Below are some of the best events I’ve played a role in facilitating. Be sure to check out the calendar as well for future events that I will be organizing and executing.
Denver Sad Girls Club – 2017 #WCW
Our first ticketed event, this was a fun, casual mixer to give local members the opportunity to meet one another and make connections. The event was marketed around the hashtag “#WCW” meaning “Woman Crush Wednesday.” As a female-aligned organization, this was cute and creative.
Through the securing of sponsorships and trades, we reserved the popular coffee shop/bar Bellwether for an evening of drinks, games and prizes. We utilized local businesses within the group and the Denver area to create swag bags for every guest that included some great items and discounts exclusively for members. This was a great opportunity for local businesses to gain new leads and we supported another female owned business in town via the venue.
During the event we had an organized “speed meet,” similar to speed dating but platonic and with girlfriends! The event went off without a hitch, everyone received a swag bag and we sold out! Not only did we max out on attendance, but more gals tried to come after we had gotten started as well. We called it a success!
Savor Dallas 2016 – #ShakenandStirred
One of FleishmanHillard’s newer clients, Savor (owned by Crowdsource, operated by Dallas Morning News) is a food and wine festival in Dallas. The event has been running over over 10 years and aims to bring together Texas’ finest wine, food and spirits to the echelon of the community. However, recently, the client’s focus is to bring more millenials to the event and improve their social presence. While I played various roles in helping FH prepare for the entire event (a four day festival), I was also on-site for one of the millenial-centered events, Shaken and Stirred. My job, with my partner Alyssa Delz, was to create social posts for Savor Dallas’ Instagram account in real time. My personal goal was to create beautiful photos for the client to use and learn from as they continue moving into their social landscape. Here are examples of our posts from that night:
While we are still waiting on a recap of the different nights and how Instagram fared, overall we did see a several hundred growth on the platform, breaking 2,000 followers. We also saw a steady flow of about 15% increase in engagement on each photo during the festival. The photos were taken on my iPhone and edited by me, they turned out pretty nice for a dimly lit event space, don’t you think? 😉
Fort Worth Opera: Social Media Night
In the past, FWOpera has hosted a Social Media Night during one of the last rehearsals of one our their productions. The point of this is to create some online buzz about the festival as it approaches. In order to achieve this, we had another intern reach out to social media gurus and local reporters to invite them to our SMN. I created our digital collateral to invite them and then took over the project, reaching out to these individuals myself. Through trying to create a relationship, she were able to get a lot of people out at the event and we think they had a lot of fun.
For this event I designed several things (some of which will be on the writing samples page) but above you can see both the DM SMN invite and the e-mail version that we sent to all of our prospective guests. The DM was sent primarily through Twitter with a few Instagram accounts mixed in. Above, you can see the responses we received from that night as well as some of our own posts. I was in charge of running the Twitter (the majority of the night) so I have provided those examples, but we also used Instagram. Overall, our guests seemed to have a lot of fun and really enjoyed the experience.
Fort Worth Opera: Open House
The Fort Worth Opera is known for not only its amazing productions, but also for its ability to involve the community. This year we decided, for the first time ever, to host an open house at Bass Hall a week or so before the festival kicked-off. This was an experiment for us and we weren’t sure how successful it would be, but we knew we wanted to find a unique way to involve the community (low-income to business man) in a fun and interactive way…that would also hopefully bring in a few ticket sales.
For this event I designed three different print collateral pieces and two digital. We spent the morning passing out flyers to people walking around Sundance Square, we did lots of promotion on our social media platforms, and the rest was word of mouth. At least a couple hundred people wandered through the halls of Bass Hall during our very short event. We had performers, swag, photo booths, and lots of yummy treats which everyone seemed to enjoy. Aside from collateral, I created and hosted an Instagram Scavenger Hunt during the event. The winner received two tickets to La Traviata on opening night. It was a real success, we had several people participate and most of them finished the challenge. By the end of the night we sold about 20-50 tickets and were told by dozens that this was an amazing opportunity, because they usually could not afford to ever be inside Bass Hall. This event was a lot of fun and something we will be continuing.
Big D Reads Festival at Klyde Warren Park
The final celebration for our Big D Reads selection True Grit was a massive event at Klyde Warren Park on April 25. We took over KWP and really made a splash with tons of interactive programming, all kinds of performance, several photo opportunities, and of course books! We had a great turn out for this event and an event better amount of engagement. Throughout the month we had over 60 events, I’ve cherry-picked some of the best/ones I was really engaged in for this page. If you would like to see more pictures from our events check out our Facebook page here.
This event was fantastic and pretty much everything we were working towards. We handed out dozens, if not hundreds of books to people enjoying their day at KWP. I worked closely with Krista to get our special guests, Bacon the Piglet, Nelson the Goldendoodle, and Walter the Wolfhound. I attended meetings with KWP to coordinate everything and ensure a smooth event. My project for this event that I worked on solo was finding, contacting, securing, and coordinating vendors for the event. Krista had a goal of six booths and despite a lot of obstacles, I was able to secure eight. We had different literacy groups and nonprofits from around Dallas to not only share their organizations with the community, but also to continue promoting literacy. I created a lot of collateral for this event and managed our social media throughout.
EY Presents: Western Dallas Festival
To kick-off Big D Reads this April we hosted an event on the Continental Avenue Pedestrian Bridge. This event was intended to be completely organic with no real set schedule for programming, no tickets, not absolute time frame. The idea was to just get out there and interact with the community. We invited schools to perform, creature enthusiasts, clowns, face painters, and more. Through all of this came an evening filled with fun and the opportunity to hand out dozens of copies of True Grit to the public.
I was given the task of not only running our booth and social photography, but I also helped Krista with the logistics come event day. Leading up to this event we had a ton of planning, canvassing, and gathering to do. I spent several days walking around Dallas trying to convince local business owners to put our flier for the event in their window. This may sound easy enough, but most districts in Dallas are owned by a blanket corporation that make the decisions. I tried working with Trinity Groves to make this happen, but did not succeed. Determined to get the word out there, I began to bypass the e-mail cycle and start persuading the business owners personally. This proved to be very fruitful and led me to suggest we put together a database of apartment complexes in the area and focus on those communities next. We implemented this and had a fantastic turnout at our event.
House of DIFFA No. 25
DIFFA is a nonprofit in Dallas fighting against AIDS. Every year the group hosts a fashion show with a silent auction. This event is their primary annual fundraiser and is a show that no one in fashion (in Dallas) wants to miss. This year the show had a large focus on popular pop icons, fun prints, and the theme of unity. The jackets seen throughout the show were up for silent auction.
My role in this was primarily logistics and social photography. Before the event, we hosted a media preview party where I shadowed a photographer and took down names. I later helped catalog those names so that they could be sent out to publications. At this event, I was in charge of checkin in media and directing them to their proper places. It was also my job to communicate to the rest of the group to get questions answered and problems solved.
Lauren Cecilia Mims 