Difference between revisions of "Working Group: How to host Awesome Summit"

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=== Sponsorship ===
 
=== Sponsorship ===
 
In all fairness, didn’t go great in Seattle
 
In all fairness, didn’t go great in Seattle
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Bailouts are not a sustainable way to do business
 
Bailouts are not a sustainable way to do business
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Put together a letter talking about the summit, what the foundation is, had tiers of sponsorships
 
Put together a letter talking about the summit, what the foundation is, had tiers of sponsorships
  

Revision as of 00:48, 17 March 2016

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 Historically it’s been local businesses 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