Designing a Successful Event: Thinking Beyond Attendance
How running a successful initiative that I dreaded helped me create an initiative I love: Co & Create is a friendly meetup with your founder besties, hosted every Wednesday at Railtown Pursuits.
Designing a Successful Thing, Badly
I used to think I was a bad entrepreneur because I don’t like networking events.
For 2 years, we hosted a popular monthly coworking day. I designed it to include everything a good networking event should: new faces every month, business focused, and perfect elevator pitches. People loved it!
Each month I met so many incredible, kind people, and I hated it. Victoria and I dreaded event day to the point we hoped that no one would show up.
Unsurprisingly, we stopped hosting them.
How cute! Our extremely successful Summer Rooftop Social series only ran once.
(Re)Designing for Sustainability
Countless factors need to come together for a program or initiative to find longevity. In the case of our monthly coworking days, I got everything right except for my own personal capacity to sustain it.
I’ve spent the last year thinking about how to design a meetup that will serve our community and be sustainable.
In that time, I’ve asked myself:
1. What already exists?
In Vancouver, its not difficult to find events that are:
Business-centred, networking focused
High-pressure, high-touch interactions that drain introverts energy
Once off, with all new faces
These types of events are so valuable and needed. Luckily, I don’t need to recreate them because extroverts will do them better.
2. What’s resonating with me?
…and do the themes that resonate with me overlap with a gap in the market?
As our community grows, and especially since we launched The Vessel for larger events and gatherings, I’m frequently asked if we host regular meet ups. I’ve also started to feel a greater pull personally for deeper community connection.
Themes that resonate with me:
Community building > networking
Simple and routine = familiar and repeatable
Offering real help: it’s not “Let me know if you need anything.” Its, “I’m yours for these hours.”
Gathering doesn’t need to be aesthetic
Show up quietly, often > grand gesture, once
3. What I built:
These themes translated into Co & Create: a weekly low pressure meetup that makes it easy to:
Show up
Ask for help and offer real help from our friends and peers
Host and attend soft community initiatives
We’ve all heard the phrase “If you want a village, you have to be a villager.” Co & Create is a space for us to learn together how to be villagers.
Reminder: You’re a Person
As entrepreneurs, it can be easy to relentlessly focus on problem solving and delivering solutions to our customers, and lose sight of the fact that we are often the ones doing the actual solution delivery.
In that intensity, it’s simple to treat ourselves as invisible cogs in a larger machine. Designing solutions that work for us as individuals can help us avoid burnout, ensure we continue to love what we do, and continue to create lasting initiatives.