Working Group: How to host Awesome Summit

Rough Schedule

Friday

• Social events to organize people, also a travel day for some

Saturday

• All-day summit stuff
• Party

Sunday

• All-day summit
• Some sort of after-party

Things you need to run a summit:

• Places to have events
  • Main venue
  • Venue for the big party, different in style and shape than
  • Alternative places for other parties (as needed)
• People
  • Attend
  • volunteer
  • (It also helps if you have a city that people want to go to)
• Early Announcement
  • Travel and housing assistance (bulk of SEA budget was travel assistance)
• Food
  • Breakfast
  • Lunch
• Parties
• Alcohol
  • Something that can be had a parties
• Swag

Timeline

Helps if you start about 9 months in advance, getting funding assistance. The longer runway you have, the easier it is to get starters Planning events long-term is essential!

Sponsorship

In all fairness, didn’t go great in Seattle

Bailouts are not a sustainable way to do business

Put together a letter talking about the summit, what the foundation is, had tiers of sponsorships

If you want to run a summit

• Have a project manager and a schedule
• Have a bunch of people to do the work
• Would have been great: have somebody who could do scheduling and resource management
• Helps to know what people are good at

Every summit is a little smaller than before--first summit in Boston had 200, New York had 100, Ottawa had 50, Seattle had 67

Second time we ran the summit, extra day of external-to-Foundation partners, was a little weird because it wasn’t quite an Awesome thing, may be a backburner thing

Donations

MailChimp has historically donated money to help run the Summit

Historically it’s been local businesses as well--get their products in front of a group of people with a track record of spending money on things for no material gain

Chapters that are equipped to run a summit may not be equipped to fund a summit (Unsolved problem across multiple foundations)

Other options

Running a “New Philanthropy” conference on the side: happened for the New York Summit had that but it was problematic

• Winning the next summit
• Presentations to IHAS

What opportunities are there to NOT have it in North America?

• Or what about multiple summits for various countries? Stable established chapters are all in North America, for better or worse right now
• The travel assistance alone for Europe would be crippling

Timeline of Summit Preparation

9-12 months in advance

• Hey, we’re having an event!
• (The event choosing process that we have right now doesn’t really give it enough runway: what if we announced the next two bids?)
• Start asking for money and venues, follow up weekly
• Used Proximate to get the registration site up and running
• Get trustees to add their registration to the site

6 months in advance

• Everything nailed down
• Confirm travel assistance confirmation (Seattle had about 12 needing assistance)
• Travel and housing assistance can take many forms, some were PayPal sending of message
• Decide what kind of in-kind donations you might want

3 months in advance

• Start working on housing assistance
• Start booking hotels in advance

Inside of 3 months

• Not planning, executing on plan
• Designs complete, printing complete, ideally weeks in advance to avoid rush fees
• Any in-kind donations done by 2 months
• If you want things from a major brand or a local brand that has been acquired by a local brand, leadtime is helpful there
• Relationship with Kind began when they wanted to send stuff to Awesome Foundation

Two weeks out

• Food for lunch
• Take advantage of Costco memberships

Day Zero

Have the Summit!

Post-Summit

Recovery

Documents to create

1. Brands that are worth reaching out to
2. Kinds of letters sent to people

Deciding the program

• Decided partially because the exact same conversations happen in the same order almost every time
• Breakout sessions are the things that people normally want to talk about
• Having facilitators is helpful
• Think about making a bit more Unconference style with pre-filled boxes

Questions / Thoughts

• Why are we not pulling together a super-committee of Awesome Summit folks?
• Can we reach out to designers outside of the chapters, for example?
• Not everybody has been to every conference, would be helpful for people to have some knowledge
• Documenting the experience--sometimes the stuff from the conference ends up in the New Chapters Handbook
• How do we take the gems of stuff and transfer it over to the working committees?

Awesome Summit Audiences

Two audiences for Awesome Summit:

1. New people who have never been to one before
   • Approach the summit with the wild optimism of Awesome
   • Meeting new people
2. Old hands who have been to them before
   • Don’t need to go to the “what challenges to chapters face?” meetings because they’ve lived those questions before
   • Value is to see old friends, make new ones
   • Get tactical things done

Would be great to have some sort of way for people to make an opt-in to contact people

Post-mortem

Had access to the budgets, verbal communications But that was about it