Becca,
I was very impressed with the allocation of prizes last year!!! This year, I am ASKING Andrew to have each donor tell us the "donor value". I hope this will make your life easier, since you will know what prizes are, theoretically, equal.
The system I am envisioning will assign each prize a number, early on. From that time on, that number will be on every worksheet. So, the prizes will be our "tracking device". Each contest will have it's own worksheet. And, I hope there will be one person in charge of each contest. (They may have more than one contest, but not more than 20 prizes--with ALL their duties combined).
I suspect this will mean 5-6 people as "contest prize heads". Dawn and I will be the "fall back" in case any of these people get overwhelmed.
IF Alumilite (specifically comes to mind, not the only one) is a donor again, we should make certain all their prizes are awarded about the same time. They wanted to ship them all at once (reasonable, I guess). But that meant the lady that won their prize on Feb 5ish did not RECEIVE it until nearly March. (Not real reasonable, from her point of view). They (Alumilite) also were not real happy about having to ship one container to Europe---this again points out the difficulties of an international program. There should be either a separate prize group for Europe/Australia or a fund for shipping. Even with a shipping fund, however, the shipper has to fill out customs declarations. This is more work (and if you are dealing with the USPS, it CAN be a LOT more work) and makes some prize donors unhappy.
So, I rambled. Main point-thank God Andrew is back, we certainly look forward to having Becca's steady judgement and Dawn and I are getting ready to pass the football to a whole bunch of receivers. We stand by to "push them" over the goal line, if necessary.
(Packers just lost to Favre, what else do you expect as an analogy from Cheese country, they are in mourning!!)
