The summer is sort of drawing to a close, and at rustmedia that actually means a “break” is coming up. Typically the months from May to September are the off season; a chance to catch some rays and spend more time in the water than on the land. But around here, summer has proudly proved itself to be one of our busiest seasons. In the years since the dawning of the agency, we’ve slowly been acquiring events like trading cards. The more events we do, the more we want to do more events.
As much as we love the daily grind (and we honestly do), there’s something about the rush of a great event that we can’t seem to get enough of. That’s how we ended up doing three major events this summer. Putting on events with a team as lean as ours can be challenging at times, but the victories are so much greater.
This was the third year of the event, but for most of the team, it was only our second time putting it on. And we’ve logged a lot of painstaking hours in the last year trying to learn from July 2015’s award show and making 2016’s even better. It totally paid off.
First, we worked on a slight rebrand of the Semoball Awards. We’ve had a lot of focus on sponsors because we literally couldn’t put on events without them (#thankssponsors) and this year we wanted to shift a little focus to the athletes we’re honoring. The whole show centers around their accomplishments, but we wanted to put that in early marketing to get the athletes excited about coming to the show.
We were able to really make the event shine. We opened the whole thing with this video,which focused on a few selected nominees. Imagine that opening an award show in a totally darkened theater. Pretty undeniable wow factor. Plus, not only was it a total blast to plan, stage and shoot–it was incredible to hear from the stars afterwards about how they felt seeing themselves on screen.
The rest of the event–food, venue, guests, speakers, presenters, winners–all went spectacularly well, too. The countdown to next year’s Semoball Awards is definitely on.
Earlier this year, our lead project manager Jamie said to herself, You know what we need? A women’s event. Then she made it happen. With a group of other like-minded planners, they formed an event for the women in the community with breakfast, lunch, a vendor expo, different panels and presentations and a keynote speaker by Gigi Butler of Gigi’s Cupcakes. So in addition to a nearly perfect first-time event, we also got these giant cupcakes.
My takeaway from this whole event? The potential to inspire is right here in our own community. We had 12 local women present on topics they excel in, and it was really powerful.
So technically, this event is this week. Sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll post an update of this. But for now, I can speculate that it’s going to be great. We’ve invited seniors in the area, plus their friends, families and carepartners, to come to the Isle Casino for a whole day of classes, vendors, health screenings and entertainment all at no cost to them. Personally, I will be leading a small group in how to understand Facebook better, and I couldn’t be more excited. We’ve got demonstrations in golfing, fly fishing, a card making and I’m pretty sure I’m going to walk away from this event as inspired to embrace life as the attendees.
Stay tuned for more of our office antics.
