Here is my short summary of Ecofair 2011, i had to write for my internship :)
Internship Summary:
Description:
During the 2 weeks of the internship I focused on the organization of the event "EcoFair". My position as a head organizer included the following responsibilities:
- group Leadership
- marketing
- budget
- action planning
- volunteer organization
- speaker organization
- debrief and set up for next year
Organization for EcoFair started in September 2010 with an initial visioning process that resulted in the main theme, the vision, the group agreements and the formation of a 15 person core team. This core team continued meeting weekly since September until the event started.
My position of head organizer included the leadership during these meetings, writing and following the agenda, upholding group agreements and supporting the team leaders in their efforts.
Group leadership:
during the whole year, a big part of my position was leadership within the group Taking and sharing responsibility, holding members and myself accountable for agreements and sometimes taking a strong position with the group where the most challenging parts for me.
Marketing:
during the 2 weeks of my internship, one of the most important parts was the short term marketing for the event. Since it was 3 weeks before the event, we focused on easy accomplishable strategies. Our media mix included online media (facebook: http://www.
My job here was the organization of these efforts and the distribution of advertisement material.
Another important aspect of marketing was the networking aspect, which means being present at various meetings, inviting leadership members of the community to cooperate with us (Francis Thicky, Stuart Valentine, Bob Ferguson, Troy van Beek, Amy Greenfield, and many others)
Budget:
one main part for me, was to create a budget, make sure that it people stick to it, and to keep an overview of our income and expenses. A short version of the budget is attached.
The biggest challenge with the budget was the insecurity of incomes and expenses. Since i did not have any experiences with events like this, it was very challenging for me to come up with a realistic budget. I used last years budget and adopted it to our needs and it turned out to be pretty accurate, even though our expenses where increasing and increasing and finally we end up with a small loss.
Action planning:
during the 2 weeks of my internship i spend a good amount of time organizing the more then 30 volunteers, we had 3 volunteer meetings where people could sign up for volunteer positions and get more info about where they could plug in. My head organizer for volunteers, Minca Borg, did a great job, and i supported her with all volunteer efforts. Further action planning included the creation of the final schedule, the reservation of all rooms, the planning for speaker needs and requirements, the coordination with the university and concrete planning of all needs for every event.
Volunteer organization:
as explained earlier, a big portion of the work went into organizing volunteers, and coordinating the efforts of everybody willing to help. To incentivize volunteering we cooperated with the local initiative "Hometown Hero Rewards Program" to distribute rewards to our volunteers, as well as we gave out free tickets and T-Shirts for volunteers.
Speaker Organization:
for all the out of town speakers I organized the booking, the contracting, the payment, the travel arrangements (booking flights, hotel rooms, organizing drivers for the weekend), as well as the check in, the presentation requirements, etc. This was the most expensive part of the event, since we payed about 6500 dollars for speakers, transportation and accommodation.
Debrief and set up:
since the event is over, we had 2 debriefing sessions with the team, where we went through the event, and looked at what had worked and what did not work. These notes will be handed over to next years organizing team, as well as booklet with the most important information from every team leader.
Furthermore we started planning the initial visioning process for next years EcoFair, which will be held in about 4 weeks and we hope that students and comunity leaders will participate and share their ideas for next years EcoFair.
Here you can find pictures of this years ecofair:
Here is a rather funny news clip about ecofair:
