openswitch

So, our chicken-cue fund raiser went extremely well today. We spent $481 on chickens, the rest of the supplies were donated. We sold ~250 units (chicken, slaw, baked beans, bbq sauce) at $6 each which equated to around $1,600 total earned. That means we made roughly $1,119 profit. Not bad for 2 days work. I’m writing this article in order to lay out, as logically and completely as possible, the way to go about organizing and executing a chicken-cue on a large scale. But before I get into the ‘how’ I’d like to briefly discuss the ‘why’ of a chicken-cue fund raiser.

Why a chicken-cue?

A chicken-que is a great fund raiser idea for a church, especially in the South where barbecue rules. Sure, there are fund raisers out there that make ludicrous, even mind-blowing profits; much more profit, anyway, than a chicken-que as I’m describing here. If you’re just after money, then perhaps you might look into another means of raising funds. But I suggest that a chicken-cue is an excellent fund raiser for a church because 1. it turns a nice profit but more importantly 2. it creates an environment where church members of all ages can work side by side to accomplish a common goal.

Most fund raisers out there focus around one concept: buy a product in bulk for dirt cheap prices and then sell this product, presumably to friends relatives and neighbors, at a hugely inflated price. Fund raisers like cookies, cookie dough or soda all work like this. Each individual is responsible to sell as many of the product as possible and then the money is tallied.

But a chicken-cue, by contrast, is comprised of youth and adults (even older adults) actually making a truly great product and then selling it at only marginally inflated prices. It’s not just about making money as fast as possible. It’s about community, cooperation, and getting young people in a situation where they can literally rub elbows with the adults in the church. Deciding to do a chicken-cue as a fund raiser is much more than a means to make money, it’s a means to create community as well. In a culture where there seems to be an ever widening void between young people and older adults, this is an excellent way to bridge the gap.

How to Chicken-cue

1. Get lots of chickens

First, you need chickens, lots of ‘em. We usually sell around 250 chicken halves when we do this fund raiser. You may find that you need more or less chicken halves to make this work. It’s going to be trial and error to find the magic number.

We have a contact in our church who gets the chickens whole sale. They come already halved, gutted, de-necked and de-footed as I like to say. All we have to do to clean them is cut off some of the extra fat and make sure the insides are totally clean of stuff you don’t want to serve to guests.

2. Cook the chickens

Cooking this many birds takes a lot of time. We had two pull-behind trailer grills to cook on. They’re huge, about 3 feet by 6 feet. And it still took us 8 hours to cook all the chickens. For this number of chickens 3 trailer grills would be ideal. You must cook the chickens well! A trusted method to test whether the chicken is done is to grab and twist the leg bone with your fingers while it’s on the grill. If the bone is already free of the meat, that is, the meat has fallen off the bone, then the chicken is done. You really must make sure that the chicken is completely cooked.

Obviously, you need some way to keep the chicken hot so they don’t spoil in the 8 hours the rest of the chicken is cooking. To do this we get 8 or 10 big coolers, line them with tinfoil, and quickly put the chickens directly from the grill into the coolers as fast as possible once they’re done cooking. Then we close the lid and don’t open it again until they’re ready to serve. You would be amazed at how hot the coolers keep the chickens. When it comes time to serve be careful as you open the lid to the cooler, the steam could burn you!

3. Cook the fixin’s

The chicken is arguably the main ingredient in a chicken-cue. But it’s not the whole story. If you want a famous chicken-cue (as ours is) then you need great fixin’s. This includes excellent barbecue sauce, coleslaw and baked beans.

The most important of the fixin’s is the sauce. I’ve obtained the recipe for the barbecue sauce we make each year for our chicken-cue. It’s 100% home made and created by the famous Keith Chastain. He has made this recipe by himself, and folks, it’s the best around. At the end of this article you can download this recipe as well as the recipe for the coleslaw.

4. Serve the customers

This is the easy part. We get a bunch of clamshell take out containers and in each put a half a chicken, 1/3 cup coleslaw, 1/3 cup baked beans and then cover the chicken in sauce. Before you close the lid you put a sheet of wax paper over it all; then you close the lid. This keeps in some of the moisture and it helps keep the contents from getting out of control on the ride home.

We also tape a small thank you note to the top of the container that says something like “Thank you for donating to Southside Baptist Church youth group” or whatever. What you say isn’t so important, but a ‘thank you’ is a nice touch.

We serve our customers in a drive through fashion. They pull up, tell us how many units they want, pay us, take the containers and drive off. This means that at any given time you really need about 20 units ready to go at any given time. Don’t prepare too far in advance or else the chicken will get cold.

I suppose that if you wanted you could have a ‘dine in’ chicken-cue but this would be a lot more work. It would also mean that you’d have to supply drinks, another expense. I feel that the drive through method is the best.

5. You’re done

So, that’s basically what goes into a chicken-cue. Obviously I’ve skimmed over some details but hopefully most of what I didn’t write here will be common sense to you. If you do have any questions or would like more specific information feel free to email me: ben (at) openswitch (dot) org.

As promised, here’s the .pdf file which contains the recipe for our famous barbecue sauce as well as our coleslaw. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a recipe for our baked beans; for that you’re on your own. These recipes are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 license. Feel free to use them and reproduce them, but please remember to keep the attribution to the recipe’s creator (not me) in all reproductions. Don’t claim that you came up with it yourself. That would not only be dishonest but illegal too.

If you actually use these recipes I’d love to know about your experience! Feel free to leave a comment below and tell us what you think.

Today I spent four hours cleaning chickens. Sparing you the unpleasant details, it’s enough to know that we’re doing a fund raiser for our summer mission trip. The fund raiser is called a “chicken-cue.” It’s basically a barbecue but we only cook chicken. We create individual meal units. We make some coleslaw, baked beans and home made barbecue sauce, put it all together with half a chicken in a clamshell take out container and sell it for $6 each. We make about $3 profit per unit. We typically sell about 250 units each time we do this fund raiser. In short, we make a lot of money in a couple days time.

The thing is though, that in order to create such a large profit margin we have to do most of the work ourselves. That means buying and using raw materials whenever possible; chickens included.

Take it from me, cleaning one chicken isn’t too bad. But by the time you finish your 100th chicken you’re ready to become a vegetarian. The reality of the matter is that we as a race eat far too much meat. I don’t know who to blame or when this obsession with meat started, but I have the feeling that it’s a large contributor to my weight issues.

After spending so much time today around (easily) 500 lbs. of raw meat I’ve decided that I’m going to significantly cut back on my meat intake. More vegetables, more legumes, more starches. Not only will it be good for me, but it’ll be good for the environment too.

Copyblogger has given us a lot of good things. Hell, you don’t get over 15,000 subscribers by schlepping out sub-par content. I’ve learned a lot from reading the entries Copyblogger publishes. They’re interesting, engaging, and more often than not tell me something I don’t know. That said, Copyblogger has inadvertently contributed to a plague among bloggers: title-itis.

Now, everyone knows that a good entry title is essential, there’s no doubt about that. Blogs like Copyblogger have done a great job getting the blog-oh-sphere to pay more attention to its titles; giving them the TLC they so heartily deserve. But I fear that we bloggers have taken this advice too far. Everywhere I look, blog titles are all starting to look the same, they’re running together into one big hodgepodge of sameness. “X ways to accomplish Y goal”, “B things that will ruin C”, and so on and so forth.

Folks, the point of what Copyblogger and others are trying to get across is that you need to make your titles interesting and descriptive. Examples were given to illustrate the point, but they were not trying to give you a formula for creating entry titles.

In a world where everyone wants to know the secret formula to success, be it whatever field you find yourself interested in, we have lost ourselves. Success is not about doing what everyone else is doing, it’s about finding your own beat, your own drummer. Note that Copyblogger also has a lot of articles on improving your content. Yet I see far fewer people cranking out good content and far more people with samey-looking titles. Improving your entry titles is easy, quick and sometimes effective. Improving your content, however, is hard and slow. But unlike a witty entry title, great content will always be effective. Hence, we should focus more on content than titles.

Be different! Sure, write exciting blog titles, use formulas if you want also, but keep in mind that even the most interesting entry title can’t compensate for bad content. An eye-grabbing title may get people to knee-jerk click to your blog, but if then, they find lackluster content they’ll just as quickly click away to the next shiny object.

Obviously, the best combination is to have a great title and great content. That’s the magic bullet, if you will. But, speaking for myself, I can’t always find that special connection between title and content. In those cases, however, I would much rather have engaging, thought provoking content rather than a shiny title.

If I were to compare titles and content to a river one would be shallow, wide and fast running. The other would be narrow, deep and slow moving.

By all means, work on writing more interesting titles. But two pieces of advice from my humble keyboard: 1. don’t write ‘formula titles’. Be interesting, be engaging, but don’t be a ‘cookie cutter blogger.’ 2. don’t focus so much on titles that you neglect your content and vice versa.