Lessons From Our First Offline Event at Stutern
It is not a surprise seeing Nigerian youths at events that improves or promises to improve their chances of employment. What is however surprising is seeing a mass of youths ready to pay to attend such an event. I mean, it is not a Cinema.
This is just evidence that our youths are seriously in search for a path. WWW.STUTERN.COM has come to lead them.
When we hosted young talents at the Stutern Open Offie Hours, just few days ago, this was precisely on the 30th of April 2016, we had 75% of the total pre-booked attendees present.
Our goal was simple, at Stutern we literally have an eye on everything that happens in the internship hiring process except for the interviews.Even though we do not have a say on the interviews that employers conduct with the interns, we found that we could still have an influence by better preparing the youths on interview skills.
So, we invited an HR expert, Gbenga Totoyi, the HR Lead at L5lab and we also invited few of our interns who have aced interviews.
As much as holding an offline event meant a lot to us as the Stutern team, it also meant a lot to us as the Stutern brothers. Talking of the Stutern brothers, my twin and myself have worked on ideas and plans for different offline events back at our university days. The highest common factor however was that non of those event ever saw the light of day. Non. From a TEDx event, to Alumnus event, to a concert, and an hackathon, they just never held.
What we took away were the bouquet of lessons that made this first offline event a dope.
For any offline event, you will have two things, You will have the people and the resources. For the people, we are talking about the team, audience, speakers. While for the resources, we are talking about the venue, refreshments, audio, visuals, sponsorship / finance, theme, branding / marketing and the post-event. By the way, this article is part of the post-event.
We learned two important lessons, a usual one and an unusual one.
The usual one was the power of putting together a brain trust of committed team who will help make the whole thing happen. A successful event is a group effort, this was a critical mistake we made in our previous attempts. This is the most critical, it is also the most rewarding, so go team! Thanks Taiwo and Funto.
Here is the unusual one. Do not host your event on a sanitation day in Lagos. On a serious note, do not. But if you will, schedule it for at least 3/4 hours after the sanitation. If not, your audience will likely be stuck in the 10am Lagos traffic that starts after the sanitation; as soon as movement is allowed. We hope to learn more lessons in our upcoming events and we do hope to keep you posted.
Originally published at medium.com on May 11, 2016.
