A few months ago, I got an idea for a “Pay it Forward” style birthday party, where guests would each bring an item to donate rather than birthday gifts, in celebration of my 30th birthday.
The idea got squashed pretty quickly, since there were already plans to travel to Disney World the following week and I was told that I “just needed to pick one and Disney had already been decided.”
But when I found myself with the freedom to make that decision for myself, I started putting out feelers amongst some of my vendor friends as a way of fine tuning the idea. I emailed 30 fellow female entrepreneurs in fact, and basically just asked them to send me any ideas they had for how something like this could work.
And yall, the answers I got back were AMAZING! Talks of a scavenger hunt, service project, family style ticketed dinner, and food drive were all thrown around amongst literally dozens of others before we landed on this-- a donation based party, where guests would bring {either} puppy pads that could be donated to the local animal shelter, or children’s books, to be donated to the local schools.
Additionally, I had decided that I wanted to hide random acts of kindness within the birthday cupcakes, as a kind of “kindness fortune” that guests could go out and pay forward in the weeks following the event.
Now before I go any further, let me just remind you that I work in the events industry and my birthday is in the fall-- which is one of the busiest times of year for us. That means that when you invite your work friends, which most of my friends are work friends, since we spend the majority of our nights and weekends together, asking them to commit to yet another event on a weeknight is a lot to ask. Not to mention the fact that many would be driving over an hour to attend.
Got it? Right. Well we had about 75 guests attend, and collected upwards of 1000 puppy pads and 700+ books-- PLUS we raised an additional $800 for the local pet adoption agency.
Yall. Can we talk about how awesome that is? How impactful we can be when we combine forces and work as a team?
It was easily one of the greatest events we’ve ever produced, and one of the best birthdays I’ve ever had.
And for anyone reading this who would like to also plan their own version of a Pay it Forward party-- feel free to reach out. We had so many ideas that we weren’t able to integrate, and would love the opportunity to continue the trend!