From Fun To Fundraising

A Brief History of the Ghent Bar Tours

Continued from Page 1

It was thought at the time that this outing was a one-time thing. (The Virginia Beach portion of the volleyball team never came through on their half of the deal to do a crawl at the oceanfront.) But in the weeks following this first bar tour, people started talking – some about how much they liked the tour, some about how they were sad they missed it, and others about how they hoped there was another one sometime. After enough requests to do it again we said “What the heck, why not?” and planning began.

Beginnings

We knew right away that the next bar tour would be different – it had to be bigger and better in every way. So we decided to get T-shirts for everyone that participated and to cut down on costs we made plans to contact the bars ahead of time to negotiate some sort of “group discount”. We realized pretty quickly that to accomplish this we would need some budget; we would need to charge our friends a small fee for going on the tour. But we ran into some trouble figuring out how much to charge, what we would do with leftover money, and why any of our friends would pay money to us in the first place – we weren’t looking to profit off of them, just throw one kickin’ party. Then the ingenious idea was born to give the money to a charity.

The Make-A-Wish Foundation® was chosen to be the charity of choice for the bar tour thanks to head organizer Scott’s previous involvement with the organization. With their ideas and support, the event quickly scaled up to unforeseen proportions – the 2006 Ghent Winter Bar Tour was fast becoming a reality. A date was set for the last Saturday in February to avoid the beloved football season and give people something to do on a relatively dead weekend in the middle of winter. GhentBarTour.com, the official website and primary marketing tool of the bar tour events, came into being on December 1, 2005.

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