A story worth sharing
Have you ever wondered how TEDxISTAlameda came to life? Let me tell you our story — an unique learning ride.
Organizing an independent TEDx event (or any other event!) is no easy task. I’ve been doing this for three years and, every edition, I learn something worthy of sharing.
I decided to take our motto in practice and share with you what I’ve learned along the way. What follows is a story about TEDxISTAlameda’s origins, its twists and turns, and how we became who we are today. Maybe this will inspire you to organize a TEDx event in your local community!
2015. IEEE-IST Student Branch
In 2015, I was invited to lead Instituto Superior Técnico’s first bioengineering student group, EMBS-IST, a society chapter from IEEE-IST Student Branch. In a nutshell, IEEE (Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers) is the world’s largest technical professional organization, in over 160 countries and with more than 420,000 members, dedicated to advance technology for the benefit of humanity. Branching from this global organization, IEEE-IST Student Branch is an autonomous student organization from Instituto Superior Técnico, which focuses in nurturing innovative initiatives complementary to IST’s academic education, in an unique mentoring environment.
When you are responsible for a new student group in an university with more than 44 different student organizations, you have a few barriers to entry you need to overcome to ensure survival: scarce resources (students and funding), network effects (you can’t do what others are already doing) and strong brands (other groups have potentially locked in their followers). So, you need to bring something bold and inspiring to your university, otherwise the local community won’t notice.
Back then, my team and I decided to dig into Instituto Superior Técnico’s past to look for innovative events we could revive from the ashes. We uncovered that, in 2013, Instituto Superior Técnico partnered with American Corners Portugal to organize a TEDx event in Campus Alameda, themed “Innovation in Sciences and Humanities”. We had found our golden goose! After support from Instituto Superior Técnico’s Executive Board, TEDxISTAlameda was officially part of EMBS-IST. The game was on!
Rule of thumb: Differentiate your group from others alike by organizing inspiring and impactful events. Learn from the past, focus on the future.
2016. Our first round
On February 20th 2016, more than 200 attendees gathered in Salão Nobre to participate in TEDxISTAlameda’s second edition. Themed “All Aboard”, our objective was to bring together a diverse and multidisciplinary audience, unafraid to sail into the unknown for a better tomorrow.
Motivated by IEEE’s broader mission, we invited speakers with technological background to showcase their state-of-the-art technology. Startup co-founders pitched their life-changing ideas. Rui Quinta and Tiago Nunes, With Company co-founders, and Carlos Arturo Torres, designer at IDEO Chicago, discussed the role of design thinking in innovation and problem-solving (here and here). Andreas Mogensen, first Danish astronaut to visit the International Space Station, shared his experience living in space. It was amazing how simple, inspiring ideas could empower our local community for change!
But — I’m sure you were expecting a but!— , things went south rapidly. I’d put a lot in my shoulders. I naively forgot about the event’s typical format and structure, so I ended up squeezing 20 speakers in one afternoon. Due to technical problems (sound wasn’t working properly, lights weren’t enough for the recordings, we didn’t have spare batteries, etc), sessions lagged behind and 30-minute networking breaks to foster discussion and collaboration became 5-minute bathroom breaks. Gradually, TEDxISTAlameda’s audience was reduced to half, then one third.
Although my lack of experience was clearly a bliss, it also made me unable to predict the consequences of certain actions. Unfortunately, every single detail counts — even if you have an amazingly curated lineup, small failures will skew the audience’s overall perception. Looking back, we were so committed to organize the best TEDx event possible, we completely forgot about the attendee hierarchy of needs — same idea as the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but applied to event planning. We lost sight of our audience’s foundational, most basic needs and organized a hybrid, patchy event, inspired by other events alike in our university.
Rule of thumb: Don’t lose sight of the audience’s foundational needs. Follow Maslow’s hierarchy applied to event planning.
2017. Cultivating a community
Even though our first attempt at organizing a TEDx event failed miserably, the event brought a lot of attention to EMBS-IST. Our local community had taken notice, in part because TEDx events are a worldwide phenomenon and eventually everyone had stumbled upon an awesome, powerful talk on YouTube. We also found out there was a need for a comfortable space of open discussion and collaboration, a platform to enable change and (re)action.
We took this opportunity to focus on creating and cultivating our local community first, before throwing an event just for the sake of it. We redesigned our engagement on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn, and worked hard to figure out what type of informative content our local community was looking for. By looking inwards, before looking outwards, we gained organic momentum while providing value in a scalable manner.
By building our follower base, we found out our local community was full of passionate, ambitious people who needed a platform to amplify their ideas. With the right curation, these ideas had the potential to become worth spreading! So we growth-hacked our influence even further by organizing a Speaker Contest so that anyone in our local community, from students to researchers, could present a simple, inspiring idea that would stimulate the curiosity of our hand-picked jury. Winners would step onto our stage and present their ideas in TEDxISTAlameda’s third edition. The contest was — spoiler alert! — an enormous success and it was no easy task selecting the winners! If you’re curious, follow the links for their talks: Francisco Azevedo [PT] and Miguel Rodrigues dos Santos [PT].
We took this community-first mindset to TEDxISTAlameda’s third edition, themed “Focus” and co-organized with Inês Ferreira. We invited an extraordinary lineup of speakers on topics our community was deeply interested in, such as education (João Couvaneiro, Filipe Jeremias [PT], Tomás Mello Breyner), artificial intelligence (François Pachet) and science (Joe Paton). We designed an interactive experiment to understand how attendees would interact with each other and with our partners. As a result — and post-event feedback clearly speaks for itself — we manage to create a highly engaging, more focused experience, in line with our audience’s expectations.
Rule of thumb: Focus on creating and cultivating your community. Learn about your community needs and figure out a way to solve them.
2018. Plussing the experience
After our third edition, we became a project of IEEE-IST Student Branch. I invited Inês Ferreira and Beatriz Lucas for the roles of main-organizer and co-organizer, respectively, and I continued helping the team.
We started looking for ways of adding new initiatives, as they are fundamental to build innovative, differentiated experiences to keep our local community engaged. We were inspired by Walt Disney’s concept of “plussing”, which is simply finding ways to deliver beyond what people expect. As long as you keep surprising people, they will never stop coming back. For example, the sunken submarine and sharks explosion sequence in Finding Nemo was a lot of fun, and the final shot with two birds sitting on the water completely plusses it—if you’re curious, check it here.
We took this idea and asked ourselves “how could we plus our presence in our local community?” Last year, we had found people needed a space to advance local discussions, express their innovative ideas and put them into action. So this year, we decided to organize smaller, immersive events — named (x)change hub — to get people together in person and exchange different perspectives. We focused on throwing higher energy events people wanted to be at, as opposed to ones they had to be at. Coordinated by Augusto Reis and Carina Barreto, we successfully organized a Meet-up @ Findmore Consulting (current partner), a guitar workshop by Mistah Isaac (past speaker) and a networking event with a group interested in hosting a TEDx in their university. This is just the tip of the iceberg! — if you don’t want to miss out, make sure you follow our social media, these events are sold out before you know it.
Rule of thumb: Plus every experience. Deliver beyond what people expect and people will always come back.
What’s next?
As we’re hitting our stride, our hard work is starting to pay off. We continue laser-focused on bringing you bold ideas worth spreading, either by amplifying our community’s stories, or by inviting speakers to share their personal experiences. We have new, enthusiastic community-minded partners with awesome initiatives to keep you engaged. For example, in this year’s edition, IEEE-IST Student Branch is taking over the task of innovating our event’s in-day experience — you’re going to love it!
We are inspiring others, creating meaningful experiences, and activating ideas like no other organization in Lisbon. Deep down, we are actively contributing to the change we want to see in our local community — but this is only the beginning. We have much more in store!
Thank you for reading.
Note: TEDxISTAlameda is not TEDxIST, which has been around for astonishing nine editions up-to-date! These are two independently organized TEDx events, each organized in its respective campus. In fact, we’re one of the few universities in the world which, due to the location of its campuses, has two TEDx events per year. This means, twice as much opportunities to change attitudes, behaviors and, potentially, the world! Two top-quality TEDx events are truly unprecedented for an enthusiastic community such as Instituto Superior Técnico.
We’re helping other organizations bringing TEDx events to their local communities! Feel free to contact us at team@tedxistalameda.com.
