Remember the Bottle Openers: Lessons Learned from Running a Nationwide Event Series
On June 11, 2015, hundreds of UVA students and alumni attended simultaneous meetups at 7 cities across the country. The goal was to continue building the Wahoowa Network, a loose community of UVA students and alumni interested in tech and startups. The events were very successful — but it certainly wasn’t easy to get there.
I’ve always loved the complexity and logistical challenges of event planning — just take a look at the massive Tom Tom Founders Festival schedule if you don’t believe me. But our team faced some new and unique challenges for this ambitious, simultaneous event series. We learned a number of key lessons, which I thought I’d share here.
1. Never be afraid to ask for help.
Back in January, we asked a U.Va. alumnus at WeWork for access to their venues for these meetups. (WeWork creates beautiful coworking and event spaces for entrepreneurs across the globe.) One thing led to another, and by March, WeWork had donated 5 of their locations for our use. This dramatically cut our costs by thousands of dollars. It seemed like a moonshot back in January (and it was), but we asked anyways, and it worked!
2. Drizly’s drink delivery service is awesome.
Drizly is a drink delivery startup. Click a few buttons on your computer or phone, and your drink of choice will be delivered to your door. Drizly was attractive to us a partner because ideally we could order all of the drinks for all of the cities all at once. However, Drizly’s service was not designed for multi-city orders. This of course makes sense — it’s not often someone wants to have several cases of wine and beer show up at the same time in 7 different cities.
We got in touch with the Drizly team to explain our situation and ask for help. They agreed to help us make orders for the 5 cities they could service. Their team was incredibly helpful and responsive, every step of the way. The managers in each city worked with our team one-on-one to customize each order to our liking, and worked with us to “hack” their platform to accommodate our large, multi-city orders. Drizly was one of the key company partners that made these events a success — go check them out!
3. Ask the right questions when people RSVP.
We advertised these meetups through nearly a dozen different channels. But looking back, our team has very little knowledge about what worked best. We forgot to include a “How did you hear about this?” question on the RSVP form — that would have been a plain and simple solution. But instead, this little mistake has left us largely in the dark about what channels to focus on next time.
We did ask about attendees’ graduating year. This allowed us to target our email reminders to students and alumni. Student reminder emails sounded like they were coming from a peer — we wanted them to feel like their friends were coming, and so they should too. Alumni reminder emails focused on the student-led nature of the events and how many alumni were also coming.
We also collected data on majors, current jobs, and roles. I’m interested to see what other targeting we can do with this data in the future.
4. Educate and build community with your attendees.
Every email to RSVP’d attendees included background information about theWahoowa Network and HackCville, the two sponsoring organizations. We also had standardized fliers and stickers at every event to educate attendees and market our organizations.
These reminder emails also included links to city-specific Facebook groups where students and alumni could meet each other before the events. This was more successful in some cities than others. But where it did work it was awesome — it built excitement and camaraderie leading up to the meetups.
5. Take pictures!
All event hosts were instructed to take a few crowd pictures and posed pictures. (These are spread throughout this article.) We put them all in aFacebook album afterwards, and then sent it out to the attendees. This was a fun and easy way to remind people about the events and help them see how they were part of something larger.
6. Don’t forget the bottle openers.
I had to mail stickers, fliers, nametags, trash bags, and hundreds of cups (yes, cups) to every city, since I was the only one with the credit card. (I got a lot of weird looks at the post office that day as I packed the boxes.) But I forgot to mail bottle openers, leading to a few last-minute CVS trips so we could actually open all the beer. Lesson learned!
7. Work with great people.
At the end of the day, nothing replaces working with an incredible team. A huge shoutout to the entire HackCville and Wahoowa crew who spent hours of their summer volunteering to make this all possible. I’m very lucky to get to work with such a rockstar group of people, and it makes me proud to be a Wahoo.
About Me
Hello, I’m Daniel Willson. I’m a technologist who loves to build partnerships and communities that connect entrepreneurial people with the resources they need. I also love to play the fiddle. Read more about me →
