Events Marketing and Production - Mastery Journal
When it comes to hitting my original objective for this month’s course, I feel I hit it squarely. The Course Goal on my Timeline stated that I wanted to understand all it takes to run public and digital events, such as press conferences and web chats, and we did that this entire month in the form of a live event. We had to design, write, and present a live online webinar, which is similar to a press conference in that you can take questions from attendees. Getting through my first webinar really helped make it easier to do others in the future. From designing slides that are engaging, to writing a script, to practicing my presentation, learning how to communicate to my publics via an online event is an incredibly powerful tool to use.
Another useful too that will be of the utmost importance is the Event Proposal. This month we had to assemble a hypothetical Event Proposal that had my client, illustrator Tim Tyler, attending a live Wizard World comic book convention in Orlando, Florida. The proposal included topics such as the Venue it is being held in, the entire Budget to get him there and home again, a Promotional Plan, a Program showing what he’ll be doing every day at the event, an Evaluation in the form of a questionnaire to determine if his time spent there was productive, and an Inspiration Board to motivate Tim to use the event to his advantage. This was such a big help for me, because I used to attend these types of conventions myself, but I was never organized and had a plan to work it to it’s full potential. If you follow an Event Proposal, you should be busy and productive the entire show, and it should be able to grow your fan base and get attendees to stay in contact with you online.
We also studied crowdfunding on the site, GoFundMe.com. I learned that if a person is well prepared to be an active participant in his crowdfunding efforts, he will be rewarded not only by reaching his money goals, but by receiving a bigger “push” from the host website (GoFundMe.com). I looked at several of those fundraising pages and could find out what made them succeed or fail. It usually came down to not having a video or more photos to inject some personality in the project, or that fundraisers didn’t show they were going to spend the donated money once they got it. Keeping people involved in the project is extremely important here.
The only troubles I had this month were technical; otherwise, I seemed to grasp everything pretty well. I used FreeConferenceCall.com for my webinar, and it had audio and video issues at first. I ended up just using my slides and a photo of myself, instead of showing a live feed. Once I had stopped trying to use the video, the audio stopped cutting out and greatly improved. It was probably my location and connection that caused the problem. Overall, it was another fantastic month that gave me loads of new and productive tools to help me later!
