Events

Events

As part of running a successful startup community, your hub might organise or host a range of external programmes like events, meet-ups, evening classes, trainings, workshops or lunch and learns.

This section has step by step instructions on how you can embed inclusion into every aspect of organising an external programme.

On this page, you’ll find


Inclusive Event Design

When planning any event, you should recognise diversity as a priority. You can do this by identifying the potential barriers to successfully running a diverse event and design your process to minimise the barriers where possible.

Scheduling Events

Use this ‘social events and educational programming’ template to help you map out the events you’re delivering and when and help you easily monitor whether there are certain groups that are being catered to than others.

Tip: Make sure you’re aware of holidays outside of the default calendar in your ecosystem.

Why: This can help be sensitive to attendees when you’re planning events in advance. Having this knowledge can also provide an opportunity for learning and increasing cultural competence in your hub.

How: You can use this tool to check International Holidays.

Outline the Plan

Plan for effective delivery of each event by creating a structured program of events.

Create a detailed event plan which can be shared with all people involved in execution and use the Gantt Chart format to manage it.

Event Brief Template: Use this template to create detailed ‘Event Briefs’ for each event. These briefs will help clarify the details of your event and each team members responsibilities. You can also refer to these briefs for a high overview of the event when organising with external stakeholders

Choose a Format

Identify core format and theme of your initiative – what’s that one word that ties everything together.

Create a ‘Topics to Consider’ tab in your master spreadsheet to log feedback and suggestions from your team and your community. This tab can be used to help inform the theme of your event and help you create an events schedule.

Use this deck to explore event types which focus on different themes to achieve different outcomes.

Tip! Ensure all your events are designed with optimal inclusivity in mind

Delivering Inclusive Events

This checklist is a guide to help your events team check inclusion at various levels implementing external programs.

This deck outlines the various steps involved in delivering an inclusive event.

  • Slides 1-14 are an overview of values, code of conduct, team building and communication.
  • Slide 15 onwards covers inclusive event execution, managing an incident and effective data collection at the event.

Note: If you’re looking for a more granular outline of how you can embed D&I as a key theme into your event organising processes you can head over to Section 4 “Diversity in Tech Week”.

D&I Themed Events

Running a specific event to celebrate workplace diversity is a great way to drive home the message that you value multiple perspectives in your hub.

Hosting events can be a great way to publicly share learnings and foster inclusion in your ecosystem. As a startup hub, you’re in a unique position to influence founders, corporates and policy makers.

If you’re starting out on your D&I journey you should start by linking up with your community team to see what capacity they have to deliver a diversity specific event internally. You can beta test the content for your event and then build on it to work toward hosting an external event.

If you don’t where to start, or what kind of event you might run have a look at this article for 88 examples of cultural and diversity events to help you brainstorm

At Dogpatch Labs, we’ve run our Diversity in Tech Week in March to coincide with International Women’s Day The UN General Assembly declared May 21st to be ‘World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development’.


Mobilise Your Team

Identify who your key resources for planning this event will be & notify them of your intention to plan DITW.

Team Structure

Defining effective communication rules before the project begins is essential for minimising communications breakdowns or misinterpretations.

Use this document to help clarify what type of communication structure you’ll use when planning the event to ensure the team are aligned.

 Inclusion & Sensitivity Training for Volunteers

Use this Inclusion & Sensitivity Training by Change Catalyst to ensure your team are up to speed with D&I information, allowing them to conduct themselves in an appropriate way at your event.

Team Lunch & Learn

Host 2-3 Lunch & Learn sessions with your hub team to ensure they understand basic D&I principles, why DITW is happening, and the opportunities for them to get involved.


Speakers

Speakers and experts will be a key part of your event. The earlier you confirm speakers the better as they can often dictate the content of the event and be a core factor in driving attendance for your event.

Use these assets to help you organise, engage and prepare your speakers for events you plan. Create a speaker tracker tab in your master spreadsheet. You can use this list to log people of interest who you might like to speak at your event and to help you manage multiple speakers.

Speaker Communications Core Document

Create one core document where you can draft and collaborate on the content that will be sent to speakers.

Create A Speaker Bio Sheet

Compose short biographies for speakers as they confirm their attendance to use as promotional content for the event.

Getting Diverse Speakers

Use this quick guide to help you consider how you can broaden your network.


Tracking D&I at Events

Events are a great way to gain insight into the groups who are interacting and engaging with your hub, and more crucially – those that aren’t. You should work toward systematising the process of collecting and reviewing data or integrate D&I data into your existing data collection processes.

Where to capture this data

  • Event Registration Forms (i.e. Eventbrite)
  • Hard copy event feedback survey
  • Live QR code
  • Feedback Surveys

Note! Remember to Define Which Groups Are Underrepresented In Your Ecosystem and set measurable, data-driven goals before you start tracking.

Tracking D&I at Events

Representation measures the demographics of the people who attend your events. Belonging scores are a qualitative measure of how those groups feel about your hub and at your events.

What to Track

  • Speaker Demographics How well does the speaker lineup for the event represent a diverse set of demographics?
  • Attendee Demographics How diverse are the attendees?
  • Belonging Scores:
    • Consider how do these differ between demographic groups?

Consider…

  • Diversity Access Tickets Are Diversity Access Tickets used to support D&I for events?
  • Family Friendliness – Enabling families to attend together supports diversity and inclusion of the event. How do audiences differ when supports are provided?
  • Code of Conduct at Event How does the Code of Conduct for events support diversity and inclusion?