Date: 30th May 2009
Time: 8:00am-
Venue: Temasek Junior College

Roy's Reflection
I feel that CAN! Marathon is an event that has it failures as well as its successes. It is a failure at allowing us to achieve our expected profits. However, I do not deny that it has allowed us to learn more about planning for what we need and also not to overestimate. Evidently, it highlights the importance of self-estimation and the need for a contingency plan.

On the actual day, we had about 20 packs of curry puffs and spring rolls each, 12 tubs of ice cream and 48 bottles of root beer. There were also approximately 250 brownies for sales. However, the sales ended up badly. We were left with about 15 packs of curry puffs and spring rolls each, 10 tubs of ice cream and about 30 bottles of root beer.

Only 600 people were seen to be present. This differs largely from the estimated number of people turning up by the organizers. Although part of the fault lies in the organizers for over estimating the number of people turning up for the event, we should self-estimated and do a self-research on the number of people turning up for the event so as to prepare a suitable quantity of food for them.

Having equipped with the experience and knowing the importance of self-estimation and the need for a contingency plan. I believe that we would be able to make use of these to apply to future fund raising events to achieve greater heights.

Shirlin's Reflection
The CAN matathon is considered one of the bigger fund-raising activities we had and so we ordered quite a lot of food, hoping to earn more since the estimated crown was around 2000. The carnival started at arond 10 in the morning and sales were not as well as we wanted it to be. After the first one to two hours, the crowd was still quite small and so a few of us started walking around the campus to promote out stall and also offer to take orders and deliver it to them. We did manage to increase out sales by a little bit however the whole turnout was not that good. We ended up with quite a lot of leftovers and some of us went to chalets and restaurants to try to sell them off. We managed to earn enough to cover the cost and also earn a little profit

Even though the fund-raising was not as successful as we thought it would be, we managed to take off a couple of useful lessons that will help in future fund-raising events. I feel that we should not assume that things will always turn out well and that there is always a need for a back-up plan in case things take an unexpected turn like the one we experienced. I also feel that we should have out own estimation of the expected crowd and then from there decide how much we are going to sell instead of just believing what the others tell us. Determination plays a key park in keeping ourselves going and with the experience this time aound, I think that we will be able to overcom the challenges in future fund-raising event.

Wenqing's Reflection
For the CAN! Marathon fund-raising, the team prepared brownie, ice cream floats and other various foods to sell. I thought that we were quite well-prepared and that everything would go well on that day because we offered different and attractive types of food on sale. We expected around 2000 people to turn up for the carnival; hence we prepared a lot of food to sell.

However the 2000 people that we had expected to arrive in TJ did not come. The school was a pretty empty place and there were very little people around. We realized that it was impossible for us to finish selling all of the food, but we decided to try our best to cover the costs. Sales became quite bad after a while in the canteen; hence some of us took turns to walk around and try to persuade people to buy our food. The situation became desperate when there were less and less people in TJ with a seemingly never ending stock of food in our booth.

In the end, everyone from the team had to help to cover the costs by buying up the food remaining. It was not a very good feeling to see all the stocks left unsold and having to buy up the remainders, because this meant that we had failed badly in the sales that day and we would have incurred losses. The emotions were very low that day as everyone sat around our booth, doing mostly nothing due to the lack of customers.

We would always look out for possible things that might go wrong in our fund-raising. In this case, I felt that we had overestimated the amount of people that would be coming to the carnival. The sponsors told us that about 2000 people were coming but we should checked to make sure if there was really that much people coming. I also feel that it is important to have a backup plan on hand should things go wrong as it would minimize the losses. Despite the failure of the fund-raising this time round, I feel that it is a very good learning experience for the team because now we have learnt to think out and better prepare for more fund-raising to come.