Back in July our church held a great Ladies Night that would be really easy to replicate so here’s what we did.
Venue: we used a local Workers Club
Time: Friday eve 8pm -10pm – we deliberately pitched it late so it was obvious it was not a children’s thing. This was to be time out for mums/girls/working women
Title: Creative Night Out for the Girls
Strap-line: ‘Making, Baking, Taking Care of yourself’
We had the room laid out with lots of small tables to sit around with drinks with nice table decorations (there was a bar so we didn’t have to do drinks). Then we had a series of activities that our guests could choose to join in with or not.
Our activities were: card-making, someone gifted at this brought lots of stuff and allowed people to just ‘have a go’. We also did cake decorating, partiuclarly sugar craft shapes for decorating cup-cakes. We provided all the materials and people just ‘had a go’. Someone else brought a sewing machine and all the stuff for making lavender bags, this was very popular. Some else offered free facials, then in another corner we put on a DIY nail bar where groups of freinds could paint each others nail. One group of ladies from the church made lots of tray bakes so there free nibbles for everyone to enjoy. Finally we invited a local slimming group in who offered to do free 1-2-1 consultations giving people their BMI’s and body fat anaylis as well as free nutritional advice.
GENIUS IDEA: we wanted to give away free goody bags, to bless our guests but we had almost no budget. So we blagged 30 free large paper carriers from Costa Coffee (actually they were very obliging) and took these to church a few weeks ahead of time, we asked all the women at church to take one or two bags and fill it with 3 or 4 items that people might like to receive. Our goody bag fillers were really creative and almost everybody had things lying around such as unwanted gifts they were happy to put in the bags eg skin creams and smellies, cotton wool packs, notebooks, pens, photo frame, nail varnish etc. All the goody bags came back on the night and we added a Liberti magazine to each one (new Women’s Christian magazine) Because we didn’t have goody bags to give one to every guest, we gave out FREE raffle tickets as people arrived and then called the raffle at the end of the evening. This meant everyone stayed for the 5 minutes talk about life being mind, body and soul and that God cares for every part of our life.
The whole evening was easy to put on, the emphasis was on taking part not on spending money so we had very little there for anyone to buy. We wanted to simply create an occasion that offered something a little more than just a night out for the girls.
You could do this! Have fun
