Recently Cosmic ran the soical media presence and engagement for the Devon Startegic Partnership Conference at Devon County Hall. Our CEO Julie Hawker has written a blog about her thoughts on the event and why the event was so successful online.
I was privileged to recently be involved in planning and running the Devon Strategic Partnership (DSP) Conference, and this provided an ideal opportunity for me to have a rethink about how we plan and run events. I was particularly interested to reflect on the value of social media in and around events to add value and achieve impact. The theme for the DSP event was ‘co-design’ and so the opportunity really couldn’t have been much better!
More information about DSP can be found here https://new.devon.gov.uk/devonsp.
Having met with colleagues in the voluntary and community sector as part of the planning process, I helped to evolve the idea of running a highly interactive event, with opportunities for informal discussions, use of case studies to enhance understanding, and also the ‘goldfish bowl’ style workshops to allow participation by all. All of the planning and deliberations paid off very well and the feedback from the event was very good.
We also discussed the role which social media could play, and my colleagues Vicky and Alex took on the role of developing the plan for the event, and then for managing and monitoring social media on the day itself. They set up a new Twitter account - https://twitter.com/DevonSP15 and hashtag - #dspconf.
The audience consisted largely of professionals and volunteers from across the public sector, voluntary organisations and social enterprises. Most of those attending in person were not users of social media, but several did contribute to the tweets on the day. In addition we had several people keen to engage in the subject and with this audience - as can be seen from the Storify version of events - https://storify.com/ExeterCI/devon-r