Being an active member of a music association sometimes brings interesting challenges. One of the best was The Night of Music, a one-off festival to celebrate the association's 110th anniversary.
A special steering committee and several subcommittees were formed to plan and run this huge event. I was asked to sit on the steering committee, and on top of that to chair the PR & Sponsoring subcommittee.
PR & Sponsoring
The subcommittee I chaired carried three tracks at once: getting the word out, funding the event, and keeping everyone in the loop.
Public relations
- Social media
- Local media, papers and TV
- General advertising
- The festival website
- Posters and flyers
Sponsoring
- Setting up the sponsor framework
- Creating the sponsor book
- Landing sponsors and sponsor deals
- The event flyer
- Other sponsor outings, flags and banners
Internal communication
- Monthly updates to everyone taking part
- Meetings with the core members
On the steering committee
The main committee bore responsibility for the whole project, but each member also picked up roles that went beyond their own subcommittee. For me that meant:
- Layout and design of the festival terrain
- General input on the stage design
- Main coordination during the event itself
- Entrance and payments
A festival is the one project where the deadline is a single evening, and everything you planned for months either works that night, or it doesn't.
From the first sponsor pitch to coordinating the floor on the night, The Night of Music was a crash course in turning a hundred moving parts into one evening that felt effortless from a seat in the crowd.