Hosting an educational panel discussion about a global development issue followed by information about your campus campaign both demonstrates the need for fair trade, maternal health, labor rights, and all other development issues globally, as well as motivates your friends, fellow students, faculty, and staff to join your campaign on your campus.
This toolkit will help you organize and facilitate a fantastic panel discussion and action planning workshop on your campus—an event which features expert speakers, and brings together a diverse group of students, student organizations, and members of the community. AID students have successfully used this toolkit to coordinate hundreds of events. Follow the steps below; adjust pre-written scripts, invitations, e-mails and poster templates; use the publicity strategies; and HAVE FUN!
Here's our eight-step guide to organizing a film screening to help link individuals into your carbon neutral campus campaign or UEA city campaign:
Step 1 –Reserve a room or space.
Step 2 – Recruit great speaker(s).
Step 3 – Get the word out.
Step 4 –Prepare for the event.
Step 5 –Host speaker or panel presentation.
Step 6 – Host take action workshops.
Step 7 –Wrap up.
Step 8 –Take further action!
Consider a variety on venues: classrooms, auditoria, and lecture halls are perfect locations. Another idea is to try community institutions—such as a public libraries, churches, high schools, town centers, mosques, and synagogues.
The procedures for reserving space differ from place to place. Many institutions have online room registration forms, or perhaps you will need to file paperwork at the student affairs office. You may need the permission of an academic department. The whole process can be much easier if you find a student or community group, academic department, or dean to co-sponsor the event with you.
Here is a template email for approaching co-sponsors to help secure a space for your event.
Once you’re reserved a room, register your event with us. We’ll schedule to have your DVD available for your date and set aside a mini-grant of up to $50 for you to cover the cost of your event (click here for a sample mini-grant budget).
STEP 2 —Recruit a Panel of Speakers or a Keynote
Remember to invite three to four times as many speakers as you hope to have at your event. Here are some ways that you can identify speakers at your university or other nearby colleges:
1) Go to the relevant academic departments (e.g. Politics, Law) and browse through the lists of scholars.
2) Google for "visiting scholars" and "global" to try to identify relevant visiting scholars, since they may not be listed on the regular websites.
3) See if there is a university expert or database, usually called a "Media Guide." You might find something like http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/features/experts.
4) Often, it is helpful to go to faculty office hours. Explain that you are organizing an informational panel discussion followed by workshops during which students can choose to take action in the community as a part of a nationwide series and ask them if they have ideas of qualified speakers. When contacting people they recommended, make sure to mention the referring professor's name at the outset of your email.
5) Send out invitations: Here is a template you can use to invite a speaker. We encourage you to call the speaker first. If they answer, ask what their preferred way of receiving a speaking invitation is. If they don't answer, just leave a message saying that you're sending an invitation. Remember to follow up in three to five days if you haven’t heard back yet from the speaker.
1) Distribute posters and flyers. Click here for a poster template.
- Don’t waste time with bulletin boards! Flyers on bulletin boards will be covered in a matter of days, if not hours. Put your flyers someplace they’ll get noticed.
- Do flyer in unorthodox places. Bathrooms, tables, the ground, building entrances, lounges, etc. are the best places to put your flyers. If it’s a strange place to put a flyer—it’s probably a good one!
- Don’t flier too far in advance. Your flyers will probably just get ripped down or covered. Try to start flyering about a week and a half in advance.
- Do flyer with all your energy the morning of your event.
- Don’t hesitate to e-mail groups or departments that seem unrelated. Reach out to new groups—Greek houses, campus ministries, student groups, and academic departments—to engage more people in global issues.
- Do stand at the entrance to your campus’s busiest dining hall or student center at lunchtime. Spend just half an hour handing out quarter sheets at the entrance and reach hundreds of students.
- Don’t forget to put flyers in the community. Use tables or bulletin boards at local shops, bookstores, music stores, and cafes.
- Do choose two large lectures to make announcements at on the day of your event. Show up ten minutes early to ask the professor if you can make a 30 second announcement before class.
- DO MAIL MERGE! Consult our guide online at http://www.aidemocracy.org/mailmerge.doc for sending personalized e-mails to your lists of contacts.
2) Submit a press releases 1 week and again 2 days before the event. Click here for a sample press release templates. If you need to fax the release, you can email Autumn with the number and we will fax it there for you. A great resource for finding press office fax numbers (and the tool that we use) is Newspapers Online. Then call to remind the press outlet of your event the days before. Click here for a sample phone script.
3) Send emails or "e-flyers" to relevant professors and student groups. Here's an email flyer you can send out to your listservs. Click here for an email template to send to professors or other student group leaders so that they can mention the event in their classes and meetings. AID will even distribute emails widely for you using our mail merge capabilities—just ask us!
4) Create a Facebook event and invite your friends. Paid Facebook ads also work. Need AID’s logo? Download a web-version here.
5) Put your event in the calendar of events. Find your newspaper contact at Newspapers Online. Since community calendars fill up quickly it is vital that you put your event in early. When corresponding via email be sure to put “Event for community Calendar-INSERT DATE” in the headline. Once you have attained contact information and have spoken to someone be sure to follow up with an email or phone confirmation especially 2 days before your event and the day of.
6) Class announcements, dorm meetings, dinner conversations or table tents, phone calls.
7) For other effective tactics, go to Part II of the organizing toolkit and click on the link “Publicity.”
STEP 4 — Prepare for the Event
Arrange for campaign members to manage small tasks during the event so that everything proceeds smoothly.
1) E-mail each of your speakers one week prior to the event to confirm. Click here for a speaker confirmation e-mail template.
2) Prepare action workshops: In collaboration with other campaign members, talk about what you can do on your campus or in your community to make a difference: How can students take what they learned at the event and become involved with greening the campus, pushing for carbon neutrality on campus, or engaging with the city to pass the Urban Environmental Accords. It’s essential that the discussion moves beyond the panel and discussion and results in student action. We have generated a list of actions you can choose to engage in as well as discussion guides to help you and fellow organizers lead informational and planning workshops after your speakers have presented. (For additional guidance, read Step 6.)
3) Prepare Introduction Speech & Closing Remarks: You may need to “Google” for a brief biography of your speaker(s) if you have one. You can follow this template.
4) Refreshments: Someone should acquire and set up snacks, drinks, or other small edibles. Keep the receipts so that you can be reimbursed if you were allotted a mini-grant. Be sure to provide something vegetarian as well as possibly something kosher or halal. Remember a few bottles or glasses of water for your speaker(s).
5) Put up signs on the door of the building, elevators, long hallways, etc to help people find your event.
6) Set-up a welcome table with a sign-in sheet, one page informational sheets on AID, and other information about action campaigns you’ve downloaded from our website and would like to share. Once the event starts, pass the sign-in sheet around the room to make sure you get a record of everyone who was present.
7) Equipment: Nothing is more embarrassing than having a hall full of people and not being able to get the DVD player, projector, or microphone to work. Make sure any equipment you need is ready to roll before guests arrive.
8) Document the event: Assign someone to take pictures if the press does not send a photographer. We'd love to see your photos as well, so send them to us.
9) Designate at least one chapter representative to sit near the front so they can quickly stand up at the end, say thanks, and open the floor to questions and/or discussion.
STEP 5 — Host Speaker or Panel Presentation
1) Greet our speaker(s), clarify any questions you have about their bios for your brief introductions, and confirm your expectations with them (ex: for a panel ask them to each speak for 7 minutes, for a keynote ask him or her to limit themselves to 15-20 minutes).
2) Get started: If people are still shuffling in when you’re scheduled to start, you can wait for a bit, but limit yourself to a 10 minute delay.
3) Introduce your speaker(s): Please reference our template introduction so you can incorporate our introduction to AID as an organization for those who are not familiar.
4) Enjoy the presentations: Use hand signals or signs (2 minutes left, 1 minute left, time to stop) to keep speakers to their time limit.
5) Q&A: After your keynote or panel discussion, thank the speaker(s) and ask if they’re willing to take a few questions. Call on individuals with questions (if there are a lot of hand, call on two people at a time so the panel can answer two questions at once). Thank your speakers again when you’re ready to wrap up.
6) Action workshop(s): Invite your audience to choose one of the action workshops you’ve planned so they can learn more about how to get involved with the campaign on your campus.
STEP 6 – Take action workshops
These workshops should serve two purposes: They should give students an opportunity to discuss the issues and the campaign further in depth, and then, take this knowledge and learn how to apply it to the campaign. You can help facilitate the workshop by both introducing some of these questions, answer questions about your campaign, and leading the trainging part of the workshop.
For the first part, here are some discussion questions: What are the links between local and global development? Between maternal health in your local community and those around the globe? How does trade influence you each day? Are these influences empowering and/or inclusive for all people involved? How does AID’s development campaign address these different issues? How can students get involved?
For the skills building part of the workshop, you can focus on a number of different topics: messaging, press releases, media contact, building coalitions, publicity, etc. These workshops are essentially how-to guides that give students skills to wage effective campaigns. The AID staff member at the conference can direct this part, or contact sam@aidemocracy.org for more information.
Done? Excellent work! Now you can look back nostalgically on all that labor and look ahead eagerly to the next event. First take some time to decompress, and then:
- 1. Debrief with your group and cosponsors: How did the event go? What worked well and what would you do differently next time? Fill out an event report form at http://www.globalscholar.org/event_report/
- 2. Mail in your reimbursement form and sign-in sheets (AIDemocracy, 701 Cathedral Street, Suite L3, Baltimore, MD 21201)
- 3. Write a letter to the editor to a local newspaper. Send us a letter in progress for editing and feedback. Click for an example letter to the editor written by an AID organizer in the past.
- 4. Follow up with a thank-you note to volunteers and speakers. Sample thank you template available here.
1. Set-up a campus campaign on one of the development campaigns:
Hopefully this panel discussion demonstrated the influence your campus can have on the international community beyond your campus. If you haven’t already, we hope you’ll start a campaign on one of the development campaigns. There is a comprehensive toolkit that details the fundamentals of planning and running a campaign available just for you!
Additionally, AID offers specific organizer’s toolkits and mini-grants for the following events that you can use as steps along your campaign goal.
2. Consider other campaigns we’re supporting this year:
- Global Development: Run a mini-campaign on an issue varying from HIV/AIDS to fair trade, from maternal and child health to potable water, and from debt relief to environmental sustainability
- Global Health: Prevent Malaria with $10 bed-nets, Birg-dog along the ‘08 campaign trail about HIV/AIDS treatment internationally, and more!
- Global Environment: Get your administration to sign onto becoming a carbon neutral campus or get your mayor to sign on the Urban Environmental Accords.
- Global Peace & Security (Hope Not Hate): Increase cross-cultural awareness and open dialogue about human insecurity, peacekeeping, and nuclear proliferation to name only a few.
3. Setup an AID chapter on your campus!
AID offers an unparalleled number of resources for college students who are interested in bringing the world home to their campuses. When you set up or join an AID chapter, you become a part of a national youth movement of tens of thousands of young people that are working together to promote a U.S. role in the world that is appropriate for our increasingly interdependent world.