Course content
2010
What did we put into the training packs I hear you ask?
After much deliberation and many different drafts of the documents we decided, the best place to start was .... yeah, at the beginning.
Working in the voluntary sector is totally different to organising the likes of the Scottish Learning Festival. The budgets can be negligible, the venues varied, the audience totally diverse.
So we stripped it all back to basics. What is an event? What does it involve? Why put a plan together?
To get the brains thinking, the first exercise was a group activity where we asked the delegates to think about an event they had organised or attended and what they thought were the key tasks involved in organising such an event.
Where do you start when you are asked to organise an event? Logistics. Think of your 5w’s and discuss all your options. Gather your team, decide which position best suits each member in the team and delegate tasks accordingly.
There is no point in asking someone to be the role of AV co-ordinator if they do not know the first thing about AV!
Get to know the team and then offer roles that best suit each person's talent, knowledge or experience. Until they become confident then it's important not to take them too far out of their comfort zone.
They should be willing and able to take on the tasks required of them irrespective of the type of event and, as they become involved in more events and see what other tasks are required, they may then look to try their hand at something else.
There are many different job roles to consider within an events team from the Events Director to the Administration Team Leader and the VIP Liaison official. The job titles aren't important it's the tasks associated with the role and how these relate to the rest of the events team.
We provided a series of job specifications to the group to consider in one of the exercises and to refer back to at a later date, not every person is going to be in the same role for each event after all.
Each person was asked which job role they would like and why they thought they were best suited to that specific role then, as a group, they were asked to discuss and decide if there were any other important roles they felt were needed within their events team. Health and Safety officer and people to go around with donation buckets immediately sprung to mind.
We then moved on to Venues where the team had to think about the questions to ask when selecting appropriate venues.
Using some of the resource pack checklists, they were able to identify the information required to make informed decisions about different venues, how one may be better suited to a particular audience and event setup.
So what better way to explain this than to give the group different scenario’s to work through? How to organise a Youth Film Festival, International Women's Day, a Public Meeting to consider the Local Authority's Regeneration, an Employability Forum.
Different Audiences. Different Outcomes. Same skills required.
Throw in some hints'n'tips along the way, ask how they would deal with some unexpected challenges and finally ask them the first question of the day again. What they thought were the key tasks involved in organising an event. This time the group came up with a very similar list of the 'must do' tasks.
But although the training pack was 30 pages full of information, with hints and tips on how to organise your own event it was the resources pack that almost filled an arch lever folder.
But that is another story for another blog I think.
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