Tying It All Together

Hi Everyone!


This is my first blog for the semester. Over the last few weeks I have been working alongside a friend who studies events management at ECU to organise and execute an awareness building and fund raising event for Youth Focus. Youth Focus are a West Australian based not for profit organisation who provide services and support for young adults (aged 12-18) who are showing early signs of depression. They provide free counselling services, camps and mentoring services.

My events management friend has been working in Burswood for the previous two years, and served in a few of Youth Focus’ Gala Ball corporate events. He wanted to get involved with the organisation, and with his passion for events and knowing that I had experience in public relations he proposed we create an event for Youth Focus. We met up with the Business Manager for Youth Focus and he was keen to take us on.

I am very excited to work towards the final event, and to see it all come together successfully in the end (fingers crossed!). So far we have been meeting a lot of people who have experience in this line of work to gain insight and to take from their own experiences. We met with the founder of Movies by Burswood, as we will most probably be using this location, and have spoken to friends who have been involved in similar events.

At this stage we are focusing on research and weighing up our options. Originally the concept was “Perth’s Biggest BBQ”, however we realised that this did not have enough “pull” factor to get our target market there on the day. Then we thought about surfing on the “flash mob” craze with a 2-hour Zumba challenge. We contacted a few Zumba instructors and one lady was particularly keen. However, we weren’t certain that it would get the type of people we wanted down on the day. We have been surveying friends and family on what they would come down to see, and most people said that seeing a well known band would be the most appealing. Knowing this, my events management friend and I are meeting this Wednesday to email potential local bands that are relatively well-known. In addition to this, we would still have the barbeque, have food stalls, face painting and circus acts (who we have contacted from the Fremantle Circus School).

So far it has been quite a slow process to get any concrete ideas, but we expected that knowing it was the first event we have organised by ourselves. Youth Focus are very excited to get young people on board. The business manager was particularly keen on having students on board who knew the ins and outs of social media. We hope that this will be the most influential means of promotion.

If you have any suggestions on the concept in general I would love to hear from you!

I hope all of your placements are going well.

Thanks,

Renae