The media event happened today and was, in my opinion, a success. I walked around with one of the groups and, while it took some time and effort to get them to warm up and be friendly, it seemed like overall they enjoyed the activities, found it a fun atmosphere and positively responded throughout the day. I took photos throughout the day of the different activities, speakers and graduation ceremony, helped Lee print out all the graduation certificates and gave the main reception the schedule of the event in the morning along with all the rooms and mine and Chloe's phone numbers in case people from the media did show up - which they did, as we got a reporter/photographer from the Bath Chronicle!
All photos that I took on the day can be seen here, apart from the ones I took of the Big Draw and film sequence activity since those were taken using other people's cameras.
Summary:
Stage 1: Record
As can be seen from these blog posts, through this event I experienced what it would be like to lead a team to work in tight schedules to meet deadlines and produce many different aspects of a successful media event. As one of the three main deputies and head of the marketing team, my role was to support Chloe as the CEO, take an active role in coming up with ideas and the progression of those ideas and lead a designing team and a contacting media team; giving them briefs, assigning them tasks and making sure they met the deadlines. As well as delegating responsibilities and making sure everyone stuck to the schedule to meet the deadlines, I also took an active role in designing and contacting the media myself and was there to oversee every area of the marketing department. I was able to observe and learn from more experienced people such as tutors and the marketing department at the university things such as the best way of creating press releases, how to gain media coverage and how to design logos, posters and media event invitations to a high standard to make it appealing.
Stage 2: Influencing Factors
During the course of this event, I researched things such as examples of successful media events in the past and what made them a success, as well as examples of media event invitations and press releases that successful media companies such as Apple have created. The main influence that came out of this research I would say were the ones that the company Apple produced and released, as we liked the minimalistic style and simplicity of their designs. Apple is one of the most successful media and technology companies in the world, and pioneered this type of design for their products that arguably is one of the main factors of their success. For the design team, we decided to take on these aesthetic qualities influenced by Apple into our own work and I thought the designs worked effectively to get our message across.
Stage 3: Reflect
I believe that we accomplished what we set out to do for this event, as we received feedback from the students and the teacher that this was the best event they had been to as of yet. I do think we could have done some things differently though and prepared more thoroughly for other things to have made the event run smoother. One thing that could have gone much better that our team was in charge of on the day was the handing out of the graduation certificates. We had a list of names of all the students in the class, but we had also discussed briefly the idea about having everyone write their name down when they came in, so that we would know who was there on the day. However, that was as far as we got; a strategy to get this done wasn't implemented and we never got a list of the people who had come that day, so we had to design and print off many more certificates than we needed. This was a waste of money, but it also meant that Chloe had to read out all the names of people who weren't there and wait during awkward silence as no one would come up.
As I was busy on the morning of the day with printing out schedules and hand outs to go in the information packs, as well as putting on the labels of the packs and didn't get this finished until just before it was meant to start, I didn't think to have a list ready for everyone to write down their names when they come in as should have been my responsibility. In this respect, I should have handled this differently in two ways:
- Prepared everything beforehand and gotten everything printed, labeled and ready a few days earlier so that there wouldn't be as much stress on the morning and so that I would have had time to remember to make a list;
- Taken more initiative to implement a strategy or to delegate the task of getting all the names to someone else to get done.
I've learned from this process that I tend to leave things until the last minute to get done and I need to change to learn to prepare everything beforehand to cause less stress on the day. I now see this quality as one I need to improve in many areas of my life, and I will be working on this intentionally in the future to change this about myself. I need to change the approach I have to work, getting everything done as soon as possible in advance and leaving time at the end, rather than thinking I have all the time in the world until I frantically try to get everything done right before the deadline. This is valuable to learn about myself, as this experience showed me the consequences of doing this in a professional environment and the effect it would have on things under my direct responsibility.
I also learned from this event that I enjoy leading people, finding what they are passionate about and giving them tasks that would fit their specific abilities and passions and that would stretch and challenge them. I enjoyed leading my team, delegating and giving tasks, even if it meant a lot of checking up and running after people to get things in for deadline! I learned more about my specific leadership style as well and things I would do differently in the future, such as being more assertive and decisive even if everyone on the team aren't 100% happy with the decision.
Overall, I'm very happy with how the day went. I think we achieved the aims we had for this event and the students went away happy with what they did and hopefully thinking more about applying to university once they finish their course. I feel like we all pulled our weight and were committed to putting on an event that hopefully the students will remember, as I'm sure we all will.
