On the 4th of December, we carried out the Christmas Market event at Brookes University. Even though there were many obstacles to overcome and unexpected changes at the end, the event was still a success. We received some great feedback from vendors and our client, Brookes Union.
At the beginning of the planning stage, we all contributed many ideas that we could do for the Christmas Market in which 2-3 pages were filled. The decision making of the whole group went surprisingly well as we started to cut down on the ideas and assessing the feasibility of them. However, as time went on, the communication between the groups and with the Union was inadequate. There were some confusions with who was in charge and who was emailing who. I myself, experienced that issue with the union as mentioned in the last post. I learned communication is key in event planning.
Another problem we all came across was the confirmation of event content. When we started off, we were all stuck (especially marketing) as we had no confirmation of what vendors and entertainment were joining us. This made it difficult to market the event as we did not want to false advertise it. It also affected the operations side of it, such as the floor plan. I think as a result, the execution of the 3 separate areas; Piazza, Forum and Union Bar, were not as connected as it could have been.
Marketing
The team I was in had clear roles assigned, I was on the social media role. However, I felt that the workload was slightly unbalanced in terms of each team member. There was one member who took the lead, 2 who helped out wherever they could and 2 who just emailed Isaac for visuals. Nearing the end, I told Maddie (who was also on social media) that I could do social media on my own because she also had other roles in the group. I felt like I could do more so I offered my help to other team members. As commented on before, the content confirmation was quite near the event, around 2 weeks before. We already had a draft of the visuals but the final piece and printing took us a week to do. Thus, social media content only went up less than 2 weeks before and posters less than one week before.
Furthermore, I ended up collecting the print work and hanging them around campus just a couple days before the actual event. I tried to cover all areas and handed out some flyers, however, I did not expect it to be that time consuming. Thus, I gave the print work to two other members the next day to finish off. They told me I covered most of it, which was quite a relief as I thought I missed many areas. I assumed that they would keep on giving out flyers, however, they did not do this. This is where communication comes into play again as I should have checked if they were giving out more flyers. On the day of the event they gave the flyers back to me and I stood outside with 2 others to hand them out, one of them being in the marketing team and one in vendors. Whilst I was doing this, I felt like it was no use by this time as they would see the market inside in the forum already. We stopped shortly after because many were turned down the flyer anyways.
At the debrief, it was said that the event was not really ‘known’ about, which implied that the marketing team could have done more to advertise and brand it. This I agree with. Our team came up with some other ideas, such as the vinyl stickers for the forum. However, the Union did not agree with this. As well as that, entertainment was talking about doing some videos to promote the event but they never acted on it. Once I saw nothing was happening, it was too late to start a video or anything else. To add, the union sent us a spreadsheet to fill in our social media posts. At first, we planned to post something everyday, however, the problem was that we did not have any content confirmation and photos or videos to put up. Also, I assessed the Brookes Union Facebook and Instagram accounts and tried to align the same style as they had. Therefore only ended up with 3 posts in the duration of one week. Even then, the Union did not really follow what I put in the spreadsheet. Nonetheless, on Facebook, we got a total of 453 people who clicked ‘Going’ or ‘Interested’. In comparison of how many students Brookes has, it is nothing. However, compared to the Christmas Market last year (total of 10 people FB involvements), it was an improvement. Therefore, we can see that the marketing team did improve upon last year’s event.
Upon reflection, our marketing team could have been more productive by:
- Communicating more with each other: confirming and checking what each of us are doing.
- Getting quotes for printing whilst content confirmation was pending: we only looked at print after we got the final visuals, it would have saved us a lot of time if we did it before.
- Creating social media content, such as Instagram photos, promo video: this can help to posting to social media channels everyday.
- A brief or guidelines on what style the client wants for their social media.
- Handing out flyers before event, not during: raise awareness before event
- Could have involved film and photography students to create content for next year
Overall, this experience has taught me many things. For example, I did not know about the existence of social media spreadsheets postings. Therefore, next time I can implement this to organise each post. Also improving on my communication skills would benefit my future jobs, it would allow me to save time and develop higher productivity.
FCSV 