Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.
— Oscar Wilde.
This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.
Christmas Market
As a part of the event management course at Oxford Brookes University, third-year students have been organising the Oxford Brookes Christmas Market.
I was a part of the logistics team. I felt that we had excellent communication internally in the group. Most of the time when we needed to do something, we would discuss between us who should do what. I felt that maybe if we had a designated person(s) to be the team manager from the start, it would allow us to share the responsibilities to better success. After a few weeks, we kind of informally established two leading people in the team. I believe this was good as now every time we had a task, we did not have to discuss who would do it, and the tasks were alighted out by the “team managers”. Even though, while reflecting on the first few weeks, I could have taken on more responsibility as I felt that some of the other team members had more tasks than I did.
Communication between the groups was not ideal the first few weeks. I remember that groups would argue between each other saying things such as “we need this from vendors” “we can’t do this before we get the information from entertainment” etc. and basically blaming other people for why things were not happening. I was also one of these people. I now realise that blaming other people for delays was extremely unproductive, and it did not create any solutions. I remember thinking that the reason why the communication was so poor was that we did not have one event manager that was responsible for seeing the notification being sent to the different groups. What happened was people would send or ask for information about a matter to one person, and then that person would not tell the rest of the team. This created a rather inadequate flow of information between the different groups. However, a few weeks before the actual event, we all sat down and discussed the lack of communication. To fix this problem, each of the teams assigned one contact person that the other teams could contact, and that person was responsible for sharing the information within the different groups. After this, the communication across teams was great.
On the day of the actual event, I was the site manager of the Piazza. Not much was going on out there other than the two food vans. I enjoyed talking to the two vendors we had outside. Every time someone bought anything, I would remind them that more things were happening down in the forum. Still, I feel like we could have done more outside to promote the market. One of the vendors mentioned to me that no sign or anything was suggesting the Christmas market was happening inside. He also said that maybe this resulted in people not walking through the forum would miss out. I agreed and wrote it down to discuss that further in the post-event discussion group.
In conclusion, I really enjoyed the Christmas Market and believed that everyone from the vendors to the students also enjoyed the event. I have put the link to a short video a friend of mine made just showing some of the things that the vendors were selling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIYFknMUuf4
Best,
Rasmus
Sustainability in the Event Industry
There is no doubt that the global climate crisis has grown in awareness over the last few years. The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg spoke at the UN meeting in New York September 23. (2019) where she repetitively stated how angry she is that our world leaders does way too little to try and solve the climate crisis. Millions of kids and adults alike has been marching the streets of cities around the world in order to protest the way our politicians are trying to solve the climate crisis.
Christopher Cashman of LSO St Luke’s predicts that sustainability is going to get a larger focus over the next few years in the events industry. He believes events professional will be looking more closely at ways to reduce their carbon footprint and offset event pollution. Corporate-events.co.uk has created a list of ten ways that events can be more sustainable.
- Know your impact before improving
- Go plastic free
- Ditch the paper
- Organic, locally produced food and drink
- Choose responsible Venues
- Delegates’ carbon footprint
- Projection over print
- LED lighting
- Go outside
- Choose an agency who shares your ethos
These are some great tips that event professionals can use for their events. Please check out the link for a more in-dept understanding of the list.
-Rasmus.
Introduce Yourself (Example Post)
This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.
You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.
Why do this?
- Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
- Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.
The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.
To help you get started, here are a few questions:
- Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
- What topics do you think you’ll write about?
- Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
- If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?
You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.
Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.
When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.
My thoughts on the current Event Industry 