How do I host a dinner?

Your dinner is an opportunity to express yourself:

• You can prepare an elegant meal for your guests.
• You can just order pizza or takeout.
• You can call it a potluck and make your guests do the cooking.
• You can even scrap the dinner party idea altogether and host a lunch, a brunch, or an entirely non-meal-related event such as a cocktail hour.

The point is to bring together friends to have a good time and support Obama; you decide the best way to make that happen.

That said, please review our keys to hosting a successful dinner. It's a lot of information — but if you're making the effort to plan and host a dinner, it's well worth your time to review this list.

• As soon as you've picked a date, create your dinner so others visitors to our site know that you're planning to host. You can always go back and edit the dinner details later. With every new scheduled dinner that appears on the list, the buzz about Hungry for Obama grows — and that can only help Obama's chances in November.
• Invite guests! Convince friends and family to join the Hungry for Obama movement and ask them to make the two key commitments: contributing to the Obama campaign at your dinner and then hosting their own dinners. We recommend a personal touch: you'll have more luck if you contact potential guests individually instead of sending out mass emails. Face-to-face conversations and phone calls are most effective, but feel free to adapt the text from this sample email and send it to friends.
• Consider asking your employer about matching the contributions made at your dinner.
• Whenever you get a confirmation, use the "Add a guest" link on your dinner page to add your friend to the official guest list. If you're co-hosting the dinner with others, you can add them as hosts using the "Add a host" link.
• In the days leading up to your dinner, remind your guests to start planning their own dinners. The eventual total impact of your dinner — and of Hungry for Obama as a whole — depends largely on the ability of guests to execute a very quick turnaround and host their own dinners within days of attending a dinner.
• At your dinner — before anyone makes a contribution — take a minute to welcome the guests and to reiterate the commitments that they've made to you and the broader goals of Hungry for Obama:
  1. Ask your guests to make a personally meaningful contribution to the campaign. The recommended contribution is 100, but feel free to make your own recommendation that's more appropriate to the group of people at your dinner. Be sensitive to the financial limitations of your guests, but by no means should you be shy about encouraging them to give as generously as they can. A decent rule of thumb to determine what constitutes a meaningful contribution is to take your annual income and divide by 500: if you make $50k, give $100; if you make $25k, give $50; if you make $100k, give $200.
  2. Remind your guests to host their own dinners as soon as possible. If any of them have already set dates for their own dinners, ask them to go ahead and register the dinners on the website.
  3. Encourage your guests to contact friends and family — especially those living in other places — and convince them to join Hungry for Obama too.
• Provide a laptop that guests can pass around the table and use to make contributions by clicking the "Make a contribution to this dinner" link on your dinner page. The contribution totals will be updated every hour, but you can initiate an immediate update by signing in and clicking the "Update contribution stats" button on your dinner page.
• Important note: A guest does not need to be signed in to her account — or even be registered as a guest yet — to make a contribution, but she must use the link on your dinner page. If a guest makes a contribution without using this link, it will not be automatically counted toward your dinner's fundraising total. Please make sure this is clear to your guests.
• Another note: when each guest clicks through to the official Obama site using the "Make a contribution to this dinner" link, the form may already contain the name and address of the previous guest to use the computer. This is not an error — it's simply an auto-fill feature of the Obama site that happens to be unhelpful in this case. The guest currently on the computer should simply erase the previous contributor's information and fill in her own.
• If any of those in attendance have not yet been added to the dinner or have failed to confirm their status as confirmed guests, their names will not appear on the publicly visible guest list. Ask them to use the "Add myself as a guest" link on the dinner page.
• You're done! Sit back and watch the total impact number on your dinner page grow!