We just had our Stag & Doe two weeks ago and I’m so glad it’s over. Not that we didn’t have a lot of fun, but I think the planning of it was more stressful than the wedding. So I’m hoping this will help someone else with theirs!
Stag & Doe’s are very popular where we live and almost everyone I know who gets married has one, but I know a lot of people haven’t heard of this so I’ll explain... It is basically a big party and fundraiser to help cover wedding costs. Generally you’d rent a hall for a Friday or Saturday night, hire a DJ, invite everyone you know, have games, prizes & food, then drink & dance until 1am. We aren’t having an AHR so we used this as our big party with everyone who wouldn’t be at the wedding. I did most of the planning myself, it’s usually the wedding party but ours is small (plus my MOH lives in Australia) then our family and closest friends all helped out with selling tickets and running the games.
So here’s what we did:
Tickets were $10, we sold almost 150 in advance then more people bought at the door. It was tropical themed of course so when tickets were ripped for door prizes each person was given a lei. Then they could pay $2 for Goldfish Insurance. That meant that if someone won a prize but didn’t have a fish stamp on their hand they’d have to eat a fish to get their prize. We had a big scary goldfish on display but there were actually a bunch of minnows hiding in the back.
Most people take care of their own booze for a stag & doe, buy it then have their friends run the bar. There’s more profit in it that way but it also means buying everything yourself, getting a liquor license, insurance, and being responsible for anyone leaving the hall drunk. Instead our hall ran the bar then refunded us $1 for every drink they sold that night, and rented the hall to us for $300 less than if we’d been running the bar ourselves. This drink refund basically covered the cost of the hall rental…we had 483 drinks sold.
We sold over 1000 of both 50/50 tickets and raffle tickets (10 tickets for $5). We had raffle prizes donated from friends or we used our HBC points, airmiles, shoppers optimum points & canadian tire money to get more.
Games:
There were Joker’s Wild boards on the entry table and we went through 4 by the end of the night.
Bottlecap Guess - $2 to guess the number of bottlecaps in a jar to win a Heineken Bubba. There ended up being only about 15 guesses.
Crown & Anchor – I don’t know if it was profitable but gave people something to do.
Horse Races – These were a lot of fun… It’s a poker-sized table with spaces sectioned off around it, then the horses move after a roll of the dice. People would bet on a horse based on colour then the top 2 winners move on to the finals, the winner got $100.
Stomp & Pop – at 9:30 we announced that it was balloon stomping time, and about 20 people paid $5 to tie a balloon to their ankle. When the DJ said to start you had to try to pop everyone’s balloons, last person with their balloon intact won a $50 LCBO gift card. This was fun to play and watch!
Paintball Shootout – this was our biggest moneymaker. I’d seen an idea online somewhere and joked about it to FI, who then repeated it at work…then his work people said “We’d pay a ton to shoot paintballs at you!†So we set up an area outside with lights, a girl he knows donated her old wedding dress for Adam to wear, then people could pay per ball to shoot at him.
At 11:30 we had a Toonie Toss. We bought a texas mickey of Rum and people got in line to throw/slide their toonies at it. The person whose was closest without hitting it won the bottle. I think we pretty much broke even on that one but it was nice to see someone go home with that giant rum bottle.
Our last thing was to put 2 jars out for Pie in the Face. One jar was for FI, one for me, and whoever’s jar had the most money in it by the end of the night would get a pie in the face by the other. I lost, and I’m pretty sure most of the money in my jar came from my FMIL.
Anyway, by the end of that week I was so worried that there would be either too much going on because it sounds like a lot of games or that people would be bored… but everyone really did have a good time, there were people on the dance floor all night, and as a surprise my parents brought their laptop and a projector and skyped my sister (my MOH) in so that she was "there" too. Then when it was all over we raised about $3000 to put toward the wedding!
