that's in the gift shop is a local crafter or creator in some fashion. It's all handmade products. So, what we decided to do is expand that during Farmers' Day. So, we cleared off all of our computer tables, our displays for new books, and we had these vendors that are normally here plus a lot more bring in their wares. We have it set up so that the vendor or the crafter ends up with 80% of the sale, and the friends of the library gets 20% of the sale. So, we don't get a huge amount of this, but it brings people in for all of the other events that we're also working on. So, it worked out really well, and it's a good way to support the local businesses as well. So, a bake sale. Everybody has bake sales. They're always a hit, but we do it a little bit differently. We nickel and dime things to death. We know that a child who's walking by who's asking for 20 bucks from their parents for a whole cake, they're not going to get that $20, but if they have, they see a prepackaged, you know, a couple of brownies or some cookies for a dollar, parents are going to give them a dollar. So, that's how we end up making most of our money on the bake sale. It's something that we integrate right into the middle of the library, so people are walking by, it smells great, and it looks good, so it's easy to do. So, our salsa contest is a really fun one. This is an event that had been going on for many, many years, eight years ago during Farmer's Day, and then it kind of fizzled out. It was a very special thing to my heart because I just thoroughly enjoyed participating in the salsa contest, so I wanted to bring it back. So, I checked with all the people who had run it initially. They had no issue with it, so this was the second year that we reintegrated it into Farmer's Day. We have two different categories, the red and the green salsa. The participants can bring in their salsa ahead of time, and it's free for them to compete. Where we make the money is the tasting and the voting. So, it's two dollars. To be able to do that, they get a vote from each category. It's a completely blind taste test, so the only person who actually knows who belongs to each salsa is me, and I don't get to participate. It's a huge hit, and people love it, and it's just a tasty thing that we put on right after the parade is complete, and since we're pretty close to the parade route, we get all of these people walking by, they see us outside, and it works really well. Here's a picture of the salsa contest. You can see all of the people there milling around, getting their salsa, and our very stern looking advertising dude who very adamantly told people they needed to come and taste salsa and buy baked goods. He's taking it very seriously with that tie, and yes, this is a very hardcore. So, hi, City Guy. This was a new one that we did this year. It was so fun. So, this came from a brainstorming session when we really should have been doing other things. I had just found out that we were losing $30,000, and I knew that we needed to get more fundraisers going, something that would be fun that would get people involved. There was a lot of drama going on at the time. There had been some issue with some city departments, and a lot of the people in the community were very irritated about it, and so we were like, okay, let's give them a fun, light way to vent some frustrations that will make us some money, and this is what came from it. I was able to get somebody from every single department, including the mayor, the city administrator, one of the police officers to participate. So, we sold raffle tickets. There was three tickets that were going to be pulled from the pot, and those three people got to buy the city employee of their choosing. The big thing with this is, don't ask people to do something you're not willing to do yourself. So, I was the representative for the library. No one chose to pie me, yay. But there was definitely some stuff that we learned from this that we're going to change next year. You have to constantly be willing to adapt things. We didn't have a good sound system set up. We did have the local DJ doing the announcing for me, but he's not quite that loud. So, we'll definitely fix that next year. But it was such a huge hit. This is not something that people really buy ahead of time. I did have a few individuals come in, and like they dropped 50 bucks on enough raffle tickets so that they had a chance to pie the mayor because they were annoyed. And that's great. And I'm totally happy with that. But most of the tickets were sold right there on the spot. Right after the parade completed, I sent some of my very loud friends downtown, and they very loudly announced that they were selling raffle tickets and they sold tons of tickets. While that was going on, I was here at the library and I'm pretty loud too. So, while we had hundreds of people in here, I was really loudly talking about how I was selling raffle tickets and to buy them from me. Be a little obnoxious. It definitely helps to sell things. I had people buy tickets just to shut me up, which works. I'm okay with that. But it was super fun, and we will definitely be doing this for years to come. Here's some pictures of the actual pieing. Everybody who ended up pieed were super good natured about it, and it was fun. So, some other stuff that we ended up doing, we got involved with some events that Farmers Day was, you know, some of the Farmers Day events that weren't fundraising events, so that we could raise awareness for what we were doing. So, we walked in the parade. We have six different book characters represented there. We've got Hunger Games, Outlander, the Magic School Bus, Little House on the Prairie, Winnie the Pooh, and the Great Gadsby. I didn't even fully realize that there was a competition, but we ended up winning second place. Another event that we participated in, or we actually put on, was a Mario Kart tournament. It was totally free. It was mostly children that participated in this, and the Farmers Day Committee purchased the prizes for each of the leagues, a pro league and an amateur league. My son-in-law and his brother ended up dressing as Mario and Luigi, and they put this on. You can see a very happy kid there with her gift card to the ice cream shop. It went really well, and it gave us the opportunity to kind of remind people of what was going on at the library at the same time, and kind of hopefully get some people to wander over to us too. So, advertising is the most important thing with all of this stuff, and you can't just go one or two different avenues. You have to really blanket the whole community. So, we had maps and flyers on sandwich boards in a bunch of different businesses and locations throughout the community, not just for our stuff, but for everything that was going on during Farmers Day. We went nuts on our social medias, and we had everything that we were doing up on those. I write a column in the paper, so we, I think three weeks in a row, I listed pretty much everything that was going on, and I wrote a couple of different columns about why it was so important for us to do these things. I did a radio interview, and then they recorded it, and they replayed it like the day of, I think it was the Friday of Farmers Day. But the most important thing is word of mouth. If you're enthusiastic, and you really love what you're doing, and you're passionate about it, then talk about it to anyone who will listen to you until they want you to go away. It really helps, and it got people in here. So, the key takeaways. It's not possible if you don't have the most amazing staff in the world, and I think that they're right there to say hello. Hi, everybody. And I lost my place. It's tons of work, but it's super, super fun. You have to create events that you are passionate about, and that you are excited about. You have to plan ahead of time. We started all of this planning probably three months in advance, but it worked, and it was very successful for us. You have to really communicate with the different groups in your community, your staff, all of the planning committees for all the things that are going on during events like this, and patrons love to help. They don't want to just give you money all the time. They want to participate in things, so make sure that there's an opportunity for them to bake some cookies and bring them in or whatever you need. Help out with the book sale organization. That's always tons of work, and people love helping out with that, too. One thing that I have noticed more than anything else is if you can possibly be charming, do so. If people like you, they're more willing to give you money, so be likable. And that's it. Any questions? All right. Thank you, Amber. That looks like a lot of fun, and like I said, a lot of work, but a couple of months of planning is not bad. They come up with all these ideas, and as you said, some of them are things you are already doing, you just like transfer them to this particular event that was coincidentally happening. Yeah. So being able to be creative or on the fly, do things like that is great. So does anybody have any questions for Amber? She mentioned a lot of things that they did. So if you have any questions about anyone and no more detail, we have a couple of minutes. You can answer questions. And all right, just double checking things here. Good. So the first question I have wants to know, funny. Who was hit with a pie? Okay. Pied or? I mean, where did I go? I have to go back to that one. I forgot there who, what departments they were. The people got to pick who they wanted to hit with a pie? Yes. So, so our DJ, he's the real tall guy there. He was the one who actually pulled the names because I didn't want anyone to say that I was, you know, picking people that wouldn't pie me. So the guy with the hat on, he is from our electric department. No, he's from streets. The second guy is from the electric department. And he's also one of our volunteer firefighters. And then the last guy with the towel being thrown in his face, that was actually really awesome. He, the lady whose name was pulled, she's just like the super sweet lady. And he asked if she would mind if his granddaughter was able to do it. And so, of course, she gave up her opportunity to pie somebody. And so his granddaughter, like, she just smashed that thing in his face and rubbed it around. It was awesome. What was great about this is, after we were all done and the official pieing was done, all of these workers, they were prepared to get pieed. And they didn't, or most of them didn't. So they were like, well, let's get some more supplies and let the kids pie whoever they want to just for fun. And so we all stood there getting pieed for like half an hour. The very, very last one, I was like, okay, I can't, because nobody had pieed me at this point. And I'm like, okay, I can't not be pieed when I made you guys do this. So this four-year-old came and she just barely touched my face with the pie. It was really sweet. All right. All right. So we got a bunch of the questions coming in and we'll get them answered here. So here's a good important, when doing the bake sale or food contest type thing, how do you handle the liability with food allergies or contamination? So anyone who asks, we let them clearly know that there was absolutely no protections of any kind. We didn't accommodate for gluten-free or nut allergies or anything like that. In our community, people aren't, I mean, there's plenty of people who can't have these things, but they're happy to cover their own basis. If there's even a chance that they don't participate, we never had a problem. I think this is the kind of the opposite of making something that everyone can eat or use and doing the opposite of saying, this is all homemade. It's going to be what it's going to be and don't come over here if you're worried. We have plans. They could buy it. Yeah. So many other options too. Yeah. A lot of questions about how much you made. What was your biggest profit? How much did you make? What was your biggest profit maker? And then I hope this was not what happened, but did the money you raised get specifically set aside for the library or did it get deposited into the city coffers? Hmm. So we have, I mean, we're integrated into the city, but we have all of our own line items. So yes, it was put into the city coffers, but it was in our portion of it. So it was definitely not something like that. Sophia allotted to, this is the library's money. It was the library's events. Yes. We made about $4,000 on these events, which I know for a lot of people isn't huge, but for us it was massive. And the biggest money maker was the pie. The DJ, it was funny, a lot of the guys were giving him grief because he wasn't up for being pied and he hadn't bought any raffle tickets at that point. And so he whips out $100 bill and he's like, okay, give me 50 tickets. And I'm like, I didn't even have the tickets with me. So I had to send a young person running back to the library to get them because a whole bunch of people bought some right before we actually started it, which was fine with me. All right, great. So for more info about activities, someone's asking, we'll have the presentation, the slides here. I didn't notice if you had your contact info on there or not or the website in your slides. I know we have a link to the Kimball Library website on the BigDoc page. My email, hold on, I'll pull it back up. There we go, questions. I'm happy to share Flyers or anything about, well, anything we did. It was fun and it's really fun to talk about. It sounds like it was a great thing. Yeah, it's a great day. All right, yeah. So if you have any other questions or anything you want to know more about what they did in Kimball, reach out to Amber. She'd be happy to share. We're always happy to share what we're doing here in Nebraska. All right, thank you so much.