Tag Archives: MGCI

Community Events – From Tasks to Roles

We recently had a MGCI training and office hours session (will update w/links – likely need to be a MGCI member to view) on Committee Roles and Responsibilities. Sharon did a wonderful job providing slides to kick off discussion. 

A few years ago, I posted thoughts around the subject from the perspective of the event we run locally in Minnesota: Original Building a Team post.

Not a lot has changed on our event team, but let’s switch things around a bit and focus more on typical tasks for each event. How you choose to define roles around those tasks changes from organization to organization and depends on the skills and interests of the folks you assemble. 

My #1 recommendation is still: Don’t go it alone.

*Could* you do everything? Maybe, but it’s not fun or good for your mental health. Start with the basics. Find a crew of peers, coworkers, like-minded community members, whatever it takes to get rolling (it may take a few event iterations to get the right mix). Early events don’t need to be super polished productions; they just need to deliver content to folks. 

Then take a peek at the Organizer’s Checklist (will add link when available… MGCI site migration in progress…), work through a list of tasks and see if you have the folks to do what needs doing and evolve your team as needed. It’s an opportunity to do and try new things. You don’t need to be experts. It’s a great time to stretch and grow. 

Consult with MGCI Regional Leads or other event organizers to figure out how to start lean… what you can skip, where you can get away with less… Then build from there. 

Also keep in mind that tasks could be grouped by *when* they happen as well. You’ll have a significant set of tasks before the event – planning and preparing. You’ll obviously have specific things happening the day-of your event. And there will be a number of follow-up tasks (Don’t drop the ball on these…) 

With that, here are roles, tasks, and (maybe rambling…) commentary: 
Note: As we mentioned during the office hours, the following list is neither fully comprehensive nor are all the tasks required for every event.  

  • Sponsor coordination – Activities related to funding the event via sponsors.
    • Determine sponsorship levels/packages, pricing, and what’s included. – Don’t do this in a vacuum.
      • Get an understanding of what other groups are charging and providing.
      • Talk to prospects and partners to find out what they need or want from partnering with you as a sponsor.
    • There’s a sales component to the role as you are selling sponsorships.
      • Lots of angles on how to build the network – as someone already in the community with connections or finding ways to build new connections.
    • Work with communications folks on getting the word out, email blasts, etc.
    • Before, during, and after the event you or others will need to tend to the sponsor relationships and needs to make their experience successful.
    • Follow up post-event. Might be via email, conversations, and/or surveys. It’s important to thank sponsors as well as find out what worked, what didn’t, what could be done to improve, and how sponsors feel about the value they got from the experience.
  • Speaker coordination – Activities related to finding and organizing speakers and the sessions they’ll deliver.
    • Manages the Call for speakers
      • Familiarity with call for speaker tools like Sessionize or Run.events.
    • Communications to prospects, folks accepted as speakers, and those that were not picked.
    • Before, during, and after the event you or others will need to tend to speaker relationships to enable them to be successful delivering their content.
      • If you are including and encouraging new speakers, someone will need to spend time with them as mentors. This can be the coordinator, peer speakers, or other community folks that want to help. (e.g. We have a local Power Point MVP that is a great resource…)
    • Follow-up post event for feedback.
    • Coordinate and manage speaker gifts. Effort here varies with how many speakers you have and what you’re doing for a gift, if it needs to be personalized, etc.
  • Web and content management. This could be one person or several as there are a number of possible end points and tools to use.
    • Sessionize and Run.events – These have a lot of speaker management but aren’t limited to speakers and sessions. Throughout the course of the event a number of things need to be set up, maintained, or cleaned up after the event.
    • Community Days – Initial request and configuration, integration with other tools, content updates, and more.
    • Event site – If you have a separate website used “off-season” there will be updates throughout the process – keeping information consistent with other platforms and with link updates.
    • Social media – These might fall under a social media, marketing, or communications role but needs to be maintained throughout prep, day-of, and post event.
      • There will be specific bursts of activity here: Event announcement and launch, as the event approaches, communications during the event, and timely follow-up (availability of slides/recordings, follow-up surveys, etc.)
  • Food coordination – It might be as easy as snacks and as complicated as multiple meals throughout the day… The following could be delegated to different folks as needed.
    • Some venues require working with on-site food providers. This requires selecting menus, quantities, timing, etc.
    • Could require providing information to attendees on where to find food on-site or nearby.
    • If bringing food on-site the effort requires transportation and timing preparations. As attendee numbers go up, make sure your vendor can meet expectations.
    • Coordinate need for food helpers (might work with a volunteer coordinator) to direct attendees, manage special meals, set up, clean up, and more.
    • Speaker dinners – Locate a venue. May need to set menu choices, arrange drink tickets, understand spend minimums, arrange payments and tips, etc.
  • Venue coordination – Works with venue contacts (event coordinator, IT, food service, security, etc.) as you consider venues and work through the details to pull off a successful event at their venue.
    • Manage contracts, insurance, and payments.
    • Manage rooms and room sizes.
    • Understand what facilities are included (how many tables and chairs, AV equipment, etc.), require extra payments (table covers, etc.)
    • Day-of (or prep time the night before) activities might include setting up signage, room prep, cleanup, etc. and can be delegated to other volunteers
  • Session / Speaker selection – This is usually a group. There are lots of interesting directions this could go (attendee/community “board” input would be intriguing but might be touchy too).
    • In many cases, a group of folks on the event organizing team
    • Speaker coordinator organizes and delivers submitted session abstracts
    • Decide if you’re making choices with/without knowing who the speakers are to avoid bias
  • Volunteer coordination. – Find them, schedule them, assign them, manage them.
    • Work with leadership team to determine staffing needs and requirements
    • Good single point of contact for organizers when they need help with something
  • Project manager (optional – usually one of board/leaders)
  • Communication (promotion and engagement), Marketing, branding, graphic design – could be multiple people and tasks could be broken out…
    • Develop a brand
    • Create logos and graphics that will be used for social media, signage, stickers, etc.
    • Work with/as communications folks
    • Can you tell this isn’t my area of expertise? Connect with Emily Mancini and her Community Day Miami crew!
  • Organization
    • Finances / budget – Make sure you’re working within the $$ you’re able to raise! Keep track of where you’re spending so you can adjust where needed for future events.
    • Legal, non-profit, contracts –
      • You’ll likely need a business entity (non-profit or not) to manage money
      • If you want to create a non-profit organization, you’ll need some legal work done
      • There will be ongoing needs to work with contracts (venues, food vendors, and more…)
  • Event Volunteers
    • Registration – Staff the desk. All day(?) Be engaging with attendees, collect info from unregistered folks, and be helpful!
    • Signage – How to get to the space. Get around the space. Identify rooms and room schedules
    • Day-of helpers/pointers (“where is…”)
    • Room helper – A/V, logistics
    • Assemble bags/registration packets
    • Set up help – other
    • Room counters – count attendees in each room during each time block
    • Timers – check rooms at end of session time to cue speakers as needed to wrap it up and stay on schedule…
  • Gifts buyer
    • attendee giveaways (keep folks around until end of day)
    • Speaker gifts
    • May also corral vendor/sponsor giveaways
  • Swag tasks:
    • Source items (4imprint, etc.)
    • Work with your designer for any graphics required
    • Purchase/order
    • Verify
    • Distribute
  • “SharePint” (Happy Hour) organizer (VERY optional) – Where? When? Do you have a sponsor or funding to provide a round? Be aware of liability issues… Our event/community hasn’t done one in a while but as we’ve to Friday events maybe we need to revisit the concept.

Take-aways from the Teams meeting conversation: I will be changing my role title to “Event Instigator”. 🙂

Hope you found something useful in there. Let me know what you think!

crop woman filling calendar for month

Community Events – Choosing a Date

No, I’m not talking about choosing a person to attend an event with – though I suppose that perspective could also apply… Now I’m wondering if anyone’s ever met a significant other at a technical community event. I digress.

I’m talking about choosing the date you’re going to host an event. It sounds easy, doesn’t it? Looking at checklists and documents about how to spin up events makes picking a date look easy. It’s a simple task, a single item on that task list. Unfortunately, it’s rarely as simple as you’d hope.

Note: I’m talking primarily about in-person events. Some points here will still apply to hybrid and online/virtual events as well, but the main focus is in-person events.

Choosing a date can be simple. If you limit external factors as much as possible, you can keep things as simple as that. Pick the date. Put it on the calendar. What’s next?

It’s also easy to fall into “analysis paralysis” – trying to consider all the options to find the “perfect” date. Well, there isn’t one. Get over that now. As with many of the choices you’ll be making along the event planning path, you won’t be able to please everyone. But you can do your best to balance the factors you control.

With that, let’s look at some of the factors, impacts, and variables to consider when choosing a date for your event.

Lead Time

Make sure you’re planning far enough out for you to get all your tasks done without too much stress. Speakers need time to submit and create presentations. You’ll need time to pick speakers and sessions. You’ll need time to get sponsors. Sponsors need time to figure out staffing, travel, swag and more. Swag needs time to coordinate and get ordered. There’s a lot to do. Make sure you leave your team enough time to do it well.

Day, or Days, of the Week

When we were doing “SharePoint Saturdays”, the day of the week was a given. Years later that’s still our go-to day, but there are definitely reasons to look at other options as well – especially with the push for work/life balance not cutting into personal time (weekends). Most business and technical conferences are during the week. Now, there are plenty of community groups hosting events during the work week. It’s a legitimate option to consider. I suspect that the audiences for weekends and audiences for weekdays might be slightly different as well. Something to consider.

Along similar lines, are you going to run a single-day, or multi-day event? While I’ve primarily run single-day events, I’m confident that multi-day events add a whole new batch of variables and multipliers…

Your Team

I’m not saying that the planning team is top priority over attendees, speakers, and sponsors – but it’s definitely got to be a consideration. These are the folks that put in all the work, want to be at the event, and motivated to make it successful. So, you want a date where most, if not all, can be there. This is one of the few places where having a larger team can work against you a bit. The larger the planning and organizing team, the more schedules you have to juggle.

Potential Venues

Plenty of factors to consider when selecting a venue. Maybe we’ll tackle that in another post. Venue availability is one you need to consider when choosing a date. We usually come up with a few date options, then start having a conversation with the venue contact to see which dates work, which don’t, and which might have other things to consider… like other events, construction projects at the venue, staffing availability, etc. Keep them in the loop as you progress towards a date.

Some venues, like technical and community colleges, may work for weekend events but not weekday events.

Community Events

Keep an eye out for other community events on the calendar. Events like yours (Community Days, etc.) as well as first party (Microsoft Build, Ignite, etc.) and third party (365 EduCon, M365 Conference, etc.) events will draw attendees, speakers, and sponsors to their events and directly impact your event. You might want to give some events even more space on the calendar if it has travel impacts as well. Regular travelers like speakers and sponsors need a break too.

Do you have other similar groups that host events locally? Coordination between groups can go a number of ways. You might want to put buffer time between similar events and plan connections with others. For example, it might be convenient to have your full-day event the same week as a monthly user group meeting as it may allow out of town speakers or sponsors to visit both.

Local and Regional Events

Do you have other groups in your area that have overlap with your topic area or audience? Are there other things happening in your area that might impact attendance?

In Minnesota we have things like the State Fair that would definitely impact our event if we overlapped with them. Do a quick check to see if there are general happenings you don’t usually consider that overlap with potential dates. Think outside the box. Do some searches. Lean on your planning team with different backgrounds. One year we accidentally overlapped with the University of Minnesota’s Homecoming game. Whoops.

Holidays and National Events

Avoiding traditional national holidays seems pretty obvious, but also consider other national or religious holidays and events. For example, stay away from Super Bowl weekend. Once again, leverage the diversity of your planning team and audience to consider holidays or other impacts outside of your personal experiences.

The broader the scope you consider, the more impacts you’ll find so balance what impacts your event and which variables you might need to decide to lessen in your calculations.

Your Audience

Yep, you need to consider your audience. 🙂 This might not be high on your list when first starting an event because you’re just starting to figure them out and will be excited for whoever you can get to attend. But as you have more events over time, you will come to know your target audience a bit and understand how their needs impact your event planning. You’ll likely find some will only attend on weekends or weekdays. You might have different sub-audiences to consider. In our case we have fairly distinct groups/roles that attend, and they each have their own preferences. If you switch days of the week, you might find you lose some regulars, but gain a whole new crowd of folks.

Weather

Obviously, you can’t plan for specific weather. I live in Minnesota. Winters can be harsh and unpredictable often making folks less interested in leaving home or traveling if weather is threatening. Summers are so valued that folks won’t give up their free time – so planning events during the summer definitely impacts attendance. With all this in mind, we tend to schedule our events during the “shoulder seasons” in Spring and Fall.

Speakers and Sponsors

Many of the variables listed above may also impact your selection and availability of speakers and sponsors. Religious holidays may make them unavailable. Larger conferences may pull both speakers and sponsors. You might need to allow for travel between your event and other events.

Whew. Seems like a lot, doesn’t it? Don’t let it scare you. Figure out what works for you, which considerations have larger or smaller influence on your event, and make the call. The world is too big and busy for you to not have any conflicts. Find your balance and get the event on the calendar so you can get the content out there that your audience needs.

Now What?

Once you’ve chosen a date, and if you qualify for Community Days, get your event added to the public calendar so others can use it when considering their planning. It’s also important and useful to get your event registered there for lots of other reasons (yet another post…).

Am I missing anything you can think of? Let me know.

References

room chair lot

Build a Team to Organize Community Events

Don’t go it alone.

Technically, sure, you can do it. But don’t. It’s not worth the pain, frustration, stress, and anxiety.

If you’ve got a desire to produce an educational event for a community, there are a lot of details to pull together to be successful and managing those tasks requires a lot of time and energy. So, before you dig into that task list, build your team.

Building a team not only distributes the workload, but has the potential to bring diversity of thoughts, perspectives, and ideas – all contributors to more successful outcomes.

Our event – M365TC

I’ve been a part of local events for years. The one I’m most involved with is M365 Twin Cities, formerly a SharePoint Saturday event. For a bit of context, before COVID we were running two events a year with 300-500 attendees. Details about our most recent event: M365 Twin Cities Winter 2023 by the Numbers – Wes Preston (idubbs.com).

Our current organizing team has six members, though we’ve had as many as eight people involved. There are countless ways to spread out responsibilities. You’ll likely find that assignments can align with team members’ skills, though roles may also evolve over time. Each person brings their own skills, experience, and strengths. Leverage what you can, grow the skills you don’t have, and lean on other folks in your community or the broader community when you can or need to (see info below about MGCI).

The following is an example of how an event team could delegate tasks and roles. It’s just an example of how our team does it, not necessarily a model for everyone.

  1. We have a person that manages sponsorships – They determine sponsor levels, assemble documentation and materials, communicate with sponsors running up to the event, connect with sponsors the day of the event, and following up with them after the event.
  2. We have a person that manages speakers – They organize the call for speakers, coordinate and moderate the speaker selection process (a group of as many of our organizing group as we can get together), manage communication with speakers, coordinate speaker gifts, post session details and assemble the agenda, pull together and distribute speaker and session feedback, and more.
  3. We have a person that coordinates food for the event, pulls together a speaker dinner, and orders all of our swag.
    Preparing the food requires talking with potential vendors, pricing out options, coordinating delivery, and more all to keep our attendees fed. The speaker dinner requires coordinating the location, menu, invites and RSVPs.
    Event swag varies event to event but involves selecting items, managing timelines, and more.
    Note: Sounds like a lot of for one person, and it is. These could easily be delegated to three separate folks, but we’ve been lucky to have this person around for years and she’s got it all figured out.
  4. We have a person that does all the money and legal stuff. It’s a short description, but pretty specific and requires its own experience.
  5. We have someone that coordinates our venue – Finding the venue when we need to move, communicates with the venue host, handles contracts, maps and materials for the event and signage for attendees to get around, and more. Details here include what rooms, resources, and staff are needed and available for the event. They typically coordinate set up and tear down, putting up a giant session “wall” (agenda for the day by room), communications for the team during the event, and AV for keynotes, opening, and closing sessions.
  6. We have a volunteer coordinator that figures out what we’ll need help with, comes up with a plan, and organizes a call for volunteers prior to the event. During the event she wrangles all the volunteers, sets up and staffs the check in desk for attendees.

Don’t let the number of words or the length of the descriptions above fool you either. This doesn’t capture everything we end up doing. We all have our hands full. Our team is pretty flexible, so there are often responsibilities that jump from one person to another as time and availability dictate. There are all sorts of variations out there on how to run an event, where to invest your time, and more. This is just one example.

The main point is, there’s a lot of work to do and having a team in place helps spread the work around without (hopefully) overwhelming any one person. You have to divide to conquer. Build a great team.

Microsoft

In the Microsoft space, the Microsoft Global Community Initiative is working to make organizing Microsoft community events easier by providing tools and resources for leaders to put on successful events. Keep an eye on MGCI as this effort matures, grows, and more resources become available to help you be successful.

Note: I was recently named a Regional Leader for MGCI. What does that mean? Stay tuned… 🙂

References