With a week to go, we all felt the pressure of delivering a well-polished and informative seminar to our peers. We were liaising with the Steering Committee regularly, to ensure that we gave them the correct content that they needed to do their jobs as well. We had confirmed all three of our special guests:
Nick Pearce and Marcus Crook founded Homeless of Melbourne in 2014, an organisation that aims to generate community awareness about homelessness in and around Melbourne. The organisation’s awareness has grown through sharing of personal stories of homeless individuals on social media, as it pushes for change to dispel the stigma that is attached to homelessness. Nick and Marcus’ advocacy in this area has grown further by their business HoMie, a clothing store where each item purchased has an equivalent item donated to someone experiencing homelessness in Melbourne.
Sophie Draper, from Uber Melbourne
Uber is evolving the way the world moves. By seamlessly connecting riders to drivers through their apps, they make cities more accessible, opening up more possibilities for riders and more business for Uber Partners. Since being founded in 2009 they have now launched in over 300+ cities, and with Uber’s rapidly expanding global presence they continue to bring people and their cities closer. Sophie is the Community Manager with both agency and in-house experience. Formerly London based, her previous roles include an events and social media role on the City Experts team at Google, and past agency clients include Skype, NIVEA and Tesco, to name a few. She has a creative photography background, with advanced photographic editing and retouching skills.
Sarah Stone – YouTube Personality
Sarah Stone is a musician and Youtube personality known for her unique cup song arrangements and captivating voice. That video you just saw has amassed over 9 million views on YouTube, and Sarah is her own boss, managing and curating her public image. Recently off the back of the Nova’s Red Room global tour, Sarah has had the opportunity to reach millions of fans through the exclusive music platform that provides a unique opportunity for brand integration, not only through artist alignment & content creation, but with amplification of key brand messaging at the event, on-air and on-line.
After creating short bios for all of our guests we were still in full swing of promoting our event. I took the liberty of designing a secondary poster to our main seminar advertisement (see above), to further promote our event that was fast approaching. An event was created by the steering committee, who we consulted with to provide the relevant information and content, and this was shared through many RMIT channels on social media.
It was during this time that I took the lead and accepted the role of the seminar host. I wanted to be in a position to influence the seminar personally, as I had already invested a lot of time into the planning and preparation period. I collaborated with several other group members on a google doc that contained relevant lines of questioning to ask each individual guest and also devised a run sheet with specific times of each segment of our seminar. Over the course of the planning weeks we had minimal meetings where every group member could be present, so it was crucial for us to keep communications open through our Facebook group. Through this medium, we were able to manage the various different aspects of our seminar and also share content that we had created with the group for feedback and accessibility.
Once each set of specific questions was outlined, it was decided that the person who had landed each respective guest would continue to liaise with them as this would be the easiest way to communicate. We each sent out the questions to each guest -I sent Sophie the questions I wanted to ask her about Uber- with a week’s notice, so that would have plenty of time to read, comprehend and come up with responses. I also contacted Sophie several times via email and phone prior to our seminar to ensure that she was up to speed and understood everything that would happen on the day of our event. At my request, she shared with me some promotional video content for Uber, that we used for an introduction to her segment of the seminar.