I often describe September as my “Nightmare Month.” It seems as though everything has decided to start up after the Summer doldrums, and life becomes busy. Meetings are scheduled, programs restart, and traffic becomes awful ¹.

For me, personally, it means Annual Session. This is the annual gathering of the American Baptist Churches of New Jersey, for which I serve as the Communications Coordinator. I begin working on this event back in March, and it becomes an ever more ravenous consumer of my time the closer September approaches.

The process begins with a logo design, moves on to creating a language for the promotional materials, and then migrates to setting up a section for Annual Session on our web site. Once this these tasks are complete I set up our online registration and begin the promotional campaign in earnest. In mid April I’ll also create the cover for our Annual Directory.

Then the work begins.

Around late April I take the general design of the promotional materials and use it to create a custom keynote theme ². Then, in early to mid-June, we send out a call to the staff for their annual reports. These are due by the end of July for inclusion in our annual directory. We also reach out to the people who will be presenting at Annual Session and offer them the use of the projection system, provided they follow our guidelines ³. These materials are due the second week of September, but we often get them right up until the week prior to Annual Session ⁴. Once our requests are sent out, July is mostly reiterating our promotions and waiting.

August hits us like a violent wave.

Staff reports come in, and our editor and I sit down to go over the submissions. We try to keep each staff person in their own voice, but clean up grammar and punctuation ⁵. Once we go over the preliminary edits, these reports get dropped into our Annual Directory project. The edited reports are then looked over by the full-time office staff and further tweaked until they reach the status of “release candidate.” At this point some other outside readers are asked to read through things to catch stuff we have missed ⁶.

Once the staff reports are finalized, we run several reports from our database ⁷ to generate our regional directory. These are exported to PDF’s and brought into the directory project ⁸. When these reports are complete we send it to the printer to get back a proof. After proof-reading the proof ⁹, we finalize the print order ¹⁰. The aim is to have this project finalized by the end of August.

Then September drops like an anvil as materials for the presentation begin arriving in earnest. Speaker photos appear ¹¹ Presenter slides show up for inclusion into our presentation ¹². Video clips show up in a shared folder, and I work through several video projects for use in the keynote. SWAG materials need to be finalized for inclusion in the registration packets ¹³. In September the podium schedule, which is usually under revision throughout the Summer, is finalized. This schedule maps out every word that’s said from the podium ¹⁴. Once the podium schedule is complete, I use my custom Keynote theme to create the slides for Annual Session — adding in the videos, presenter slides ¹⁵, and special music ¹⁶. I’ll work on tweaking these slides sometimes until the evening before Annual Session.

The week of Annual Session I show my semi-finalized visuals to our Senior Regional Pastor, and add slides I may have missed. Once registration is closed, we fix peoples names ¹⁷, and then print out name tags. All the inserts for the registration packets are printed, the directories are delivered, and our excellent office manager gets everything set up for a massive “stuffing party.” We also finalize our sound and video needs with our AV company. On my last day in the office before Annual Session I pack all my equipment and lug it home.

The Thursday prior to Annual Session all the materials are packed into a van, and we all hope we didn’t miss anything. On Friday we have an educational event for folks, and then we go to sleep and wake up Saturday morning praying nothing explodes.

Annual Session is my annual nightmare, and September is the worst bit of said nightmare, but there’s also something cool about it. I get to see a few hundred people walking around with, enjoying, or perusing things I made. Maybe the nightmare is worth it.