How to Plan for Your Chapter’s First Year
The CreativeMornings/Ghent team poses for a photo at their first event. Photo by Martín Corlazzoli
While you’re planning your chapter’s first event, you’re also simultaneously building the foundation for all the events that will follow the launch in the future. To build a strategy for your chapter’s first year, focus your efforts in these key areas:
Get familiar with CreativeMornings’ tools and process
Get familiar with CreativeMornings’ tools and process
In addition to starting to use your chapter’s accounts, saying hello in Slack, and setting up your city page, take time to get acquainted with CreativeMornings’ ticketing and messaging systems — you’ll be using these tools every month.
Before your first event, you and your team will need to know:
Build a volunteer team
Running a CreativeMornings chapter is best accomplished as a team. When building your team [LINK to this section of the Getting Started Guide], you’ll want to focus on the most essential roles, including a photographer, videographer, co-host and event-day volunteers. As your chapter grows, you are, of course, welcome to add and customize roles as you see fit.
Plan ahead
To avoid scrambling, set yourself up for success by planning your events a few months ahead of time. This includes lining up speakers, partners, and venues. To do this, look at the upcoming themes and start planning out your event calendar. Then, you may find it helpful to create a corresponding content calendar for social media posts, email reminders, and follow-ups to your attendees.
Secure local partners
At CreativeMornings, we prefer the word “partnership” rather than “sponsorship” because we believe in a collaborative approach. Building relationships with partners is an ongoing process. To get started building a partnership strategy, calculate costs, start gathering insights about your audience, research potential partners’ brand fit, and pick a partnership model, such as paid tiers or in-kind. Then, start pitching potential partners. You’ve got this!
Photo from CreativeMornings/San Diego
Plan for a smooth event day
For inspiration, here’s a sample timeline:
- 7:00 am: Volunteer team arrives at venue and sets up (breakfast, coffee, decorations, check in areas, test audio-visual equipment)
- 8:00 am: Line forms
- 8:30 am: Doors open. Attendees check in and fill out icebreaker tags.
- 8:30–9:00 am: Attendees enjoy free breakfast and coffee
- 9:00–9:10 am: People get seated. The host thanks global partners, local partners, and volunteers, then introduces the speaker.
- 9:10–9:30 am: Speaker delivers a 20-minute talk
- 9:30–9:40 am: Q&A
- 9:40–10:00 am: Attendees mix and mingle
- 10:00 am: Time to close up and clean up
Resources:
- Sample partnership outreach emails
- How to create an event page
- How to message attendees
- How to check in attendees the day of the event.
- Upcoming themes