How To Organize TEDx event ? TEDx IOE Pulchowk Experience

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vikrant-write

14 min readMay 11, 2024

One morning I was watching a TEDx video as usual when I suddenly realized, “How the hell does TED manage to organize so many events very frequently and globally?” So I started to google and find out “how and who organizes TEDx events”.

Following the search, I found an amazing blog on Eventbrite with the full process of how to get a license to organize a TEDx event.

I also got more information about license types and event types on the TED official website. It also made me clear that TEDx events are independently organized events by licensees across the globe. So I too applied for a TEDx license and organized the first TEDx IOE Pulchowk.

Many of the applications are rejected every month due to different reasons. I will try to cover all the aspects and help you understand how to get your license application accepted through this blog. Organizing events won’t be a big deal after you get a license. This blog will also help you understand the basics of event organization.

Getting The License

Since I was a student of IOE Pulchowk Campus, I thought a “university event” would be the best fit for me. So I applied for a license and filled out the application form from here.

Note: 98% of applications are rejected at this very first step.

So, you must be very careful while filing this application form and take as much time as it needs. The following fields, inside the form, should be filled in carefully:

1) Event Name

It must be unique and related to your location or university or something that represents a cause or change. This is very crucial as many people from the same university or place will also apply for a license.

Your name must be attractive enough. Good names are TEDx Dharhara, TEDx Bhaktapur, TEDx IOM, TEDx Karnali Bridge, etc while the bad names are TEDx Infinity, TEDx Unfold Ideas, TEDx Equality, etc. Don’t forget to mention very good reasons for selecting the name. It is fine if the description is long and detailed.

2) Describing The Venue

For TEDx, the quality of the event is very important. For a good quality event, the venue should be the best. So, while filling out the form please mention the possible venue as excellent places like 5 Star Hotels in our district and if it is your college, try to mention that your college has very high-quality event halls.

You don’t necessarily have to do the event in the same venue that you mentioned in the application form. So feel free to describe the event venue as cool and standard as possible, also include your ideas on how you are planning to decorate the venue with definite plans. It must let application reviewers believe that you care about the TED standard.

3) Talk Ideas ( Most important )

This is where most people make mistakes and get rejected. We all know every TEDx video is life-changing, and it cannot be a simple, general, or simply motivational idea. Please never try to copy-paste ideas from the internet or ChatGPT, the chances will be zero if you do so.

Go through types of talks well before you create ideas. Understand from there the ideas types and it will help you a lot to generate categorical ideas. Take 3 to 4 days or even more to collect ideas, the ideas that are real, definite, and unique. Most importantly, it must not be general and should be specific.

You will be asked to submit 3 ideas in the application form and there will be an extra field “More Ideas? Add them here!”. Please try to add 3 to 4 more ideas in this field. If the first 3 ideas are rejected, your more ideas field will be checked.

While mentioning the relevant speakers for each talk, please do mention names of people who have real ideas related to those topics instead of mentioning just the names of celebrities or famous people. TEDx believes that ideas must come from every corner. There are extremely talented people hidden in our societies who are underrated and not famous but might have great ideas, inventions, discoveries, or research to share. Try to find them and mention them.

In my case, I took 3 days to create and generate ideas and collected and refined them before submitting them. In those 3 days, I was so focused that I did not use a mobile or laptop. I just used to sit and write on paper, not in the note app or Google Docs, just a piece of paper.

Since I chose the university event, I mentioned the name of one alumnus, one professor, from my university, who has done great work in the respected field of ideas. Next, I mentioned something related to Nepal, my country, i.e. monks who stay on top of the mountains and do meditations in very extreme environmental conditions. Doing so I connected the event to my university and country uniquely. I also mentioned some very urgent and important issues of Nepal like “Citizens leaving this nation” and the possible research on its solution in Talk Ideas. Idea has a category “issue”. Mentioning at least one idea related to your local issue will help you get selected.

But remember, Ideas should be detailed, specific, and unique. General topics like “leadership”, “Startups success formula”, etc will not work here. The good ideas headlines are like “How the parents/relatives do brain drain their children to leave the country”, and “Getting enlightened at -10 degrees Celsius”, etc. Also, a detailed & definite description of each will be required in the form.

4) Your Goals

You will be asked to mention your goals in hosting a TEDx event. Please don't fill the space with “I want to learn and try something new. I want to build my resume. I am passionate about TEDx.” TEDx does not care what you want to learn. In fact, doing so will scare the TEDx team that you are experimenting with a TEDx license and you will seem to have selfish reasons.

Instead, mention goals like what changes you want to see in society or university or counter to make it a better place. Relate with your ideas and describe why you believe those ideas are important to be shared.

Also, even though it is not asked, mention why you are capable of doing this event in your goal field. Try to explain that you really want to do this event and will also maintain the TEDx standard in the event, explain that you have good leadership and event-organizing experience, and explain that you will do your best in inviting only the best speakers and cover best ideas for it. Doing so will increase your chances of selection by 50% because writing extra already shows you are extra hardworking and mentioning your genuine interest and capability in doing the event will make the application reviewer believe that you “really care about TEDx”.

Please don’t fill the form in a hurry and don't be lazy in filling the fields of the form. The more you describe the easier it will be for the application reviewer to understand you and your capability. Here “less is more” does not work. It’s not a social media caption or cold mail. It’s an application form that describes you and it must make it easy for them to accept you at once.

On December 1st I finally got the mail that my application had been reviewed but my ideas were related to startup and business only. Even though the ideas were specific all the ideas were from only 2 domains. So they asked me to submit more ideas from different domains. I did 3 more days of research and replied within the deadline with more ideas of different domains in the mail and explained again how serious I am about organizing this event in a reply email, even though it was not asked.

And I finally got the license after a few days, yippiee.

The email looked like this. It would contain a tentative event date but you can change that from your event page as per your plan.

Organizing TEDx Event

The next step was to organize the event just like any other event but with the highest possible quality maintained. So, here are the next steps I followed:

Announced the event with a marketing campaign and a promo video. We put papers with an X on them everywhere inside the college written with “X is coming” and recorded videos of people reacting to them. It created suspense and controversy inside the college. These clips were put into a video at the end of which reveals the name of event.
Made a team structure and department roles. Added 3 members without any interview as lead positions who could be trusted.
Define: We made social media pages and added few graphics and description in it.
Opened the application form for the Core Team, interviewed carefully, selected a team of 12 core members, and selected a few volunteers from the same applicants who couldn't make it to the core team. We did this with the help of digital flyers and A4-sized postures inside colleges. And we shared those everywhere. We opened applications for anyone from any level and any college to get diverse team members.
Did orientation of selected team members. Sent them their roles and added them to the WhatsApp community and social media groups.
Trained each department for a week.
Once everyone was ready to start, we automated the department's work and started overseeing the activities of departments, doing regular meetings to update, and helping those in need. We, organizers and initial members used to plan and strategize and give tasks to each department on a daily basis very definitely so that they don't get confused. We also used to do brainstorming meetings daily in the evening to let each department come up with new ideas.
After that, each department leader started their work with the help of volunteers like marketing, sponsorship(hardest of all), Curation, and many more.
The team of curators, who decides which ideas will be selected and who will be allowed to speak at the TED event is very important. Please choose the leader carefully otherwise it can destroy your event with boring speakers and ideas.
Selling tickets is another hardest part, I suggest opening a ticket 2 months before the event and using a famous ticket platform for it. In our case, it was the Khalti Digital Payment App that hosts most of the events in Nepal in its app.
Take a gap of a minimum of 3 months for preparing for an event. In our case, it was only 2 months and we got very little sponsorship and ticket sales were hard as hell until we tried very extreme marketing in the last 2 days to sell 100 tickets. We were lucky but not everyone is. Taking time to prepare is a good option.

Let each of your departments go through the Organizers Guide, provided by TEDx itself, on a regular basis to compare their work with TEDx standards. TEDx has many guidelines and rules, and if any of those are not followed, your license can be canceled and your videos won't be uploaded. So be careful not to miss any guidelines.

TEDx is a brand. To maintain its brand value you need to work very very hard. Your production team, curation team, marketing team, and all the team should contribute at least 4 hours a day to organize a good TEDx event. It depends on your leadership how you lead them and motivate them.

There are post-event works as well after you conduct the event. You will find those in the Organizers Guide. Please keep looking at the mail regularly. You will need to submit the email of all the attendees within 48 hours of your event date. So, collect email while selling tickets on any platform.

Tricks and Challenges

TEDx is all about TEDx speakers and their videos that go on YouTube. Making good videos is very hard and handled by the production team. Make a good team of production for it who lead this. But hire or partner with a production company who are expert at high-quality video recording. Only they can make no mistakes. Your own team won't be able to record videos from multiple angles and good lighting for a whole day event.

Try to make partners for everything. Partners are very helpful and can release most of the tension for payment. We made a Ticketing partner and hosted tickets without paying, we made Nepal’s most famous Film Studio college our our production partner who did recordings for our event, T-shirt partner for Tshirts, Media partners, Schwags partners who provide schwag to our audience, gift partners who provide gifts to our speakers, and many more.

Whatever you need, from schwags to money, try to find partners who can provide those for free. And in return give them marketing benefits. TEDx has good brand value and if you make good approaches in partnership, you will get enough partners. We even had an LED partner who provided us with LED, a Venue Partner who provided us with Venue, a Sound and Light Partner who provided us with speakers for free, and so on.

Leadership and Management

Managing a team requires good leadership and management. We used Trello and Miro to make goals and plans, WhatsApp community with multiple groups for respective departments, Discord for organized communication, and Google Sheets/Docs/Drive as workspaces. Using technology makes the management of multiple departments easier.

Regular meet and pushing the limits of department leaders is other important part of organizing the best TEDx event. Do regular meetings and motivate a team with visions like “how will our venue look like, who will be our speakers”, etc.

My Miro planning looked like this. For a detailed plan, I used Trello and for everyday task assignments and updates, we used multiple Google sheets.

The success of TEDx IOE Pulchowk

On February 21, 2024, TEDxIOE Pulchowk successfully hosted an event that became a melting pot of innovative ideas and inspiring stories. Held at the Jyapu Bhawan in Chyasal, Lalitpur, the event brought together diverse speakers, each sharing their unique perspectives, ideas, and experiences under the theme “Re-Engineering Ideas”.

The event was a huge success featuring 11 live TEDx talks, 3 performances, and 100 attendees from around the nation, with the help of 30 team members of TEDxIOE Pulchowk, and 50+ Partners.

The audience had the opportunity to experience this TEDx event with an amazingly designed Venue with awesome decorations, free schwag with a ticket i.e. T-shirt, Diarie, Pen, and Food ( Lunch and Cold drinks). There were photo booths and selfie spots at the venue as well which made attendees and guests record memories.

The videos of every talk and performance held here will soon be uploaded to the official TEDx YouTube channel which has 40.3M subscribers to date.

Speakers who shared Ideas at TEDxIOE Pulchowk:

Biplab Karki -> An IOE, Pulchowk Campus Alumni and a serial entrepreneur
Sumana Shrestha -> Member of the Federal Parliament of Nepal and a member of the Education, Health, and IT parliamentary committee
Suneera Regmi -> First women aerospace Engineer of Nepal
Khem Raj Lakai -> Advocate for the experiential journey with a degree in commerce and hospitality
Jane Dipika Garrett -> Miss Universe Nepal 2023
Dr. Bhawana Shrestha -> Distinguished educator, researcher, and advocate for emotional well-being.
Bipu Shrestha -> Founding member, Project Baja Member
Swagat Raj Pyakurel -> A visionary leader known for his expertise in innovation and entrepreneurship
Dr. Ramesh Paudel -> A distinguished economist and member of the National Planning Commission
Monty Desai -> Indian professional cricket coach who is currently the head coach of Nepal national team
Santosh Giri -> Youth Leader & Advisor | Kathmandu Metropolitan City