The Snappy Christmas Concerts were the showpiece of the year for TVMS. It comprised of over 3000 students, from 24 schools, across 4 venues in Teesside and is the largest and most popular series of events in the TVMS calendar. Naturally, the week-long event requires considerable planning to ensure it is successful. I was a member of the event planning team for this event and my responsibilities were to book the venues and set up an e-ticketing service where people could purchase tickets to the events.
To reflect on my experience working on this high-profile event I will use Driscoll’s What Model (2007). His framework is simple to understand and asks three simple questions: What? So what? Now what?
What?
I communicated via phone call and subsequently followed up by email on booking venues for the concerts to take place at. I followed a specific brief: the venues had to hold a capacity of 2000 minimum, there had to be sufficient car parking facilities and the booking fee couldn’t exceed 30% of the sale of each ticket sold. To meet the e-ticketing requirement I researched a number of online services such as Eventbrite and Billeto and came to the decision to use Billeto as their online transaction fees were considerably less than the competition. I was given guidance by my colleagues in the finance and admin departments on what ticketing system would work as we collectively made a decision on the price of each ticket to ensure we could cover the costs and still make a profit. The overall experience was extremely positive as I secured most venues I wanted to book and set up the e-ticketing account with very little difficulty.
So What?
The e-ticketing system was extremely successful as customers could book and pay for tickets on the secure Billeto site with ease. It was a huge relief for me personally as I had spent weeks researching and trailing different ticketing options and was concerned the site would crash or the transaction fees would be too high but thankfully the system I choose was a success. Snappy Christmas was the first event that utilised e-tickets. Before this, paper tickets were produced which was very costly. The management were very happy with the ticketing process and have agreed to permanently switch to e-ticket for all future events.
Now what?
Reflecting on this experience, I believe my role in organising the event was a success. I had difficulty initially booking venues with the process taking a lot longer than I had thought it would but it was certainly worth the effort as the majority of venues I contacted agreed to my terms and we secured the bookings. Perhaps, one small improvement that could be made next time would be to factor in additional time to secure venues as the deadline was fast approaching when I secured the first booking. Thankfully, I secured tree over venues quickly after that.
Very often, reflective models are used for experiences that are negative and to highlight improvements that could be made. In this case however, after reflecting on the event, there was a positive outcome and I was happy for the experience to collaborate in a small team and to have an impact on the success of the event.
