Small Events, Big Impact - A Petrus Development Show Episode on Fundraising Events

Have you ever wondered if that fancy gala is worth the headache?  (We assume that thought might have crossed your mind!)

While nonprofits everywhere are planning their biggest, splashiest fundraising events, Andrew and Rhen are asking the hard question: What if smaller is actually better? In this eye-opening episode, they challenge the "go big or go home" mentality that's driving organizations to exhaustion.

Show Notes:

It's back-to-school season, which means development teams are mapping out their fundraising calendars—and facing the same ol' dilemma. Do you throw a glitzy gala for 500 people, or host intimate wine tastings in board members' living rooms?

Big events look impressive on paper (and in those Instagram posts). But, here's what most organizations don't calculate: the hidden costs of staff burnout, volunteer fatigue, and months of planning that could be spent actually building relationships with donors.

Andrew makes a compelling case for why he's ditching the ballroom for the living room. Spoiler alert: It's not just about saving money—it's about creating genuine connections that turn one-time attendees into lifelong supporters.

Are you ready to rethink everything you thought you knew about fundraising events?

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:

00:00

Well, howdy everybody. Welcome back to the Petrus Development Show. My name is Rhen Hoehn from Petrus Development. Joining me today is Andrew Robison. How's it going, Andrew?

It's going good, Rhen. Your kids are back in school. My kids are back in school. Yes, thank goodness. Summer gets longer every year. I think the more kids and the older they are—I guess the older they are, they're probably like a bell curve. It's really, really brutal, and then it gets a little bit opposite. It gets even worse, and then it peaks, and then things get easier as they are older and can manage themselves in the summer.

00:28

Yeah, I feel like the last few weeks of summer were like the highest highs and the lowest lows. Like we had some really good experiences and moments and events. And then there was also just a lot of the kids beating on each other and screaming at each other, and trying to get back to the routine. So that's good.

Yeah, I think it's the routine more than it's like school. I think school is part of it, but just that separates them, and then just that routine. But interestingly, my wife is on the PTO for a couple different schools, and she's on the PTO for high school. So she was at the meeting this week, and I don't know if I mentioned this to you, but Texas over the summer passed a law that cell phones are not allowed to be used in schools anymore at any level.

00:57

Yeah, we were at the elementary school for like meet the teacher last night, and she says, "This shouldn't apply, but we have to say it—can't have cell phones," which is mostly the watches if they have anything.

Anyways, so there's been a lot of angst among the high schoolers and to some extent the parents who like communicating with their high schoolers during the school day that they won't have cell phones. But they've been doing it now for a week and a half, two weeks, somewhere around there. And so the principal came to the PTO meeting and he said, "Not having phones in the schools has transformed the schools."

01:25

And they're like, "Oh, how so?" And he said, "Well, first of all, the kids are just more focused." And he said, "There's fewer behavioral issues. In fact, in my tenure as a principal—high school principal—this is the first week of my entire tenure that we have not had a kid in ISS."

Wow. What is ISS?

In-school suspension. There you go. So just behaviorally, kids are acting better.

01:55

They're less distracted, they're more focused. And then he said that it used to be you could walk into the cafeteria during lunch and it was almost like crickets. I mean, everybody's on their phone. If there's anybody talking, they're sharing videos with each other. And he said, "Now you walk in there and you can barely hear over the sounds of the kids talking to each other. They've got board games in there that the kids are actually using and playing with. They're just talking to each other."

It's like, "Okay, I guess they do have social skills. They're rusty for sure, but they're in there somewhere." So it's been good. I'm very pleased. And I was asking Cheryl if other states have done this as well. And I don't know, but I know Texas has.

02:24

It's definitely been a wave. My kids' school did it themselves last spring, kind of declared it. If a kid brings a phone or watch to school, they have to hand it into the bus driver when they get on the bus, and they get it back when they get off, or when they go to their sports in the evening, that type of thing.

But yeah, it does seem to be changing things really fast, which is really nice to see. Yeah, I mean, who would've thought, right?

02:54

Yeah, I think in private schools, Catholic schools, even charter schools to some extent, they've probably been—or they have been—ahead of it in this regard. And it's the public schools that are now catching up, but that's where our kids are and we're grateful that they have, they are catching up at least in that area, certainly not other areas, but in that area for sure.

Excellent. And yeah, back to school time kind of kicks off one of the kind of event seasons when it comes to fundraising, right? It seems like fall and spring are both kind of seasons of different events, fundraisers going on. I know our kids' school has different things going on all through the fall and a bike-a-thon in a few weeks. Got some other stuff coming up. So it's event season.

03:18

And we came across some statistics that somebody kind of dug up on comparing large events to small events, like galas to kind of small in-house events, that type of thing. Do you want to kind of break down what we found there?

Sure. So I've always been an advocate for smaller events, whether they're for cultivation purposes, acquisition purposes, solicitation purposes. But I think before we kind of dive into the data, just let's just talk about kind of different types of events, right? Just so people know how we're understanding them.

03:48

There's kind of big events, which would encompass like galas, big annual banquets, auctions. I would probably even put like golf tournaments in there. Anything that's where it's large crowds of people, you're inviting people that maybe don't have an affiliation with the school or the parish. I mean they do, but they're there for kind of that purpose. Maybe it's fundraising specific. Maybe it's, you know, not celebration, but that would be a big event, right? Anything else you'd add into that category?

04:17

I don't think so. Those are the big ones that you run across frequently at least. So small event though is something that happens, but is on a smaller scale. So, you know, the father invites six couples from the parish to have dinner and drinks at the rectory, or, you know, a member of the board organizes a fundraising event at their home.

04:45

Or at a restaurant or at a country club or somewhere, you know, hotel event space, something that's small, that is maybe, you know, fewer than 50 people, I would say. Once you get over that—I've done kind of events in this space—once you get over 50, it feels like it's encroaching on big event territory. So, you know, typically in that like 10 to 25 people is what we would consider a small event.

05:14

Oftentimes there's less of a—more informal program, right? So somebody gets up and talks or maybe there's a short video they'll show. Maybe they invite, you know, a participant, be it a student or a person or somebody to speak, but it's a more informal program. Sometimes there's a solicitation and ask, not necessarily—could just be an acquisition event, you know, meet friends. We'll follow up with you afterwards to talk about some of our fundraising needs.

05:24

So anything you'd add to that sort of category of events?

What feels like the delimiter there for me is I've done, I think, probably—I think it was 65 or 70 different events in my fundraising time. Everywhere from 10 or 15 people up to 120 was the biggest one that we did as a live event. And when you get past, definitely past 50, maybe even in the 30 to 40 range, when you're in that 30 to 40 range or below...

05:53

The staff—we usually have two or three staff at these smaller gatherings—you have a chance to all spend some quality time talking to everybody that's there. When you get above that, you might say hi to everybody and you might not even get a chance to say hi to everybody one-on-one. They're all there. You're all in the same space sharing this event, but you don't get to meet them. The best thing you can hope for is a chance to follow up with them after the event saying, "Oh, it was nice to meet you. I'd love to actually talk to you. Could we have coffee next week?" And that's a good way to follow up with all these events.

06:24

But that feels like the delimiter to me is when you get to pass that 30, 40, 50 somewhere in there is where you don't get to talk to everybody at the event, and that is where it goes from feeling like a small event to feeling like a large event.

Yeah, Ren, so I know when you were doing all the events at your old employer St. Al's, those were hosted by the parish, right? Or hosted by the ministry. A lot of small events are actually not technically hosted by the charity even, right? It's hosted by Mr. and Mrs. Johnson. It's hosted by a board member, you know, A and B. That, I think that changes the dynamic, right? So then as a hosted—as a pure hosted event, they're inviting their network versus the organization inviting, you know, people that they have a connection to.

06:51

So, right, and it feels like we're, you know, kind of promoting one type of event and, you know, diminishing another type of event. I think there's a place for big events, certainly, but what we're going to talk about here is the trending data for results from events is very clearly benefiting one type of event over the other.

07:19

And what is that data?

[Some off-topic singing and conversation about music and finding the source has been omitted for clarity]

13:26

What is that data?

Yeah. So the data comes from—we found it on LinkedIn, Amanda Smith at Lehigh Valley—did an analysis of 25 nonprofit fundraising events. And what she found was that traditional galas average $45,000 net. That's one of the keys with big events—when you factor in the expense, just the cost, not even just the time, but the expense, then you always have to factor in what is the net revenue. So traditional galas average $45,000 net. Peer-led experiences, so these are like hosted dinners or wine and cheese or something like that, averaged $127,000 net.

13:56

Over these 25 fundraising events that she analyzed. Which is crazy. I mean, what is that? That's not quite 300% but basically, yeah, basically triple. So, it's interesting because when you look at the cost of putting on the big events, the return that you get from these events, and then the time and effort that you put into big events versus the time and effort that you put in to these small events. I mean, the difference couldn't be any bigger. Basically it's small events, peer-led experiences, raise more money. You keep more of that money and they require less time, effort, energy of your staff.

14:23

Yeah. I mean, she mentions in there are some of the other benefits that she saw: higher satisfaction among the participants because they get face time with the director, it's a more informal event, right? Definitely. And more new donors. So she notes in there that the peer-hosted events acquired three times more new donors than the organization-hosted events, which makes sense right here. You're expanding—you're using—you're getting access to the network of the people who are hosting the events, and she gave the example of one organization that switched from a gala to peer-hosted events and they doubled the revenue and they cut their expenses by 40%.

14:49

Right? So that's how you triple your net income from those events. Right? Cut the expenses, double the revenue. It's pretty hard to argue with the results there. I mean, it's clearly a benefit. Now I would say in order to do good peer-led or peer-hosted events or to do small events, you guys kind of found a way without a huge network of top donors who could host these events, right? You, at St. Al's, you guys said, "Hey, we're committing to this." And you built it up over time, which I think is a key. You started one year with, well, you can tell the numbers, but you started one year with a small group and then you grew them over time, right?

15:18

Yeah, we started with, I think the first year was just one. The second year was three. And by year six, I think we were up to 15. So we were doing a whole tour of them. That first year, probably, at that one, you probably had...

16:46

What, 30 people? We had exactly, it was 30 people. That same event by year six or seven, that was 120. So it grew and then we had split it to—we had added two other locations nearby. So all told those three locations, we were looking more like 250 people. So if you want to do small, when I was at the medical school fundraising, we would do a handful of these every year. And we had kind of a group of very loyal, very committed donors.

17:15

And they would, you know, every time we would meet as a group, we would say, "Who's willing to host an event?" I mean, we had them in one—one gentleman had a wine cellar. So we had an event at a wine cellar, which was amazing. You know, somebody else, at their home, they just loved hosting parties. So they had it at their home. We did one at a restaurant. So we had a network when I was at the medical school of people that, you know, this is—I don't say it's common, but they're used to it, right? They're happy to do it.

17:43

They're even willing to pay for it, right? They're willing to invite their friends. So there's benefit that way. Now there's some organizations that are listening to this that are saying, "Hey, we're just getting started," or "We might have one family, we might have two couples, but we definitely don't have enough to like make this a thing that we're doing." I think that's where you start looking at a process like what you guys did where it's hosted by the organization, you commit to doing them, even if you don't know how many people are gonna show up initially, and you commit to doing them over time, you work out your formula, your process, your program, and then it becomes part of the culture that ultimately, then you draw in those people that say, "Hey, I love doing the cookouts," which is what you guys did, "I love doing the cookouts, but next time, let's do it at my house, and I'll invite six couples that we know from church." And that's how you sort of transition into this peer-led style.

18:12

Definitely. And I want to note there, we were going to our donors. We had a very dispersed kind of donor base, working at a campus ministry in a place where very few people stay after they graduate because it's so remote. And so a lot of our donors lived six, eight, ten hours away. So we weren't hosting 15 events at the parish. We were going to Detroit, to Chicago, to Minneapolis, to Dallas, to Washington, D.C. Anywhere that we had pockets of donors, we'd go to them and host a local event close to them.

18:42

But I think that's applicable. I work with several different kind of national organizations, right? Where they have donor prospects all over the country. Like, "Okay, I can't really host a gala in town here because nobody really is here. How do I even do that?" And I remember, I think back—maybe we talked about this in a recent podcast, I feel like I remember talking about it—but one of the earliest episodes of the Petrus Development Show, you had Jason Simon from Evangelical Catholic.

19:11

And he talked about their national organization. They're based in Madison, Wisconsin area. And he talked about how they have a big donor base—and I think it was North Carolina—and it's because they had one kind of significant donor there who said, "Come on down. I'm going to host an event at my house and you guys come speak and we'll do a fundraiser, you know, build your network from my network." And they did that year after year. And now it's their kind of big donor base, or at least at the time, a few years ago when we interviewed him, that was a significant portion of their donor base.

19:38

And it's just because they went from that one person who was willing to host them and bring in and open up their network. And they built a big network of supporters there over time. So even though it's not close to their headquarters at all, it doesn't even make sense when you think about it logically, like why does this Madison, Wisconsin organization have most of their donors from North Carolina? But that's why—it's opening up the network through those small events.
You guys sort of have that with, you know, St. Al's is up in the upper peninsula of Michigan. A lot of Michigan folks leave and go down to Florida. As they, you know, sort of happens, they had almost kind of started like a small St. Al's community in Naples, Florida. And so I remember Father Ben would go down there occasionally and they would host small events just for that network. And they were almost, you know, I'm not remembering the numbers exactly, but you would think in a situation like that...

20:06

They would almost be more eager and excited to attend an event because you're really, "Hey, they're coming to me." Like you said, "Wow, this is cool. I, you know, I want to be part of this." It's a lot harder to say, "Oh, I'm busy with club that night. I guess I can make time if you're going all the way here."
Yep. Exactly. So I think that, you know, the long and short of it is if you have a long-standing gala, you have a long-standing benefit, you have done it for years and it's part of your culture for whatever reason, do you want to end that? I don't know. That's a bigger decision. But can you supplement that other times of the year with other activities? Yes. Small events.

20:34

And then also, if you don't have any of it like that, and one of your board members says, "Hey, we need to start an annual gala," then you say, "Actually, let's take a different approach to this."
Yeah, I think the caution there is you tend to think, "Okay, we haven't—if you haven't done a gala, it sounds like, oh, one day of effort, all this money raised, $100,000 raised, and we're good for the year." Right. Like it feels like a quick, easy solution. The reality and why we kind of downplay galas is that it takes almost a whole year to plan one. Right. I think of one of our colleagues who used to run a nonprofit. He talked about he had a staff member who for nine months of the year, all she did was work on their gala. That was her almost full-time job. So you have to account for that in your costs. Right. So there's a big personnel cost plus all of the resources to set up the event, you know, the food, et cetera.

21:01

And so they're—like you said, if there isn't a big tradition of doing a gala, it's probably not good to start one at least early on in your fundraising efforts. Maybe over time you get there. But don't jump into it thinking it's going to be an easy solution. Or if you're going to start a big event, find a reason to start it and not a reason to make it a regular occurrence. Right. So you end the campaign, you have a big celebration to end the campaign, right? You have a groundbreaking ceremony or a ribbon-cutting ceremony, have a big event for that. But to start an annual event because you think it will raise a lot of money every year, clearly the data is...

21:31

The data and just personal experience is saying, don't do that. Find other ways to gather people together and save yourself a lot of time, energy, headache, money, cost, all of that.
Yeah. I mean, you probably will raise decent money with a good, well-run gala, but the opportunity cost, right? You could run a lot of smaller events and probably raise more money. You could also use that time just for one-on-one donor meetings and probably raise significantly more than you would in the gala itself, especially when you talk about net costs.
I want to make a parallel to this. This is a little bit of a segue, but kind of related. So we used to do a three-day conference for Petrus called Raise. And this year we transitioned to doing smaller one-day events, kind of for similar reasons to what you're talking about with these smaller fundraisers versus larger ones. You want to kind of talk about some of the thoughts behind that and how it's a parallel to these fundraising events?

21:58

Exactly. So our annual event was national in scope. We moved it around to different parts of the country, but we always had between 100 to 150 attendees. And it was, like you said, three days. We would have 20 to 25 speakers, have a big dinner, have an award ceremony. So it was a lot of fun. People really enjoyed it. It gathered a lot of people together at one time. And as we were doing it year after year, we realized this is—as a small company, as it grew, it became a big draw on our energy, a big draw on our resources, on our time. And so we thought, "Is there a way to accomplish what we're doing, meaning teaching people about the basics, the fundamentals, the foundation of fundraising and upskilling them, and then also gathering people together in community, which we know is huge to sustaining your career in this work?"

22:28

And so that's where we switched to these one-day regional workshops. So it's a much more focused conversation, a much more focused training. It's done exclusively by members of the Petrus staff. So we love having outside speakers, but this way we can coordinate much easier, we have the program. And then we, like you said, we come to you, right? So we've seen a lot of people say, "I love this format because I can take a day, maybe it's an hour drive or something like that. But if it's local," they're like, "I can do this. I don't have a hotel stay. This is very convenient."
And so what we're seeing is more people that are attending these that would not have been able to attend the national event. Also, we're seeing teams attend. So instead of one person coming, it's two, three, four, five, six people from the organization because they make it a day and it's team building. And then we're building communities. So they're meeting people locally who are doing that work. So it's been great—we tested it, right? I'm a big fan of the MVP, right? The Minimal Viable Product. You have an idea. All right, we're going to test it before we roll it out on a big scale.

22:58

We tested it in New Orleans and Notre Dame this year. We've got another one coming up in September in Denver, Colorado. And it's just, it's going really well. The feedback has been super positive. We had 25 people in New Orleans, which is very intimate and we had lots of great conversations. We had 75 in Notre Dame and that was a little bit bigger but still manageable. And so now we've added, oh gosh, we've added four more events this year before the end of the calendar year, a West Coast tour in DC and the Allentown area outside of Philadelphia, and then a West Coast tour of San Francisco or Bay Area and Los Angeles. And we've already got dates on the calendar for 2026 for regional workshops.

23:29

So it's definitely a model that we're almost kind of taking from what we're talking about from a fundraising standpoint, but we're utilizing it from a fundraising teaching standpoint as well.
Yeah, I will say kind of to draw that parallel, you would think that planning for smaller events would be almost four times as much work as planning one big event. And it really is just the opposite. I mean, for the big conference, I was busy personally and several others on our team too. Basically from October through May every year, that was one of the main things we focused on is preparing for that big event. Smaller events, there was definitely time that went into it, but nothing near that scale. And the cost for the attendees is much more manageable because the cost on our end for hosting is much more manageable. For the big conference, we had to charge $1,200 just to make it work for everybody. For these events, we're starting out at $59 per person. And you don't have to worry about travel costs as much as everybody traveling to one location, hotels, et cetera. It's just much more manageable all around. And it kind of draws that same parallel to the small events.

23:58

Yeah, and from a planning standpoint, if you're planning, like we were talking about these smaller peer-hosted events, you have a simple, kind of more informal program.

28:59

Right. And once you figure out—I mean, thinking back to it now, when I worked at St. Mary's at A&M years ago, we did this as well, a traveling—my boss called it the traveling road show. And we had a program. It was the same program, same video, same talk by Father Mike, the same appeal by Greg or myself. And it was kind of like we tested the model a couple of times. We came up with a good flow and then we were able to replicate it over and over and over again. Similar for you with the cookouts at St. Al's.

29:29

You start getting into people hosting it and you know there's gonna be nuances and changes as they—you know, this one's at a restaurant so we have to do the flow a little bit different, this one's at somebody's home so we do the flow a little bit different—but you come up with the model and then it doesn't require like restarting and replanning every year or every time. In a way, we're seeing that with our Raise regional workshops is we've got a really good flow for the content. We cover annual fund, we cover major gifts, and we do a brief talk about capital campaigns, and that flow works really well, especially for the first time that we go somewhere.
What I think we're going to see is over time, if we go—like we're going to D.C. this fall. So let's say we go to D.C. now. Well, let's say we go to D.C. back again in the future, we might have instead of the same program, we can change it up a little bit and do a deeper dive on major gifts or a deeper dive on the big six annual fund events or strategies, but it's not—it's kind of like reworking a model that then we can replicate over and over again in that model. So it just gives us a lot of flexibility. Same thing with you. If you're planning an event, I'm planning an event, you want that flexibility.

29:59

That makes sense. Good. So if you're interested in attending one of our Raise events, go to petrusdevelopment.com/raise. Like Andrew mentioned, I think it's in a couple of weeks here, September 24th will be in Denver, and registration for that will close on the 17th. So you're running out of time if you want to register for that.
And then in October, we're going to be out on the East Coast. So Allentown, Pennsylvania, which is just outside of Philadelphia on October 22nd. That'll be at Bear Creek Mountain Resort. That sounds nice. The pictures look nice. I'd like to visit there. And then Washington, D.C., a couple of days later, October 24th, just outside of D.C. at George Mason University campus ministry there.

30:28

And then in November, I'm pretty sure these dates are locked in. So we're going to announce them. And if they aren't available for registration on our website yet, they will be in the next week or so. November 17th, San Francisco at St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park. And on November 19th, again a couple days later, Los Angeles at St. Mark's Parish.
Sounds like a great lineup. Yeah, it's gonna be all over the country the next couple months here. My frequent-flyer miles are going in.
Yep, and like you mentioned, we got some dates coming up in the spring as well. We haven't quite nailed all those down yet, so we shouldn't announce them, but stay tuned for that. We may be coming to your part of the country.

30:57

And like I mentioned, $59 is the starting registration price if you register early and it goes up to $99 if you register kind of at the last minute. So get in there, register early and come join us. The learning is a big part of that day, right? You cover a lot of territory, but also just the chance to network with other semi-local Catholic fundraisers is probably one of the biggest benefits you can get.
Yeah, 100%. We had a group when we were in South Bend at Notre Dame—we had a group drive in from Chicago. There was probably about 20 of them from different parishes and different ministries. And the whole day they were, you know, maybe they knew each other, maybe they knew of each other, but the whole day they were hanging out and talking and getting to know each other. So I have no doubt when they returned back to Chicago, there were new connections made all over the place from that group. So if you can come and then you can gather other people to come with you, it's just a great way to sort of build that community and build that network.

31:27

100%. So we're running out of time here. Do you want to play a quick game before we wrap up?
Let's do it. I think last time we did the reality show. I think I nailed—I remember right, the blind ranking. Today we're going to do another kind of fun blind ranking because that's what I've got prepared. We're going to do kind of sticking with the event theme a little bit. We're going to do the best church potluck dishes. We're gonna rank them one to five. You don't know what's coming next. I'm gonna give them to you one at a time. One is the best, five is the worst. We'll see how this works out.
When we did the best beverage or best things to eat on a donor meeting, I loved that one if I remember. Yeah. When I ended up—green tea is my favorite drink of all time.
Green tea was your favorite. I'm gonna remember that for a while.

31:54

Fortunately, there's not a lot of potluck dishes that I would say that I hate. There's probably some that I like better than others, but we'll see.
Okay. Are you ready to rank these five?
"Acceptance" is what I heard in your voice there. Okay. Good. Yeah, exactly. And hopefully these are applicable. I'm sure in different regions of the country, there's different dishes. These are all ones that are common here in the Midwest. We'll see if they translate in Texas. So potluck is a common term, but I think in Louisiana, they don't say potluck, they say "covered dish." Is that right?
Oh, geez. I've never heard of that. It's like a covered dish event.

32:24

We should probably Google that to confirm. But yeah, it's just a different term. I was like, "Oh, OK, cool." Well, hopefully everybody knows what a potluck is. If not, go Google it and figure it out.
All right, number one, pasta salad. You got to start with that. Where would you rank pasta salad? There's a lot of different types of pasta salad, so it's a little bit open to interpretation there. But as a general category.
Some pasta salad I like better than others. There's some that I don't like. I'll go four.
Yeah. All right. Not the highest. Not a high priority for my space. Saving your plate space.
Yeah. Saving my spaces. Next choice. There's lots of different names for these. I'm going to give you a couple of them. I Googled this one because I've heard different names for it just around here. Some places it's called cheesy hash brown casserole, sometimes cheesy potatoes, sometimes funeral potatoes.

32:52

Okay. Where would you rank cheesy potato dish?
I like it. I've been to many potlucks where the cheese is a bit excessive and that's a little bit too much, but I don't want to put it in my five because I think you're gonna hit me with something that I'm not expecting. I'm gonna go three on cheesy potatoes.
Three. That's the wrong answer.
Wrong answer. You would go one?
One all the way. When I was in college at the campus ministry, we had six or seven old ladies who all had their own version of cheesy potatoes and they would kind of like compete for the college students' love. And man, at certain times that we would have a potluck, you'd just have a whole smorgasbord of cheesy potatoes and it was heavenly.

33:19

All right. Anyway, you've used spots three and four. So you got one, two and five left. Where would you put deviled eggs?
All right. I'm glad that I saved one and two because it's definitely going in one of those slots. Question is, does it go one? Because I really like deviled eggs. Or do you have like—what would be like the dream? Maybe like a plate of baby back ribs. Like that would, if you're going to throw something like that in there, I want to save that one spot. I'm going to go one for deviled eggs. I'm going to one.
All right. So you've used spots one with deviled eggs, number three is cheesy potatoes, number four is pasta salad. You've got two and five left. Which of those spots are you going to put potato salad?

33:48

Ah, potato salad. Well, I can't go five because potato salad is really good and I'm very rarely—am I ever going to skip potato salad if I'm walking down the table—so I'm going two.
For me, that's a time of year thing. Here in the summertime, potato salad all the way. In the winter when it's cold, potato salad just doesn't sound as good for some reason. That's like a cookout summer thing.
I can see that. I've really never experienced that cold weather potluck. It's a bit different in Texas.
Yeah, that's true. That's true.
And finally, what's going in spot number five is crock pot meatballs.
I definitely would have gone higher, but going number five.
I should have stuck something really off the wall in there. I should have had like pickled herring or something that might have thrown you off, but I was a little bit nice on this one.

34:18

Here are some of the regional variations on this—according to Claude on what people in different places call a potluck. "Covered dish," I was right, popular in the southern United States. "Dish to pass," common in upstate New York and parts of the Midwest, especially Great Lakes region. You've never heard this?
Never heard of that. I live in the Great Lakes. Great Lakes is right on my window. Never heard of that.
I hope you've heard this. "Carry in."
Yeah, like I'm carrying in a bag or a plate of food. Carry in. That makes sense. Makes me think of a dead animal.

34:47

Yeah, carry in. Yeah, it's used in parts of the Midwest, particularly Indiana and surrounding areas. Okay, now we're going. That makes sense for Indiana. Now we're going over the Atlantic. "Bring and share," more common in the UK. "Jacob's join" or "Jacob's supper," traditional term used in parts of the UK. "Faith supper," another church-related term used in southern communities. "Shared meal" or "community meal." And then "pitch in," which is used in some Midwestern areas.
Huh. I never heard most of those. I'm sure we could break down the history of all of them. That'd be an interesting podcast. Maybe next, maybe in a couple weeks.
"Covered dish" is the only one that I've heard of other than potluck. I've never heard of any of those. "Community meal," that's, you know, but interesting.

35:16

Well, there you have it. Your top five church potluck dishes. Number five, crock pot meatballs. Number four, pasta salad. Number three, cheesy potatoes. Such a terrible place. Why? Should be number one. Anyway, number two, potato salad. Number one, deviled eggs.
So I will say that on your list of five, none of those would be like, you know, number 99 on my list. If I was making a list of top 100, I would put all of those at least in the top 10 if you gave me 100 options. So I feel pretty good about that.
Yeah, I should have—we get a lot of smoked fish here in the Great Lakes region. And so that's kind of hit or miss. Some of them are really good and some of them are just nasty. If they don't debone very well and you're like eating smoked salmon and there's all the little tiny bones, that's not fun at all. That's miserable. No good. No good.

35:45

Yep. Anyway, that was a nice little fun thing to wrap up. Maybe your next small donor hosted event can be a pitch in or a carry in or...
Or a Jacob's dinner. Jacob's join. Jacob's join, sorry. Oh my.
All right. Well, anyway, that'll do it for today. So thank you everybody for joining us and we'll see you back in a couple of weeks.