Fun In The Sun

I thought I had been doing too many lifestyle posts recently and not enough Event posts, so here's another one for you all. It's going to be a throwback to two years ago when I created my first event for my event management degree with a group of my coursemates at university. (I apologise for any important pieces of information that I may have missed out, please understand that this event was over 2 years ago so most of this I am writing from memory lol).

BACKGROUND

Since Event Management became a degree a Coventry University every year the second year students have to create an event for the first years to attend (and other students) to help raise money for a selected charity. The charity for my year was Marie Curie Cancer Care and the year before I attended an event that was aimed to raise money for Barnardo's. The event that I had gone to was inspiration for our event, most people had gone for the idea to do a club night as what student doesn't love a night out? But this particular group had decided to do a movie night. We thought this was a great idea, and so we developed it further to come up with our own event.

FUN IN THE SUN

There was a group of 6 of us that decided to do a movie night with a 'summer' theme. It was that time of year where it was just dull and rainy and just typical british weather, so we thought why not create an event that will bring people's spirits back up and get the excitement back for summer. To decide on what film to watch we chose a film from each genre and went into a lecture of first years for them to decide what film they would prefer to come and watch. They decided that they would prefer to watch American Pie and luckily someone had it on DVD to bring in.

THE VENUE

The event was held at the SQ Club, Coventry. The venue was very central, right in the middle of campus so near to all the student housing and easy accessible. They had three function rooms, we originally went for the smaller one downstairs but realised it wouldn't be big enough for the amount of students we had anticipated on coming to moved it to the larger function room upstairs.

FOOD/ACTIVITIES

To stay within the theme of 'fun in the sun' we tried to make sure that the food and activities followed suit. We had cupcakes made and decorated like ice cream/cones, hot dogs in bun with different sauces available, nachos and even managed to get in touch with Krispy Kreme to get a bulk buy of orginal glaze doughnuts at a discounted price so that we could sell on to raise further funds. This happened to come with hats and balloons that we could hand out aswell.

For the activities we got intouch with a local primary school to see if we were able to loan some games from them that they use for activities but still related to our beach/sea side fun fair theme, and we also contacted local shops and restaurants to sponsor us with some free gear that we could use to put in our raffle that we later released at the end of the event, this included things like a family ticket to hockey game in Coventry and a free meal at an indian restaurant in the city centre.

PROMOTION

To actively promote for the event we asked our lecturers to make us admin of the facebook page for our course. This was so that we could update posts about our events and specifically reach our targeted audience of the first year students as these events they would have to audit as part of their coursework. Each of us would reguarly post the posters and information onto the website and made sure we made everyone know our availability if they wanted to buy tickets in advance before the event.

RESULT

Even after all of our hardwork, promotion and determination we didn't get the turnout that we had originally expected or anticipated. Luckily on the day of our event there was another event going on downstairs in the venue so we decided to go downstairs with any leftover cakes and Krispy Kremes and sell them to everyone (most of the people were drunk so it didn't take much persuading lol).

All in all, we finished what we started and manage to raise some funds for Marie Curie Cancer Care, and it will always be a great experience!

Enjoy!

SXFRANKSON xo