Tuesday, August 21, 2007

disaster strikes....

My first experience with an event crisis has come.....and is still there, but passing. The website which I have been furiously working on for the last three weeks - along with all my website material - has crashed and burned. Note to self - always keep your material backed up. That is the lesson for this week. So the site and contract with site manager hasn't exactly worked out, which is a minor setback in operational terms, but greatly hinders sponsorship potential.

As such, I have to remake the This is Not Art website. Because of personal time constraints and the festival looming just around the corner, I have made the decision to use the website from last year, but update it with the 2007 material and look. The reasons for this is mainly from a promotional perspective. TINA and the four major sub-festivals: Electrofringe, Critical Animals, Sound Summit and the National Young Writers Festival, each have a huge amount of sponsors - all of which need to be featured on the website right now and on all printed and promotional material that has already started going out. Not a good practice when trying to lure future sponsors if their logo's aren't even featured!

As well as this, everything else from what's on, to program descriptions, accommodation, dining and transport, all need to be covered in the next week. This way, the site will be fully operational for three weeks prior to the event, which should be a sufficient time. Bearing in mind I am not a graphic designer or website designer, this has definitely taught me to step up and go that step further than my usual, writing comfort zone.

Unfortunately, this also puts everything else I have been doing on the backburner, which, frankly, can't be there. The Bike Corral which I am organising has a huge amount of work that needs to be done. Briefly this includes:
- doing a spare parts drive on radio and the local media
- sourcing material for the actual premises -eg- star pickets, hessian etc.
- doing a risk assessment for the Bike Corral as a whole
- Getting and using banner making equipment
- Making up survey forms for people to give their details as the come in for a bike/workshop
- Promotional of the Bike Corral and TINA through local media
- Organising three working bees to fix up bikes
- Organising a committee of volunteers to help on the event
- and the actual running of the event - what, when, where, how.

Basically there is a lot that needs to be done and not working on it is simply not an option. I'm not sure what part of this list should be the priority, that is, what I should be working on first. As far as I can see, everything on that list is needed for the Bike Corral to run successfully. So, I think I will make up a gantt chart to help me get this into a timeline perspective.

Important lesson - I need to multitask. I think I will just throw myself in headfirst and let loose. Here goes........

Allyson.