I don’t envy event planners. Behind the pressed linens and perfectly placed name cards, I know someone is running around in the background (sometimes in heels!), making sure everything is in order. What I didn’t know before planning Startup Ultimate was how much work takes place before the event.
As a team, we decided to plan a game of ultimate frisbee for the startups of Ann Arbor, so we could use our own planning platform to bring people together. Along the way, we encountered many of the same problems and tasks event planners know all too well. Here’s what we learned.
Startup Ultimate
The Purpose
I can’t stress how important it is to have a unified purpose for an event. What does success mean to you? We actually argued a little about this in the beginning stages. Did we want as many attendees as possible, no matter if that included students? Or did we want a small group of startup players that would form tighter bonds? We eventually settled on a goal of bringing the startup community together through Startup Ultimate, with the goal of future, bigger events.
The Sponsors
I knew we couldn’t have a successful event without sponsors, so I started calling in favors, left and right. I was quickly told to send over an email with our sponsorship proposal. Lesson learned: even if you want to reach out personally, have a prepared sponsorship request (even if you’re grateful for anything). Follow-up is also important, and shows you are both professional and committed to the event.
The Venue
I thought renting a field would be the easiest thing and I was oh-so-wrong. With many fields at our disposal, we had to narrow down a location that was both accessible and affordable. Then we had to get a hold of different parks and rec departments. We still had to submit our request and wait for it to be approved, which was a little nerve-wracking. In the future, I’d definitely nail down the venue before promoting registration.
The Plan B (and Plan C…)
Our original date for Startup Ultimate was Friday, 10/3. We stalked the weather forecast the entire week beforehand, eventually accepting that it was going to rain and the field would be too wet to play. We rescheduled the event for Friday, 10/10, having to reconfirm the venue and if our photography and video sponsors could make it. Lucky for us, it didn’t end up raining. But if it did, we would have stuck with a pizza party so our startup friends could still have some fun.
The Marketing (never really ends)
You want to promote registration as soon as it’s live and up until the start of the event. Even if you sell out, it’s your responsibility to keep building the hype pre-event. Inevitably, you will have no-shows, so you want to do your best to reduce those numbers. We ended up with 75% attendance, not bad for a rescheduled free event.
The Budget
After our first field didn’t work out, we ended up saving money on our new field rental. The name of the budget game is spend it or lose it. We got together as a team and brainstormed different ways we could provide more value to our attendees with that extra money. We bought cupcakes for an end-of-event dessert and props to take pictures with.
The Conclusion
Using Message Blocks ourselves to plan Startup Ultimate helped us see into the minds of our clients and even find a few things we can improve on (for example, we noticed a bug in some of our email previews).
We’re always taking feedback and looking for ways to make the planning process a little bit simpler.
We’d like to give a special shout-out to Ann Arbor Spark, Frog Prince Studios, TernPro, Domino’s Pizza, and Underground Printing, without whom Startup Ultimate would not have happened.
Take a look at our event highlights in our Startup Ultimate video below!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgRH5SiPfOM