Photos courtesy of Pamela Lynne Sorensen and Katelyn Gowling.
If I could only list three…
1. Venue
2. Audience
3. Take some shots
1. The venue is everything. Choose either the hottest spot that your audience will want to go out of their way to be at or go with their already favorite, close by, Friday night spot. Not only is location key but you also want the venue to reflect the type of party you’re looking for: small and intimate vs. open space and very social, sitting drink in hand or body on the dance floor? This may seem obvious but last year I reserved a space and a night that turned out to be a little too low key for our Spring Break Escape party. It’s easy to assume that the party will form itself.
2. Your audience demands a certain type of party. Ask them what they want. Then deliver.
3. This could also be seen as bad advice. BUT if you planned your event right, formed a committee, delegated responsibilities, and had a great turn out then why not party too? And hey, if your party sucks, throw one back and cheers to next years’ event…event planning wouldn’t be a profession if just anyone could throw a great party.
Events, events, events. That’s how College Media is going to build a relationship with its audience. And so we did! Last Thursday we threw a hot summer party at Santa Fe Café. And yes, it was hot.
About two months ago I knew we were ready for another party. There’s just this itch I get where I’m like “I need to make sure college students know who we are.” What was so cool was that now that we’re on our sixth issue, students did know us.
So to get started on the party planning, we chose our location: College Park. It's where we have the largest, most concentrated audience, so it's the best place for us to set the standard for our event reputation.
So how did the party turn out? We had awesome decorations, all fitting with the red hot theme—red lamps hanging above our table, red candies, red mardi gras beads, a sick looking red banner (props to Ruben for making that happen) and the red hot chili pepper piñata. Yes, I said it, piñata, filled with two very important resources for students: condoms and candy. The health center on campus even donated the condoms!
Students were wearing the beads, signing up for the raffle and getting to know College mag. There were probably over 500 students there. The best part—we had College mag photographers there as paparazzi for the night. This was key for tying in our website, so now the night’s evidence is online at collegemagazine.com…pretty sneaky eh?
As I’m taking a College magazine shooter with our editors, Brian, Ashley and Ian and then another College mag shooter with Anna, and then another with, wait, I can’t remember, I thought to myself, wow, I may be out of the college scene, but this is great party.
Stay tuned to my post on the key to event planning.