With just over 3 weeks to go, you’ll no doubt have a lot of event logistics to prepare for, but this is a critical moment to take a step back and assess your team’s capacity and event momentum.
Focus #1: Maximise your team & task delegation
Do you have enough capacity in your coordinating team to achieve your event objectives? As event coordinators, remember to avoid falling into the trap of doing all the organising yourselves. Now is the time to focus on addressing capacity gaps. Here are some tips:
- Make it easy for new volunteers to take on tasks by writing role and task descriptions (check out the resource “Dividing up tasks and coordinating jobs in a mobilization” here).
- If your team is short on capacity, are there allies you can turn to for help? It could be a friendly union, a church group or a partner NGO, or friends.
- Make calls, direct WhatsApps or messages, or go visit people – don’t just rely on emails.
Focus #2: Build event momentum
Is your event gaining a sense of momentum and exciting people to get involved? Here are some tips to make sure your event is building up a steam of momentum:
- Use multiple outreach strategies: It can take someone seeing/hearing about an event 2 or 3 times before they usually decide to join in. –> Speak to university classes, door knock, hold market stalls, social media, email lists, postering, radio.
- The power of allies/partners: If someone receives the same email or message asking them to join your event from different email lists, they start to feel like everyone is getting involved, and they won’t want to miss out.
- Make your event politically and locally important. You want to build anticipation – how are you making your event the most important thing anyone could be doing on September 8th? Rise for Climate sits in the sweet spot of thinking globally, and acting locally – you want to maximise that sweetness.
- Get up a blog connecting Rise for Climate to your local political context, engage local thought leaders on it through social media
- If it is safe to do so where you are organising, can you lay down a challenge to your local leader(s) and get some media coverage of you doing so?
It might hard to judge at this point how many people will join your event, but trust that if you are doing lots of outreach and momentum building, you will see a dramatic upsurge in the number of people that decide to come to your event in the last 2 weeks. Charge on!!