How we moved our IWD to online and still provided catering and swag
Spring. Somewhere in Southern Russia two GDG organizers have finally decided to move their International Women’s Day from a lovely loft-studio to online.
— Nether gonna happen. What for? — Peter, an organizer from another local community, shrugged and looked at me with some pity in the eyes. — People need offline meetups, networking, chatting while eating, all this stuff. There are a lot of information sources in the internet…why do you still want to hold an online event?
And he returned to his chicken wings.
I sighed and took my phone. — Hello, Taras? How is our shopping going?
Yes. We still didn’t want to give up providing our attendees swag and catering. This wasn’t a question even once. Somehow we both always thought we just can’t go without them.
Our mission is to do the best we can for our community.
All our speakers kindly agreed to perform online. We were sure that there will be a lot of questions for them and they would really help people. Our friends helped us with Zoom account and tested it with our speakers. We zeroed the ticket prices. Maybe someone will think that’s already fine for a good online-meetup, but we were not satisfied.
— Buckwheat ! — suddenly said Taras after a pause. — Buckwheat — that’s what they need. You can’t find it in stores nowadays. It can be a cool present.
— Of course.. Ha-ha. You could also suggest toilet paper… Wait. Wa-a-ait!
We both shouted — TOILET PAPER!
And laughed for a half an hour long inventing more and more fun packages for our attendees.
The final decision looked like this:
1) a packet of buckwheat
2) 4 rolls of toilet paper
3) a box of dry noodles
4) Choco Pie (for the mood!)
5) WTM pin
6) WTM sticker pack
7) space socks for the best questions.
Also we had a famous big Blahaj IKEA Shark for the lucky attendee to feel even more comfortable at home during these hard times.
— What does every attendee want?.. Maybe coffee? It will be Sunday morning..
— I know a latte bar, maybe we can ask if they deliver coffee, yougurt and something delicious to ..how many addresses?
— let’s say , 30–40.
((( By the way, the real number of attendees was 49 but not all of them wanted catering and swag. The real number was 18. )))
The next day we understood that coffee isn’t a good idea. We didn’t know how we would deliver it (the only way was to call a taxi deliver and the taxi driver could refuse to ride with so many drinks. Also cold coffee — not for this time of the year.)
PIZZA !
Yes, good old pizza variant :) Average price of one big pizza with delivery was even less than the one that we calculated per person for the catering on the offline-venue!
We sent letters to all the Meetup members who clicked YES for our Sunday IWD with a zoom link and a link to the form, where people could leave us their contacts and choose the pizza filling.
ADVICE: Never leave pizza ordering to the Day itself.
Nowadays food delivery companies have overload problems. Lucky me, I had only the problem with the pizza company app — I couldn’t order it by phone, because I needed the delivery straight to attendees addresses and I couldn’t ask them to pay for the food “because I’ll send you money afterwards and let’s pretend I’ve bought them myself”. Kind helpful guys from DODO Pizza tech support managed to solve the situation in time and finally every single pizza was ordered.
In half an hour I began to receive calls from couriers. Every single courier didn’t tell me where he is.
— Hi, delivery, I’m here.
— Sorry, could you please tell me, here where?
— Here near the house.
— I’m sorry but I have sort of 20 addresses.
Some attendees didn’t answer their phones for long. Some made a mistake while completing the form. But still everything went good.
Hot tasty pizzas on the tables at our attendees homes. Just in time for the dinner time in our agenda. Thanks, guys!
And the swag along with the shark was safely sent with taxi delivery when we finally learnt our lucky ones.
Wait, all of the packages?
No.
We moved online so now we had viewers not only from Krasnodar, but from the whole Russia.
We couldn’t send all of them pizza or swag, but we saved budget for delivering our packages to the ones with best questions. They were positively shocked! :)
TIPS FOR THE FUTURE:
Not everyone loves pizza. Not everyone wants catering in any variant. But still we need provide more variety in food like in actual caterings.
And here are two thoughts ( oops, I lied, 3, but they appear and appear) :
- To buy some kind of voucher from a food delivery company that works in a lot of cities
(+) pros: this way we can provide catering to every attendee and he/she will get what they really want
(-) cons: they can forget about vouchers; they can lose the letter with the voucher (maybe); also we lose that networking fun when everyone has the dinner at the same time and chat
2. To provide several different options(sort of food boxes) and let the attendee decide with a radio button in the registration form
(+) pros: everyone will have dinner at the same time and they won’t bother ordering it
(-) cons: it’s really hard to make really good food boxes for every taste :)
3. let the attendees decide for the menu of special companies that (like the ads say) can provide food for your every meal -for example, Freshly or Hungryroot
(+) pros: healthy tasty food for everyone
(-) cons: may be expensive.. but who knows.
We still need to go through different options of catering on the online meetups and choose the best for every community.
Stay safe!
Jenny from GDG Krasnodar
