This week we planned and promoted a Trivia event to raise money for Melbourne WebFest. This event was overall a success, and we raised around $400 for the festival. The venue we decided to use was The Peacock Inn in Northcote. We chose this because it was used by other studios completing fundraisers in past years, and because we were bringing a large group of people, the venue was free of charge to us. We did run into some issues as a group when putting the event on, but most of this was due to a lack of communication between groups. One example of this was that I made a phone call to collect some details surrounding technical specifications within the venue, and the manager told me that no official booking had actually been made for trivia to be put on. At this stage, we had already begun selling tickets and publicising the event, when we found out that the venue wasn’t confirmed. 

In The Curator’s Handbook, the involvement of merchandise is framed as both providing ‘historical significance’ alongside ‘commercial viability’. As a class, we decided that having branded items for sale would be a great addition to each event. This week we also discussed ways to make sure as many people have a piece of merchandise as possible. One idea we came up with was to bundle drinks with stubby holders, and the design team produced a concept idea for a Melbourne WebFest stubby holder. With regard to producing a program, the reading stated the benefits as “Most authors and many exhibition project teams will consider an exhibition catalogue a useful PR resource – complimentary copies are usually given to artists and lenders’ (George, 2015). We decided that we would like our programs to be available for free, and to distribute them in locations across Melbourne in effort to push ticket sales. 

George A (2015) The curator’s Handbook : Museums, Commercial galleries, Independent Spaces, Thames and Hudson, London.