YOU-The Program Co-ordinator

You have been chosen to plan and organize an anniversary celebration for a business, industrial, commercial, or specialized company, firm, corporation, or establishment.
Good. The remainder of this book will be addressed directly to you.
Who you are we do not know.
How you were selected we do not know.

Possibly you are already a staff member of the organization whose celebration you will produce. You may be a vice president who just loves people, a careerist yearning for another feather in his cap, or a secretary with time on her hands. You may be the Advertising Manager, the Sales Manager, or the Publicity Director who, three days ago, was told to "pull together a few thoughts on this thing, will you?" Or you may be a senior company officer who can't escape being General Chairman and suspects he may have to function, willy-nilly, as Coordinator also.

In any event, as an insider you will have many advantages. You will find many paragraphs in this volume academic to the point of uselessness so far as you are concerned. As a staff member you will, for example, already be acquainted with the people who'll be able to help you most. You'll know personally many of those with whom you'll be working closely. You'll know much about company history, policy, and preferred modes of operation. You'll possess a priceless hoard of inside knowledge about execu­tive foibles, procedural short cuts, and administrative storm warnings. You may even possess an unerring hand in the slicing of red tape. You're just plain lucky in a lot of ways.

Or you may have been brought in from the outside, as we recommend. Perhaps you are a representative of the company's advertising agency, a person who's directed anniversary celebra­tions for some of the nation's industrial giants. Of course, you may never have handled a celebration in your life, but, either way, the big point is: you're practically an insider. You are known by and knowing about the company. You have invaluable con­tacts. There are extensive staff resources back of you. You'll get along all right.

Or you may be a real "outsider," hired by the organization for a totally different assignment two weeks before somebody re­membered the upcoming celebration. In such an event, you not only may lack familiarity with the company and its ways, but you may be completely unskilled in this type of promotional operation.

In fact, you may be practically anyone at all, amateur or pro­fessional, insider or outsider. It doesn't really matter a great deal.

To be of greatest general assistance, we must present this material in a form useful to the least prepared, the least expe­rienced, the least professionally equipped. Regardless of your position or background, however, if you're a person who wants to produce a good job because it goes against your nature to do a poor one, if you'd like your celebration to be the envy of competitors and the talk of the town, if you just plain want a helping hand with the assignment, you're exactly the person we've been hoping to meet.

DEFINING OUR TERMS

And now that we have met, let's begin our work together by defining some of the terms we'll use frequently, and by reviewing the assumptions on which we'll base our presentation.

You are the Co-ordinator. You are responsible for co-ordinating all details of planning and staging necessary to complete and present an anniversary celebration of major scope and duration.

If you also carry responsibility and authority for all final deci­sions, you will be considered to be General Chairman as well as Co-ordinator. However, the material in this book will be ad­dressed to you in your capacity as Co-ordinator only.

We assume that you have discussed with your General Chair­man (and/or the man who hired you—we hope they're one and the same) the material in Chapter 1. If you have not reviewed with management the points propounded in Chapter 1, you should initiate such discussion at once. You need to know where you stand, because decisions reached on the points in that first chapter will affect the direction of your effort, the caliber of your performance, and the worth of your results.

We assume that you will work closely with, and report directly to, your General Chairman, and in his absence to some other company officer designated by him.

We assume that for the present you and your General Chairman intend to map out the preliminary stages of celebration planning without other assistance. We assume that later you will accept help from a small executive committee selected by the General Chairman. (This committee, which comes to life in Chapter 4, will be referred to as the Policy Committee.)

Throughout this book we will use the word "company" as a handy generic term embracing a variety of organizations and institutions not ordinarily so designated. Including, perhaps, your own establishment. We selected the word with full realization that you, and other users of this book, may not be associated with a "company" even in the broadest meaning of the word.

We tried to find a better collective term—firm? business? trust? corporation?—and gave up. You need not be concerned about this arbitrary choice. All our directions are easily adaptable, if you'll simply read your own organization's name wherever we use "company."

Another label you'll frequently notice is "Anniversary Year" (along with some more elastic terms like "anniversary period" and "observance period"). We use Anniversary Year with full awareness that you may be thinking in terms of a shorter and less complex observance than is represented by a "Year." Again, the procedural steps are basic, and you need have no concern.

When we speak about a company anniversary (or, for variety's sake, use some obvious synonym like anniversary celebration, anniversary observance, company memorial) we mean the anni­versary celebration you are now engaged in producing. In this ok that means a company birthday, or the anniversary of a founding or incorporation date. These events form the most common basis for company celebrations. We are aware that alter­native excuses for celebrations are never difficult to find: the introduction of a new invention or product, the anniversary of a merger or consolidation, the grand opening of a new unit, and so on. Our material is adaptable and will be of value in all such instances. However, it is our belief that the celebration of any and all occasions has a weakening effect, if not a cheapening one. It is the organization which is willing to wait for the widely spaced and psychologically appealing memorial occasions that obtains the greatest measure of public attention and interest.

There are three or four other terms you will be introduced to later. We'll make the introductions very casual and informal, and, if we do a good job, you'll be using the terms quite naturally even before we present them to you. Insofar as any of these labels or definitions fail to fit the pattern of your own specific needs, they should be adapted or ignored. Insofar as they make no definite contribution to the orderly development of your own anniversary celebration they should be avoided.

We shall do our best always to use these words and definitions in the sense we have here assigned to them. There may, of course, be occasional slips. Where such slips occur, it is our hope that the context will indicate the sense we intend. Where the context is of no help, you're on your own. And we don't worry much: you're bound to have a good mind or you wouldn't have received this assignment in the first place.

But good mind or not, we're giving you nothing! In this book, that is. We're going to stack the cards against you deliberately and without mercy.

We intend to assume that you have been chosen from outside the company; that you have never met any of the company officers or employees prior to this assignment; and that you have no knowledge whatever of the organization's financial or adminis­trative structure, corporate personality, history, policies, or atti­tude toward celebrations.

The company may or may not be big enough to have an adver­tising and/or public relations department. Either way it doesn't matter, because even if such departments exist they are too busy meeting each day's ulcer-producing deadlines to give you any help.

In fact, the only bright spot we're permitting on your horizon is the minor fact that when you undertake your duties you'll have no ready-made personnel problems among staff people who figure they should have had a chance at the job. Everyone is glad to have you take hold.
So—get busy.

RESPONSIBILITIES OF A COORDINATOR

Here is a check list of the major responsibilities you have assumed in connection with this assignment. Study it. Mark the page and refer back to it regularly. It will keep you from wander­ing very far off your course.

Specifically, you are being paid to, and are expected to
1. Plan, develop, and direct—in co-operation with the General Chairman and assigned personnel—a program of events marking the company's anniversary and extending over a considerable period of time.
2. Assist in formulating immediate and long-range goals, and a plan of action for attaining those goals.
3. Recommend the primary "publics" to be reached.
4. Recommend activities and media to reach those publics.
5. Create and distribute written, spoken, and visual communi­cations and revise as necessary existing forms, lists, and instruc­tional materials.
6. Accept speaking and public-contact assignments, and represent the company at a variety of lunches, meetings, and conferences.
7. Enlist the support of, and co-operate with, allied groups.
8. Provide co-ordination, liaison, and objective criticism.
9. Prepare regular verbal and written reports for management.
10.   Assist in the creation of committees wherever such appear necessary or wise, and provide the leadership required to bring them to the highest possible level of efficiency.
"Me?" you say. "I've got to do that? I can't do those things! What do I do? How do I start? That list!!" Relax.

We're going to show you. Today you don't even know where the washroom is, but, within the year, you are going to develop for this company a celebration which will be a credit to you and to them, and you're going to save them time, trouble, and money all along the way.
"But how?"

We'll show you how. And unless we miss our guess you'll end your assignment with every single thing in the above list done— and a lot more—and you'll never even have noticed.

We're going to take your hand and guide you step by step from this moment to the day the final parcel of anniversary activities and events is approved by management. We're going to present as clearly and as circumstantially as possible a plan whereby your company will benefit enormously—not only within the celebra­tion period but well into the future—from the harvest of public favor, community affection, and general good will your efforts will reap.

If in the process we sometimes seem unduly academic, bear with us. If we present problems which you never expect to face, discuss meetings you will neither call nor attend, and describe situations you cannot possibly experience, just remember: they've appeared pretty regularly in celebration planning in the past. Someone is going to need the help of such examples. Someone will be glad they're in the book. Maybe you.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

The individual chapter synopses in the Contents will provide a quick general review of the material available in the book, and you can pinpoint your specific needs in the Index at any time.

Book One, "Preliminary Planning," embraces Chapters 1 and 2, presents a look at the over-all job facing management and you, and gets you both off to a good beginning.

Book Two, "Blueprint for Progress," includes Chapters 3 through 10 and takes you month by month through the maze of plans, tasks, duties, responsibilities, meetings, conferences, and decisions which ultimately coalesce into a unified, well-rounded anniversary program.

Book Three, "Results and Responsibilities," includes Chapters 11 and 12. It presents a finally approved anniversary program, offers tools to help put the program into production, proffers some parting advice, and in general ties up loose ends.

Book Four, the "Idea Book," lists over 150 tried and tested anniversary activities. Naturally there is no assurance that every suggestion will fit all locations, businesses, temperaments, prefer­ences, policies, budgets, and combinations thereof. However, every one has proved successful in actual use, and enough of them will prove adaptable to your requirements to make Book Four a resource of rare value.

Every chapter is packed with suggestions. We do not recommend gulping or skimming if you want your money's worth. You won't get anything but eyestrain that way. For best results, take each sentence and paragraph slowly and thoughtfully. It is there for a purpose. The purpose is to state and/or underscore something you should consider including in your own program.

We say "should consider including" because it is obviously im­possible to anticipate every aspect of every possible situation. Only you are in a position to determine what material is—to you—the important material. Only you can finally decide what should be done or not done, included or eliminated, in the circumstances of your own celebration. Those decisions you must make. We can help you to make them.
So remember three things:

First, don't skim. The book is too detailed for you to give it a cigarette's worth of time and "get the general idea." If you've a celebration coming up soon and time is a factor, still don't skim. Make a pot of coffee, pull the telephone off the wall, soak a towel in cold water and wrap it around your head, and retire to a quiet corner where you can read this book from cover to cover or there­abouts.

Second, as you read each paragraph, either accept it as possibly applicable to your needs (either immediately or in the near future) or reject it. If you accept it, don't lose it. Underscore it, make a check mark alongside, dog-ear the page. As we have said in the Preface, don't scruple to make this book your book by marking it in any way that will convert it to most effective use in the con­struction of your anniversary celebration.

Third, read the book entirely through in this way. Determine and mark, as you read, the material which comprises the heart of the book for you. That heart, that substance, that core will be the book itself, and all of the book, so far as your needs are con­cerned. Alongside pertinent material, write your own ideas and comments on how best to use the matter you've marked. Then, whenever you must review or recheck, you'll be able quickly to find the reference or the page you need.

Today this book—crisp, fresh, clean—represents nothing but the small investment of your purchase price. A year from now, if it is smudged, dog-eared, and annotated, it will be the record of a dream come true, and it will have fulfilled its function.

MAKE HASTE SLOWLY

Because you have a book which plots your route month by month for the span of the project, do not, on that account, try to go too fast. Do not try to impress the boss with how efficient you are and how much you know. Remember that no matter what he says, the man who pays your salary wants the company anni­versary planned his way, not yours, and he wants preparations to proceed at his pace, not yours.

Are you going to argue about it?
No.
So move forward step by step, thinking and working along with your General Chairman, but without any short cuts or hurrying tactics. Don't skip steps and try to dazzle anyone by producing the normal result of five months of work by the end of the third month. All you'll produce will be dismay and some doubt as to whether you really know what you're doing. After all, maybe the General Chairman has read this book and trusts it more than you do. If he has read it and wants to go roaring into action at Chap­ter 7, you roar right along with him. But if there exists in either of you some respect for the ramifications of the job you have undertaken, you'll proceed with reasonable caution, and you'll turn in a better all-around performance as a result.

Construct your celebration by taking the steps in the order we present them, until such time as that order becomes, for you, ob­viously impractical, wasteful, meaningless, or downright stupid. Then change to whatever sequence best serves your requirements.

HANDLING UNEXPECTED QUESTIONS

Despite the fact that they are probably answered somewhere in the book, questions will come at you from time to time in strange guises and when you are least expecting them. This will occur less and less frequently as you progress on the job, but it can be dis­concerting if you defensively think you are expected to know everything. (You aren't.)

So just remember that if we don't cover until Chapter 6 a question the General Chairman asks you in the first month, don't conclude automatically that the entire plan is out of joint. Just get the answer and give it to him. The query happened by acci­dent, and you can bet that some of the points we present in the first month won't occur to the General Chairman until Opening Day, unless you point them out. Which, incidentally, you'd better do!

Often enough to be disheartening, some important procedural recommendation you make early in the planning—deciding on an anniversary theme, for example—won't make the slightest appar­ent dent in anyone's consciousness until it is all but too late to matter. At that point you'll have your recommendation served up to you as a bright and scintillating new thought (and why didn't it come from you, Mr. Co-ordinator? Do I have to do every­thing around here?), and there isn't a thing you can do but ap­plaud. And get on with the job.

KEEP A DAILY WORK SHEET

Certainly we hope that you are officewise enough to keep a daily work sheet. In the first place, it is simply good efficient pro­cedure, and, in the second place, you will never be able to produce a decent report without one. And reports are one of your re­sponsibilities. So if you haven't been in the habit of keeping a daily work sheet, we strongly advise you to begin the practice immediately.
What is a daily work sheet?

A daily work sheet is a diary of what you do from eight to five each workday. It is a piece of paper (any shape, size, quality, or color) which you keep constantly at hand—we roll ours into the typewriter when nothing else is occupying the machine—and on which you note each task of the day as soon as that task is com­pleted. The entries aren't supposed to be neat, but they are sup­posed to be complete, and they're supposed to be there.

For example, you should keep a record of the callers at your desk and the reason for the call, the conferences you attend, the correspondence you complete, telephone calls of consequence (local and long-distance, incoming and outgoing), and the status of projects you are supervising. The sheet becomes wrinkled, dog­eared, and smudged, because you make notes on it with whatever comes first to hand—typewriter, pencil, ink, crayon. But when it comes time to pull together a six-months' report (and we will recommend that you do so at the end of your first six-months' period) or a conference report or an annual report, you'll know that the work sheet is solid gold and well worth the time spent.
Some people use their desk calendars for work sheets, but we don't think a calendar pad has enough room. As a result you start to abbreviate. Then, backtracking to assemble a report, you come smack up against a three-months-old entry reading "Call Cat." Are you going to be able to remember that it means you called a vendor for a catalog of souvenirs?

Without some such method how can you hope to recall such things as the visit to the curator of the museum four months ago? Or the lunch with the members of the Conservation Commission three months ago? Or the multitude of meetings and conferences? Or the time you prepared the sample radio spots?

The days are full and time slips away. You know you've been faithfully delivering a full day's work (and maybe a bit more) for your day's pay, but as a lone wolf you are in a vulnerable spot. Who else knows? What, specifically, have you done?
Your work sheet will tell.
Keep one. It's a good habit.

ESTABLISH AN EMPLOYEE INFORMATION PROGRAM

It is very important at all times—but never more than during the heightened community awareness attending a public celebra­tion—that employees know what is going on in their organization.

Employees are the voice of final authority when they speak of their organization to their personal circle of relatives, friends, and neighbors. If they are regularly and correctly informed—particularly during times of unusual activity or stress—they can be the best public relations department a company can have.

Yet in actual practice, employees are often the last to be in­formed, the last to be alerted, the last to be equipped with an­swers to the questions and criticisms they must occasionally face. And the last, unfortunately, to learn of company activities which they could support powerfully if they knew about them.

More than one organization has spent thousands and thousands of dollars on advertising, decorations, displays, events, projects, and prizes without any apparent realization that their strongest allies—the employees inside their very buildings—had only the vaguest notion of what was going on.

And then, in the anniversary period, or in the course of an important promotion, a visitor—lured by the ballyhoo ("Come and visit our FRIENDLY organization")—enters and asks where the barbershop quartette is appearing today, or where items may be left for the Old Models Exhibit. And instead of information gets a blank, puzzled stare. Real loss of stature happens to an establishment right at that minute. Real financial loss can result if such incidents occur very often. Why companies tolerate this situation no one knows. Or at least, we don't know. The lip serv­ice paid to the idea of employee information indicates that the problem is recognized and the cure is known. Nonetheless, the staff regularly and fully informed on company matters affecting them is the exception rather than the rule.

So we recommend institution of a scrupulous program of in­formation for company employees. Information concerning each step in the development of the anniversary program should be given employees in advance of any public release of information.

Such an information program may include the following:

1. Increased use of company bulletin boards and the house pub­lications.
2. Selection of a senior employee (in point of company service) in each department/division/section/unit, and the welding of these seniors into an Information Committee which would be briefed regularly to answer employee questions, refute or confirm rumors, neutralize the grapevine, and act in general as liaison and information source for personnel.
3. An employee kick-off dinner prior to the opening of the Anniversary Year to outline upcoming major events and, in par­ticular, any activities and events affecting the employees.
4. Production and distribution of a simple mimeographed weekly fact sheet (prepared at a cost infinitesimal compared to the over-all anniversary expenditure) to be hand-distributed by the group supervisor and reviewed with each employee group by the supervisor.
5. Regularly scheduled mass or sectional meetings to inform personnel on general anniversary planning, departmental quotas and achievements, changes in standards, objectives, program.
6. Direct-mail bulletins to special groups (e.g., stockholders).
7. Special information releases, with all pertinent facts, to be distributed to employees prior to any anniversary event in which the public is invited to participate, or at which employees are expected to assist. No employee can help make a success of any project about which he or she has no information.

If the company has the skill and the attitude of its public-contact personnel routinely checked or "shopped" by a profes­sional service, knowledge of the material in information releases or company fact sheets should also be checked by the evaluator.

Regardless of where the fault may lie, the fact remains that an employee who doesn't know what is going on in his own organiza­tion is not well-trained and is not an asset. A company is known by the employees it keeps—informed.

MAKE AN ANNIVERSARY SCRAPBOOK    

Start an anniversary scrapbook your first day on the job. From that day forward keep it up-to-date by filing in it a fully identified copy of every photograph, news release, script, souvenir, guest list, organization chart, diagram, progress report, lapel button, newsletter, program stuffer, invitation, place mat, place card, menu, decal, label, calendar, and every other item produced for your celebration. It is simply unbelievable how many organiza­tions will spend unlimited time, energy, and imagination to de­velop novel and irreplaceable material for their celebration, and a year later be hard put to lay a hand on any single piece of it!

This is a different project, by the way, from the historical file recommended below. In the beginning, much of the celebration material you produce will be created out of the historical file. At the end of the celebration period, the anniversary scrapbook be­comes a spectacular addition to the historical file.

SET UP A HISTORICAL FILE

If, in your initial investigation into available resources, you find that your organization appears not to have recognized the value (if for nothing but legal and tax purposes) of a good, sound, complete historical file, now is the time to begin one.

So far as value to you goes, it won't have much at first. Yours will be the thankless digging, researching, sifting. Yours will be the task of identifying places and people in old photographs, of trying to pin down the day and date when the company's second plant was opened for business, of assembling an authentic and dependable list of employees who were war casualties, of pasting together yellowed and brittle clippings.

But it's an adventure. Memorabilia, often in sufficient quantity to provide a traffic-stopping exhibit, can be found in the attic trunks of older employees. Historical treasure-trove, long for­gotten and neglected and probably forever lost if you hadn't started hunting, can be unearthed. The old tools, pictures, cata­logs, letterheads, handbills, insignia, parts lists you'll turn upl Priceless!

And this file, if maintained, will represent a definite contribu­tion by you to future company operating efficiency.

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