Why should my team write a blog Blogs represent authority. Its overall power comes from the evergreen interactive nature of the posts. Blogs enable you to communicate with your readers (aka potential audience members and gig creators) quickly and efficiently. The most important aspect of communicating through a blog is that it is two-way interaction if you set it up to be so. Each blog can lead off of the previous and you can make quick adjustments based on the feedback you r

Create the Professional Sometimes the first impression that you will give to prospective event planners, financial supporters and possible new recruits is going to be a video presentation that shows off your abilities. Too often, especially with ministry team videos, the ball gets dropped somewhere; there is a contentment to just throw together straight footage that looks very lackluster at best and unprofessional at worst. I always say when videotaping a performance, try to

Let Your Creativity Flow I am a big proponent for teams to come up with their own concepts, scripts, and programs for two reasons. The first is the financial factor involved. It is so easy to spend a fortune to get permission to use other people’s material. The second is because is gets the creative juices of the group to flowing and helps pull the team together when they are racking their brains to come up with ideas and creating the script around their characters as opposed

Get Your Name Out There Marketing is often confused with sales. Though there is a clear connection between the two, marketing is the actual act of drawing attention to one’s self or one’s product. Marketing is and will be a continually ongoing process for your puppet team. How you present yourself is marketing, how you look at events is marketing, how you project yourself on the phone to potential venue directors is marketing. Every team member should be required to always pr

Let It Glow, Let It Glow, Let It Glow Black light shows have almost become a standard with puppet performance, so much so that there is now a market just for black light performance. Black light can be used in a number of different ways and add effects that are difficult, if not impossible, to recreate any other way. Every professional puppet team should have some level of black light performance in their arsenal of productions. In writing this post, it has been brought to my

You will find that the way your lighting and sound are set up can sometimes make or break a performance. Here are some tips that will get you going in the right direction from the start. I only wish that I had someone savvy in these areas when I first started out. Hopefully you have access to some professionals of whom you can pick their brains. About the Sound Chances are that you will rarely, if ever, find yourself in a situation where just using your voice and a portable C

The Kit “Hope for the best, plan for the worst.” In a perfect world, nothing ever goes wrong, the mics never go dead mid performance, the props never break, the cds never get scratched, etc. but in the real world, as the saying goes, “what can go wrong will go wrong” so prepare for it. Back Up Everything Everyone knows that CDs get scratched, misplaced, and cracked. I have seen a computer literally shatter a disk in the disk drive. So the first thing that you want to have in

These are the things that will make you exude professionalism to the people in charge of the venue you will be performing at as well as the audience. Promptness “Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.” - William Shakespeare Being prompt goes hand-in-hand with accountability. Being reliable is important to the team, to the leadership of the team, and to those that the team will be serving. As a leader It is extremely important if you are on the leadership of your

The Performance So, now it’s performance time and you have everything organized and under control. Yes? No? Well, I hope this blog post will help you answer that question with certainty. I always suggest that, along with having a detailed program together (which I will get into later) that you never do a performance before having a minimum of five to six practices with a full-on professional quality run through. The last two practice performances should be exactly like you wo

Make It Original, Make It Yours Developing Set puppet characters can be a fun way to get and keep team members involved. For them to know that the character they do is their character and no one else can do it gives them a sense of pride and responsibility to the team. I always suggest that every team member create a character; whether they use it or not. This will really come in handy when the team does return engagements and uses a set character because audiences will know