The Day-
On Wednesday 26th February I arrived at The Herbert Art Gallery at 8.30am; the receptionist said that we didn’t have a booking, so I had to sort this out. Another lady went to take us upstairs but I explained that we booked the downstairs room as that is what we had viewed and planned the day around. Luckily, with this liaising and speaking to the bookings manager, Emma, this was all sorted out fine.
I helped set up the room by putting the programmes on the seats and tidying the place up. My main role on the day was to Tweet. As part of the marketing team, I brought my iPad and used Hoot Suite to view the @IMG_19 and #IMG19 mentions and create conversations online. This went well as we gained more followers and attracted Yield Magazine to join in for my talk as well. I thought it was important to have this Twitter presence on the day.
Marketing
I am part of the marketing team and in this role I had a lot of influence on the design aspects: the logo, posters, programmes, Twitter and Facebook. Chatting to Hollie Woodward, brainstorming ideas I suggested the name IMG19- there is nineteen of us and IMG is the computer shorthand for image, so seemed appropriate. From a group vote this name was well received and we began to branstorm logos. I thought of having a clean look to the logo and offered these suggestions:
People liked the orange-y colour, but it is plain. After a class vote people liked this option:
However, I wasn’t fully happy with this: yellow is a difficult colour and I wasn’t sure whether the black worked. Joseph, Hollie and I worked for a few hours on it and we came up with this final logo:
We understood that it was important to grab an audience as soon as possible and the best way for us to do this was online: we made a blog with 19 authors to blog about their research. This is working well and definitely helped to engage an audience to be interested in the symposium.
Joseph and I from there continued to make marketing posters for the symposium and for fundraising:
I was pleased with the symposium poster and the bacon sale poster: the cake sale one was very rushed as time was short.
We had a definite template, and with that I decided to continue with designing the programme for the day: we agreed on a double sided postcard style for people to look at, with links to the website for more information. This is the design, I was really pleased with this and when it came back from print, it looked really professional:
Fundraising
Melissa and I decided do a bacon sale and targeted the first and second years as the Ellen Terry reception said that we weren’t allowed to sell in the foyer. We got up early cooking bacon and slicing rolls; I drove us to uni with them hot for the 9.30am start: despite numerous emails and tweeting to the second years their enthusiasm was underwhelming. So, we had to think on our feet: we toured the whole of Ellen Terry selling to GIllian in the heavens, the technicians, the Fresh team and Media. Stephen Dawking helped us out by letting us sell in his lectures. On the first day we broke even, so the second day was going to be profit. We made a £50 profit, which we were really pleased with: the second day was a smashing success. However, on reflection, I don’t think I will be doing it again: it was a lot of time and effort for not a huge outcome.
Letter for Finance
Melissa and I wrote out the letter to Shaun to pitch money from the department to help pay for the symposium costs. I had to use my writing skills to be precise and persuasive in order for Shaun to consider donating us money.
Overall, I felt like I put in many hours and a lot of effort into making the symposium a success: the day ran smoothly and we had a really good response from it: Shaun Hides announced his congratulations to not only the presentations but the professionalism of the day.
#IMG19 Photography symposium ends. Brilliant day! Big thanks to all intelligent, informed & inspiring presentations http://t.co/M7KIjxKwkG
— Shaun Hides (@shaunhides) February 26, 2014
KateGreenPhotography 