Appoint a fete secretary

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Appoint a Fete Secretary

This important role of fete secretary looks after correspondence, meeting minutes and other ‘office type’ work involved in the fete’s organisation. You need someone with a good eye for detail, ideally someone with strong office, computer and organisational skills.
The fete secretary needs to be a brilliant communicator, keeping all on the committee plus significant stakeholders like school administration, up to speed on what’s happening.
Once your committee is finalised, the fete secretary should compile and distribute a comprehensive contact list, ensuring every members’ details are on the list (including email, home, work and mobile telephone numbers). Committee members need to be able to contact each other quickly and easily. I recommend using group email for issues that suddenly arise and need to be dealt with urgently.
I also advocate sub-categorising email lists — for example, fete committee, stall holders, volunteers — so that you can be specific with communication. Some fete organisers prefer a network pyramid model to forward information on but if you do go with that style, be confident no-one falls through the cracks.
The fete secretary is responsible for taking minutes at meetings, distributing those minutes to committee members and key stakeholders (such as the P&C), and preparing and distributing agendas for meetings.
The fete secretary’s role continues past fete day, ensuring thank you letters and certificates of appreciation are sent out to sponsors and stall holders and that the handover book is updated.

Go to next chapter: Appoint a fete treasurer
Go to previous chapter: Appoint a fete committee
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Originally published 16 April, 2015