For my senior project, on October 27th, 2021, I hosted a speaking event at the conference room of the Springhill Suites in Rexburg, Idaho. I completed this project on behalf of Voice Advocacy, a non-profit organization that completes projects on behalf of the community. We featured guest speaker, Jason Coombs. He is the CEO and Founder of Brick House Recovery, best-selling author, and professional speaker.
The topic of the event was mental health and addiction, with efforts to reduce stigma and point attendees to community resources. My efforts involved finding a venue, securing sponsors, marketing, and advertising, emceeing the event, filming, and distributing a promotional video, distributing, and managing a registration form, and completing photography and videography at the event.
I was able to secure NAMI Idaho and Brickhouse Recovery as our sponsors to help fund and market the event. Originally the goal was to get around sixty people to the event. By the morning of the day of the event, we had 84 people registered! To our surprise, at the event, we had 87 people in attendance, with a few people who joined us through Facebook live.
This project helped me to continue to develop my strategic communication skills. I used persuasion skills and negotiation skills in my efforts to find the resources that we needed to make this event a success. I negotiated with venue managers in hopes to get a good price.
I used visual media skills to make advertising materials including the use of Canva, Adobe photoshop. I used video production skills to make the promotional video and summary video of the event. Video editing was completed using Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects.
Our guest speaker used the power of stories of lived experience to help impact change and continue to reduce stigma about mental health and addiction in our community.
____________Additional Materials
Time Breakdown:
- Secure Venue (3 hours)
- Design invitation and “Save the Date” for advertising (2 hrs)
- Negotiate and coordinate with sponsors (1 hour)
- Promotional video for social media (6 hrs)
- Advertising team meetings (2 hrs)
- Visit venue and meet with hotel manager to plan logistics (2 hrs)
- Create posts and distribute messages through social media advertising and email 1500 + students (3hrs)
- Prep, Run the event (4 hrs)
- Photography w/ editing of the event (4 hrs)
- Create a video summarizing the event (8 hrs)
- Edit full video of the entire event (20 hrs)
Total Hours Spent: 55 hours