Background
Iterating from the social held in June, I planned another programme-wide social for students and staff on courses in Culture & Enterprise Programme: Applied Imagination, BA and MA CCC, MA Innovation Management, MA Arts and Cultural Enterprise, and the MBA. The planning was very involved as I wanted to accommodate and welcome members from the part-time hybrid courses of MBA and MA ACE, who only meet monthly for weekend-long sprints. This led to the original date of Thursday, 10 November. Tube strikes resulting in total tube shut-down on November 10th meant scrambling and postponement to Monday the 14th.
Planning was once again complicated by the need to go through programme director Richie Manu for any of the tangibles (course timing to decide dates, room availability, communication, catering, etc) because I as a student have no access or power. Because Richie is so busy, this meant all communications took a long time and persistence. The benefits of working with Richie are that he was willing to persist as well to make it happen and use Culture & Enterprise budget for the catering. The benefits of these spaces to get together are continually wanted and called for in communications with students (see discussion at the Breakfast Club).
With feedback from MBA alum Ve Dewey (who I met at the previous social), I communicated directly with new MBA course leader Harah Chon as I had been hearing particular frustration from MBA students about isolation within the school. She was particularly excited by the social as she is also trying to find opportunities for her students to interact with CSM more and MBA students had good representation at the social.
Invite
After reading a New York Times article about a new online invitation platform, Partiful, I decided to use it instead of the more standard platform Eventbrite for the invite for this event. It’s designed to be more mobile-friendly with a moving responsive design and has easy clickable response options. Graphic designer Alec Emmons designed the graphic for the Partiful invite specifically.
With 58 responses there was a hearty appetite and more engagement than with the previous social. The breakdown of responses by course was fairly proportional to course size, with more representation from Applied Imagination to be expected with multiple verbal invitations: 15 MAAI, 8 MBA, 8 BA CCC, 6 MA CCC, 13 MAIM, 8 MAACE.
Lower uptake by BA CCC is an interesting thing to note as I also have less access and overlap with those BA courses, meaning they did not receive WhatsApp peer-to-peer invites. This also is indicative of a wider BA/MA siloing in the university.
Discussing the invitation with a BA CCC student who did not know about the event, she said she just hadn’t seen anything about it as she doesn’t check her email often and is overwhelmed by the emails when she does. She suggested physical posters in the future to better engage her and her undergrad classmates.
Though I provided the copy for the email, I had no role in what it looked like when the email was sent out.
I did send the Partiful invite out to people I knew in MA ACE, MA CCC, MA IM, and MBA via WhatsApp. I have envisaged using networks of Course Reps for peer-to-peer information distribution, particularly given my role as School Rep. However, because of organizational discrepancies in the Arts SU information management, by the time the social happened, I didn’t have access to many Course Reps within C&E to begin to forge such connections. Instead, groundwork is being laid for the future for such possibilities and I have been making sure all the courses are known and listed in the Arts SU database.
Information distribution is a real issue and part of this project in general. People can only come to events if they are aware of them.
Set-Up
I arrived an hour early to fold tables out of the way and arrange chairs around the perimeter of the room and tidy away piles of messy supplies at the entrance. Catering came and we made some last-minute adjustments to the amounts of water pitchers available and glassware and I helped set up the table. There were vegan and vegetarian sandwiches and wraps, adjusted after the last social’s plethora of bowls of snacks that had gone uneaten. I was not consulted about this. The sandwiches quickly were eaten and there were no snacks for people who arrived late. I discussed with Richie that a combination would be better in the future.
We had some technical difficulties logging into the new computer system to get the sound set up, meaning that there wasn’t music for the first 20 minutes of the social until a tech person could arrive.
I also set a table near the entrance for name tags, wanting that to be the first thing people did upon entering.
The Social
In response to feedback from students after the last social about missing nametags from earlier socials, one of the key elements was nametags again. It’s a simple gesture, but in line with Priya Parker’s guidance in The Art of Gathering, by asking each person who came in to identify themselves with their name, course (affinity to each other) and interests (talking points), was in a broader sense marking a threshold shift and inviting a transformation from the outside world into the self-contained social space.
It also was an action to perform upon entering, allowing me to welcome each person and identify the purpose of the gathering through the instructions about the name tags. By putting the focus on self-identification to make it easier for other people to know you, it conditions people to become other-oriented, to participate in co-creating a social environment through generous visual self-projection.
In simpler terms, it is also an ice-breaker.
But these seemingly simple gestures have profound effects, and over the course of the two hours, people understood the purpose of the social and were connecting in many different configurations. When there was stagnation, I sometimes stepped in to facilitate. For example, two students from Applied Imagination came who I knew were shy and standing together near the entrance. I invited them to try to talk to at least one other person each at the party, and they did, beaming happily at me a little later.
After technical difficulties, classmate Sujay Sood also played music over the room speakers for the event, adjusting via requests from Richie.
I monitored the drink and food table, occasionally tidying and setting out more glasses.
Over the course of the evening, around 50 people came through.
I didn’t get to have many in-depth conversations myself because hosting means keeping track of what is going on, welcoming people, and facilitating. But I did hear from several people how glad they were for the event, how warm the environment was, how excited they were to connect with each other, and how interesting the people and conversations were. One of the staff said that this was the first time he was getting to spend any informal time with students in over 3 years.
As has been discussed elsewhere, measuring the impact of community-building events is complicated. An article about Evaluation in Community Development acknowledges as much, saying “there is no simple, universal, magic solution to the challenge of measuring community development impacts.” As discussed by Fred Kavanagh, Events Coordinator for UAL Post-Grad Community, there is a sense of success with the atmosphere of community events, a sort of visual and felt measure that doesn’t successfully translate to quantitative data.
Although I feel like the event was a great success, I do wish there was more scaffolding to make the connections “stickier” or last longer, like a network of C&E where people can communicate more easily if they didn’t get each other’s information at the event, or if they couldn’t make it. There were a couple of alumni at the event, and I can see the very real benefit of also including alumni in the outreach of these events as well.
I’m helping the Arts SU organize their end-of-year Course Rep Socials by school (that will be happening after this course finishes) and the lessons from these events directly translate into making those more successful events as well.
I’m curious if C&E Socials will happen in the future without me there pushing for them, as most things that happen in the school seem to be tied to individual prerogative rather than institutional directive.