Hi everyone!
It’s Maya here ✨
I’m from do-business and be-event. Thank you for visiting my blog!
As I promised last week, I will continue the series of ‘working at su-re.co’ part 2 today!
The 4th Sustainability & Resilience Workshop
Decarbonization and Low Carbon Development Plan in Indonesia
Be ready because it’s going to be a long blog, so, I will begin with the preparation and continue with the event and post-event next week! 🥺
PREPARATION
It was my second day of work and I started to work on my first project: the 4th International Workshop. At that time, Radhya (my co-worker) assisted me with what I needed to prepare and who I needed to contact for the event. I remembered she gave me bucks of contact numbers. From Professors to drivers and from hotels to travel agencies.
Hmm..I realized that the offline event is more challenging than online! 😖
Here are the things that I worked on to prepare for the event:
Venue
The agenda for the workshop was made before I joined su-re.co. I started my first task by contacting some people from Udayana University to fix the venue. Long short story, we can’t use their room for this event. However, we only got the confirmation 5 DAYS before the event. I was so stressed in finding hotels that would accept last-minute requests After all the drama, we were lucky enough to have one hotel in Jimbaran, Bali. We also booked rooms for the guests there before, so they offered us a good price for the event. We also got a conference package facility, so, we didn’t have to find a food vendor because it’s all included! We even got the stationary for participants. You know what? The craziest thing was that we confirmed with the hotel 3 days before the event. Yup! 3 days! 😂 Thank God, everyone’s happy with the facility ✨
Guests
We had 3 weeks to prepare everything, including the guests. We invited more than 30 guests from different institutions and places, from Sumatera, Java, to Bali. We prepared invitation letters, flight tickets, hotels, meals, etc. We did research on many platforms. How to get the contact numbers of various people including Ministry of Agricultural, Department of cleanliness, experts, and student who volunteered to be the note-takers, and performers.
Imagine how stressful it was!
We had to be careful in planning the agenda for the invited guests during the 3 days of the workshop. For example, when is the arrival - departure of each guest, who will pick up the guests, which restaurant or cafe for guests’ meals, etc. This taught me to be ready at all times in case anything happens to our guests! After all, we are the ones who invited them ☺️
Decorations and Logistic
Another thing that we prepared was the logistic and decorations. We had to print banners, posters, brochures, booklets of the event, name tags, etc. We prepared for the merchandise, setting up the banners to the walls, registration desk, media partners, etc. Everyone was so helpful!
I remembered I went to the venue the night before the event, around 9 PM in Jimbaran because we were still waiting for the banners. Nobody there but the security and the truck driver who brought our bamboo for the decorations, helped me to set up everything. It was done nicely ☺️
That was a great experience for me. I could learn from every detail of the preparation, to double-check everything, to be more careful when deciding something (how to choose hotels, meals, other accommodations, partners, etc), but also to make quick decisions when necessary. AND AGAIN, I learned how to communicate with partners and vendors. Some conditions made me a bit emotional, but I learned how to handle it professionally, to communicate everything so it’s clear.
I missed this long preparation for an offline event. I miss the interaction with many different people coming from different backgrounds to make our event happen.
Hope everything is back to normal soon so that we can hold this event again.
This is not yet the end of working at su-re.co series. I still want to share with you the experiences that taught me a lot during my work here. And next week! I will talk about the event, I mean...during the 4th workshop event. 🥰
Thank you for reading my experiences, hope to see you next week on my next blog!
hopefully, corona ends soon! :(