Teen Events, it’s Easy As! by Amanda Mc Fadden

Abstract:

This presentation will give attendees the chance to learn about two teen events that have been successfully run at Tauranga City Libraries: Skyping an Author and The Hunger Games Challenge. Both events were planned as part of our teenage summer reading program as the Finale.

The teens often comment that the Finale is a highlight of Teen Mean Reads. One of the key things I have found about having the Finale is the teens love to meet new people. This way they meet others from different schools, but they all have common interests – reading and books.

The planning of the Finale parties, held at the end of January, usually starts in April. This begins as an idea from something I have read or seen, and from there it grows to a fun and fabulous event for about 60 teenagers.

In the presentation I will discuss where I get the ideas for the events; the planning and problems that goes hand-in-hand with the event planning, and how the event is run on the night.

This presentation will be of value to children and teenager’s librarians at public libraries who want to get their local teenage customers involved in their library, and for those libraries that have limited funding for teenage events.  When planning the events I have had a modest budget. When planning costs have been keep minimal, and could also be lowered with a few tweaks.

Teen Events, it’s Easy As! From Skyping an author to the Hunger Games. 

I would like to start by thanking you for coming along to this session, our teens are often forgotten in library event planning, and are thought of as to hard to reach and please. If all I leave you with after this presentation is the thought that you would like to try a small event and that it may not be too difficult to do then I have succeeded. Teen events really are easy as!

Every year to celebrate the success of the teens who finish the summer reading programme we have a Finale party. Each year we try to do something different for the Finale: adding some technology, eating copious amounts of ice cream at an Ice cream party, doing a scavenger hunt around the CBD to take in the historic sights, Rock climbing, and having a library Lock-in.  

What I am going to talk a bit about today are the last 2 events we have done: Skyping an Author and our Hunger Games Challenge.

The summer event is held in January and I usually start planning in April. I work on this between 1 -2 hours a week. I go through the last years feedback from the staff to see if things ran well from their point of view, and if I need to change anything to make it easier for them, and I do a lot of thinking. We collect feedback at all our events so I also go through the feedback from previous teen events, just in case they have given some ideas we could build on. Often teens ideas would need a $10k budget so a tad over our modest one.

Early you may say, but in our jobs something always comes up to foil my planning time, but also I enjoy planning and want every little unexpected issue planned for. My planning system of choice is to use a run sheet and write everything down; it makes it easy to see where I am at and I use the same sheet for each event, this way I don’t forget anything  and also if I get hit by a bus someone else in my team could run the event.

Skype an Author

Back in mid 2011 my team leader had read an article in The Bookseller about Laura, a librarian at Harefield library in England.  She had used Skype for a teen event with vampire book author Rachel Caine at her library; the event was aptly named Bite Night.  “We can do this,” I thought and emailed her to find out more about it. She kindly shared her knowledge, and I adapted her information to suit our event and teen’s needs.

When getting ideas for events – I usually think of what sort of thing I might like to do then I use my trusty friend Google to hunt down others who have done something similar; we are all busy in libraries and usually short staffed, and really there is no use re-inventing the wheel.

I then needed to find an author for us to Skype; luckily one of our children’s librarians has many author Friends on her Facebook page, so she put out a call for a willing author to Skype, the interested authors were Rachel Caine, Darren Shan and Lauren Oliver and Robert Muchamore.

Once availability dates and international timings were discussed we ended up with the delightful Lauren Oliver as our author.

To make it an event worth coming to we needed another author. I then put out an email to a Walker Books and we had our second author, our own Brian Falkner… and my event planning was half way there. It is always a good idea to have a contingency plan for the Skyping event. I wanted something else in case our technology fails, which as we all know does have a nasty habit of happening!

I decided to invite some of the local Tauranga authors who write for teens; Susan Brocker, Lee Murray and Anaru Bickford and asked them to have a prepared talk in case we had a blip. They were all very happy to do so.

At all the events we do for the teens we always start with an ice breaker like a quiz or brain teasers and we find this works really well. We also collect up a few small prizes like chocolate fish, the free stuff from the teen magazines and donated items; I also buy a few movie vouchers and these are the ice breaker prizes. You would be surprised how excited they get over a poster of One Direction!

Our first author on the night was Brian. We had Sykped Brian earlier in the afternoon for a practice run and all was well. But on the night at the start of his session we had a few visual issues and one very ‘techie’ young teen jumped up and helped us out, which was very helpful as our council technician had gone home after the practice went so well. Brian was well practiced at Skyping, which made things easier.  Brian is now living on the Gold Coast and does a lot of Skyping to New Zealandclassrooms.

When it came to Lauren Oliver’s session the teens were sitting in front of our big screen TV in the teen section waiting in anticipation. With me holding my breath we logged into Skype…

Mmmmm…here it was my worst nightmare! When we logged in to speak with Lauren she was not online. So after stressing a bit, we rang her at home.

But we were prepared for problems, so while I was on the phone to Lauren one of my colleagues grabbed a sheet with spot prize questions, asked a few and gave out prizes. Meaning there was no issue with down time and the teens had fun trying to answer the questions.

It turned out that Lauren was home but not online; so she jumped straight on to the computer, no glam up time for this down to earth author in her hoodie and no make up, then we were up and running. The problem had been …she thought it was her Saturday night, not ours! Time zones are very frustrating when you are Skyping!! When Lauren appeared on the TV she opened with “so what’s it like in the future?” She put the kids at ease straight away and was chatting away to them like long lost BFFs. We had pre-prepared some questions for the teens to ask, just to break the ice. It worked and soon they were away asking their own questions and the Skyping was a success.

After all our teen events we feed them; food is one way of getting them to come along to something in the library. A few days before the events we buy easy to eat snack food. We make it easy by faxing the order to our local New Worldand then just pick it up.  We buy things like jelly tip ice creams on sticks, small packs of chips, buzz bars, chocolate biscuits, cheese and crackers and drinks, all the food groups are usually covered…I am sure there is fruit and vegetables in that lot somewhere!

After the Skype event I read through the feedback and some of the teens commented that they liked getting to know new people, other’s who have the same interests as they have in books and libraries.

(See Attached Power Point). Here we have an example of this. Here’s a group of young ladies, who did not know each other; sitting together with a plate of cheese and crackers and an ice cream, they sat around getting to know one another and they swopped contact details.

As the presenter of an event one thing you need help with to make sure things run smoothly is the setting up and then cleaning up of the library and the food organization. For this we put the call out to our wonderful Friends of the Library. They usually have at least 6 volunteers who just love to see teens enjoying themselves with book related fun.  After 4 years of helping out the volunteers need few directions, so we can now just leave them to it. It works so well and no need to pay too many extra staff, which helps with the budget.

Hunger Games Challenge

Last year I was reading the blog of an American librarian, Sarah, who had done a Hunger Games themed event. On her blog it said ‘steal my ideas’. This was something I thought would work well for us and the release of the movie had sparked huge interest, so it just had to be our next teen event. I became Sarah’s Facebook friend and she gave me all her notes and planning stuff and we chatted about the good and bad issues she had had with running the event.

I changed a few things around a bit; taking out and adding tasks to make our library’s Hunger Games Challenge. It took a lot of planning and thinking so I worked with our marketing assistant to get things designed into a workable format. She had a different take on things which I found useful, and she came up with great ideas for the booklets to be used for the event.

(See Attached Power Point). We used our staff café set up ‘The Library Cornucopia’ where the teens had to grab their paper bags and get started on their adventures. We spilt the teens in teams of 2 or 3. Each team got a paper bag with a booklet of tasks, pencils, a map of the library and a chocolate fish and lollies each to keep their energy levels up.

The challenge included such tasks as: icing cupcakes (which was then their snack later on in the night), shooting bows and arrows; completing a Hunger Games quiz; a First Aid challenge where they had to roll a dice and use toilet paper to bandage a particular limb and have it stay on the whole evening, and use the catalogue to answer Hunger Games related questions. I must say our admin officer – who is also our Health and Safety rep - was a bit worried about bows and arrows being used in the library until I showed her we were using kids plastic arrows with suction cups not metal tips J These and other tasks took them around the whole library and the library was buzzing during this event, which was fabulous as we decided to do this when the library was open; we feel it is good for the other customers to see that we do events for teens.

On the feedback forms the teens commented on how they found places in the library they never knew were there; like the Research Collection and Learning Centre, a few even said they never knew there was another floor to the library.

To end these two events and because they are tied into our Teen Mean Reads, teenage summer reading programme, we gave away books and book voucher prizes relating to different tasks the teens did that were part of the programme. Also for the challenge the team that got the highest score won a prize of a $20 book voucher each.

One thing to remember is that you are planning and running this event, you are the one responsible and the buck stops at you; so gather good reliable helpers and one person to run the event if you can not be there.

My advice for if you are going to do Teen Event

• The Devil is in the detail.
• Read journals, ask others and Google for ideas from others, then tweak them to suit your teenagers and libraries. Remember librarians love sharing.
• Pick a day and time for the event that will suit your teenagers, not you. After all it is about them. So for us, for Skype it was a Saturday night and the Hunger Games it was a Wednesday night.
• Get contact details of anyone you are dealing with; it came in handy when Lauren was not ready and waiting on Skype.
• If using technology make sure you have a ‘techie’ guy there to run your plan past. They know how to do this techie stuff better than we do.
• Have a practice session or two or even three. Get a teen to do a practice run of your event with fresh eyes.  We had a work experience teen who ran through the Scavenger Hunt and gave me valuable feedback, and then I changed a few things I had planned which helped things run more smoothly
• If Skyping remember to check you have the time zones and correct day correct.
• Prepare questions for teens to ask the authors incase teens in case of teens are shy to begin with.
• Prepare a staff member to take over the event if you have to leave or can’t be there for any reason and use your Friends of the Library to help out.
• Get a small budget for prizes and food. We normally have about 60 teens at an event and spend $250 on food and drinks. Maybe you could ask local businesses for donations.
• Collect up all the bits and pieces from magazines and keep any donated books you get from customers and if they are in great condition use them for prizes.
• And the last thing; don’t think: “we have not got enough budget” or “it won’t work” or “what happens if…”.
• JUST DO IT! Your teenagers will love their library and librarians all the more for it.

References:

Laura, Harefield Library, Hillingdon, England.

Zen and the Art of Teen Services. Retrieved on August, 29th 2013 from http://zen-teen.com/

Appendices:

Mc Fadden, A. (2013). Teen Events, it’s Easy As! From Skyping an author to the Hunger Games. Tauranga,New Zealand.