Starting Somewhere: How to Host Your Dream Event
💌 Starting Somewhere is our new series that highlights practical advice from our guests in their area of expertise.
Starting Somewhere is our new series that highlights practical advice from our guests in their area of expertise. Whether you’re a creative who’s interested in starting a similar venture or already have an existing project you want to improve upon, we hope this series can inspire you to take the next steps. If you know someone that could use a nudge to start their own project, send this to them!
In our interview with Daniela Cabada, we talked about how when so much of our lives exist online there's something special about creating a physical community. Lez Get Together, a Chicago-based collective curating spaces for sapphic connections, is doing just that. Since launching, they’ve hosted multiple events with well over 100 tickets sold for each. Yet, before launching the collective, Daniela had never planned, let alone hosted an event like this. The project came out of a personal desire to build a queer family for herself and the hunch that there were other people out there looking for the same thing.
4 Tips for Hosting Your Dream Event
1. Understand Your Mission
A strong mission statement is one of your best avenues for rallying the community you’re looking to serve. In the case of Lez Get Together, the slogan “Curating Spaces for Sapphic Connections” speaks to a specific need of the audience Dani seeks out. In her words, “I wanted to do something that was sapphic-focused because we only have two lesbian bars in Chicago. Just two.” Acknowledging that most queer spaces being for all queer people often leaves the sapphic experience in the margins allows her to quickly establish value to her audience. It also informs where and how she seeks out the right audience when marketing her events. That brings us to our next piece of advice.
2. Create a Marketing Strategy
Dani initially used TikTok to help market and promote her events. Leaning into the platform’s ability to connect to niche audiences allowed her to find the people that will enjoy and champion the project.
I made a little TikTok it didn't go viral. I guess I had like 9,000 views, but it was the right audience. It was Chicago, sapphic people. So I guess it worked. I started getting a following on Instagram, found a venue on Gigster.com, put some money aside on my credit card, charged everything on it, and I was like ‘Let's hope I break even.’ And I did- 150 people showed up to the event.
Dani’s experience illustrates a point that we’ve also come to learn working on As You Are. You don’t need the largest audience to help you spread your work, you need the right audience. Meeting those people where they are and inviting them into your work can make all the difference in the reach and impact you’re able to have. This brings us to the tactical side of hosting an event.
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3. Get Event Insurance
In the business of selling tickets, renting spaces, and building out your community, it’s important to consider issues of liability. Before buying a ticket for a Lez Get Together event, people have to confirm that they are 18 and up and that any incidents that occur do not hold Daniela, anybody working the event, or the Lez Get Together team liable. You can also protect yourself and your team by purchasing event insurance. According to Dani, “They have it for wedding parties, they have it for any big event.” It’s a great reminder that while you’re leading a creative endeavor, it’s on you to make sure that the difficult work of keeping people safe and protected is also a significant responsibility. You want to ensure that the people you’re hosting know what they’re walking into. While this may not apply to every event, consider what safety precautions exist for your venture.
4. Answer FAQs
After promoting her events, people often flood Dani with repetitive questions on promotional channels like Instagram and Lex. After a while, Dani realized it would be much easier to have a central place to direct people to get those questions answered.
It’s so much easier to be like, ‘Hey, I added this as an FAQ question! Refer to that.’ It also kind of absolves you from saying the wrong thing when you've already tailored the language that you want to use for some of these hot questions that people have. You can just put them on an FAQ and direct them there.
Have you ever considered throwing an event? What else would you want to learn?
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