Fundraising

Fundraising, with the emphasis on fun.

Doreen and I are big fans of Annise Parker, Houston’s city controller. She is good at her job, and a very nice person besides. She lives in the neighborhood, and is up for re-election this year. Houston has two year city terms, and all city elected officials are term limited to three terms. Annise is just finishing her first term, and should be easily re-elected twice more.

But with all elections, there is some uncertainty. Nobody has yet filed to run against her, yet it will probably happen before the deadline appears. And while our city elections are nominally non-partisan, she is obviously a Democrat in a Republican state. So the “R” team will probably want to run someone in the race, if nothing else just to draw down her funds.

So when Doreen was asked to hold a house party fundraiser, she said yes. I was dragged along for good measure. My natural reluctance to have anything to do with people kept me from being too excited about the whole endeavor (I would have preferred to sit home alone and read a good book) I thought it would be a good thing for us to do.

We used the website “Evite” to set up the party, and asked most of the people we know in the neighborhood, and pretty much all of my friends (I don’t have very many. See above) I think that a total of about 60 invitations went out, and we received about 40 confirmed attendees. That being started, we had to figure out what we were going to do to keep people entertained until the party started.

We are lucky enough to live in an interesting house. It was built around 1910 for one of the local entrepreneurs of the era (John Stevenson, from the company Stewart and Stevenson) We have never had an open house to allow our neighbors a chance to look around and see what work we have had done, so we knew we could get most of them to come by and pay the recommended $25 donation to get in the door.

We also like to enjoy a nice bottle of wine now and again, so we tried to think of some interesting, and yet economical, wine that we liked. We wanted to offer both red and white, so we chose a nice Spanish Rioja Crianza, Condesa de Leganza (which we lovingly call Condoleezza Rice at our house) and for the white, a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc: Matua. The Boss and I had a slight disagreement about how much wine we would drink (I figured we would go through maybe a case, total. She wanted to get a case of Red and a case of White. She bought it, so you know what we got. The good news is that we bought wine we drink, so it will not go to waste. Oh, we went through 11 bottles total)

Finally we had to get some food. Now usually, I like to cook for things like this, but we decided to take advantage of our CostCo membership and bought some Hummus and Baba Ganoush. We also bought some Manchego Cheese and some Chevres. I think we had some crusty bread, some pita chips, and some pita its own bad self available as well. So the food was basic, but delightful.

We were all ready for the guest to start arriving, and Annise’s delightful campaign manager Amanda Scott arrived to help us with the final setup details. She laid out the table with name tags and contribution forms, and figured out what we had where in the house. She has done this before, and we have not. It was great to have someone who knew what she was doing.

As 6:00 rolled around (The nominal start time for the event) my friend Fred Jenson was the first to appear. He is also probably the only Republican to show up for this event. But he does understand about good public servants, so he was glad to come, meet Annise, and add some money to her campaign. He did grouse some about giving money to a Democrat, though. Oddly enough, I would guess that he has NEVER given money to a Republican. He probably thinks they don’t need it…

After that folks started coming in quickly. I think that we had about 36 – 38 folks stop in. That was good, and we raise a nice amount of cash. Annise gave a nice speech from our stairs, and our cat Little Guy only bugged her once or twice.

Anyway, it was a fun event. E-mail Amanda for more information about how to do something similar.