Step-by-step guide

Do you want to get involved in Global Entrepreneurship Week but don’t know where to start? We’ve put together a step-by-step guide to organising an event

Audience and aims

Who do you want to engage in your Global Entrepreneurship Week activities? And what’s the aim of your event?

Before you start booking a venue and sorting the agenda, take a step back and think about what it is you actually want to achieve. Do you want to help women start-up businesses? Do you want to inspire students to think about entrepreneurship? Or maybe you want to develop people’s enterprise skills?

Theme

By adding a theme or focus to your event, it should help you engage the right audience. You could add a low-carbon theme to a competition you’re running, or a creative industries focus, or even theme the entire activity around reframing the recession as a time for entrepreneurial opportunity.

Type of activity

Think really carefully about the type of activity you want to run. You could run a competition, organise an entrepreneurial speaker to inspire participants, or a drop-in business advice day. What would appeal to your target audience? Also think about running activities that are high-impact. Read more

For ideas on what activities you can run, check out the Ideas Bank.

Partners

Now you’ve decided on who you’re trying to reach and the theme of your activities, start to think about which other organisations would be interested in getting involved. Working in partnership allows you to pool resources, knowledge and expertise. It also means you can reach a much bigger audience.

Sponsorship

In many ways ‘the rules’ for securing sponsorship are the same as those that make any partnership or relationship work. The starting point is to put yourself in the shoes of whomever you are seeking sponsorship from, to establish areas of mutual benefit, agree what success looks like up front, be accountable and then look after the little things really well.

If funding proves hard to secure, ask people for in-kind donations. A local business may provide free venue space, a drinks company may offer free refreshments, and a local printing company may produce your marketing materials at a reduced cost.

The details

Now it’s down to the nitty gritty!

Once you’ve put a budget together, you need to confirm a venue and then choose the catering. Do you need to provide lunch or dinner, or will refreshments do? You also need to think about microphones, lecterns, screens, projectors and sound. And remember, if a speaker is part of your activity be sure to organise their travel arrangements.

Invites

Once you’ve put together your invite list, you need to send out invitations. You can do this electronically via an email or newsletter, or you may want to produce printed invites. Invites should be sent out at least one month in advance, otherwise you’ll be scraping for attendees at the last minute! It’s also worth sending out a reminder email two weeks before.

You might want to think about using an online registration process such as www.eventbrite.com It allows you to publish and promote your activities online, and even takes payments for tickets if that’s what you need. All the invites are managed through the website, which means your inbox doesn’t get cluttered with replies!

Promoting your event

There are loads of free ways to promote your events…

Event registration

Remember to register your activities on this website! It will then become an official Global Entrepreneurship Week event and become part of the official events calendar. It will be promoted to media, government, young people, like-minded organisations and people all over the world.

The events registration will be available from August.

Social media and other digital tools

Social media is a great way of capturing interest for your event or activity, and because social media tools sit outside your normal website, it exposes your organisation to a new audience. Social media is also free to use and extremely easy to set-up. Once information is posted online, other blogs, twitter feeds, websites and social networking sites can pick up on it and pass on the information to hundreds of other people.

Write a blog: Blogs should be regularly updated with up-to-date news and information, and include photos, video and audio. You can set-up a free blog at www.wordpress.com or www.blogger.com

Set up a Twitter account: Twitter is like a web-based text message where you can update followers (contacts) with a short message. It can also be fed into any other social media pages you have, as well as your website. www.twitter.com

Get social networking: Think about your audience. What social networking sites do they use? Then set up a profile on sites such as myspace, bebo, facebook, linkedIn or xing.

Check out some other cool digital tools that can help you plan and promote your activities.

PR

Getting your event in the press can be pretty straight forward if you match your event to the right media or newspaper feature. Local newspapers, magazines and radio love featuring the local community and if something particularly interesting is happening like a Global Entrepreneurship Week activity, you’re even more likely to gain press attention. Inviting a local journalist to be a judge for your competition is also a sure fire way to get a write-up.

More ideas and top tips on how to promote your event