COM461 - Final Project
The Final Project for my COM461 Event Planning class was where me and a group of students have to plan an event. My group had, in my opinion, successfully presented an event that we were very proud of. The event was the PVD Spring Craft Beer Festival. With all considered, it was a very rough process but we walked away with no regrets. Of course, there are things that could have been done better and in a better timely manner. But with the hard work that we put in all together, I’m very happy with the result.
Initially, when the group was planning on which event to do from the list of suggestions, I was yet to be contacted. As a matter of fact, I was not a part of the conversation. After knowing that we were doing the beer festival, I was neither happy nor upset about it. But I would be lying if I say that I wouldn’t have preferred doing an event on campus. At the end of the day, doing something on campus is something that I’m confident about: I have experience with the logistics, in particular with budgets, public relations, and marketing for events on campus. However, I got over that thought really quickly and started the process to
successfully plan the event and presentation in the topic that the group chose.
When we first got together as a group, the first thing we did was to assign the different tasks and talk about which part of the project we wanted to do. Without fail, I was the first person to speak up and took the marketing section of the project. There are many reasons I could’ve listed to explain why this was my choice. But there are two main and important reasons: 1. I’m a creative person. Projects like this are where I get the chance to let my creativity fly high in a class setting. 2. Marketing on campus is my expertise, and so I want to give planning a marketing campaign for an event off-campus a chance. And just like that, the marketing section of the project came to me.
As the project came along, I wasn’t given a lot of instructions as to what I need to do for the
marketing section. Therefore, in the first meeting, I told my whole group that I was going to take care of the events’ logo as well as the events’ color palette. The events' logo is the first picture in this gallery. After a long time of researching and looking, I’ve come up with the logo using a Bavarian guy holding
two cups of beer. I’ve also decided to use the color of spring to portray the logo. Not too long after I finished the first draft of the logo, I sent it to the group and there was no objection to use the logo as the official logo for our event. The first draft was the final version of the logo that I designed.
The color palette was the second thing that I did for the project. The idea behind the 16 colors palette was that it was Spring. And since it is Spring, the more color the better. Therefore, I put all the colors that I could possibly think of into the color palette. Those colors were taken right out of photos of trees, flowers, water, and just a lot of photos of nature. It was hard to narrow it down to 16. The first draft of the color palette had 21 different colors. But since there were similarities, I’ve decided to delete colors that are too similar to each other. And just like that, the color palette came into place.
The next thing was the poster of the event. This was the easiest task of the whole process. It took me under 20 minutes to come up with the design. However, what I think is worth noting and is quite interesting is the fact that the poster included all 16 colors in the color palette that I made. It wasn’t my intention to do so. However, when details like flowers, plants, and background come into place, a lot of colors are needed. So I had no issues using all the colors that I put in the palette.
The next thing I had to do was posting the event on Eventbrite. This was quite eye-opening and is probably the most important thing that I’ve learned. It’s not much different than Bryant’s Engaged and Bryant’s Event Calendar that I’ve gotten used to at my job. But things like ticket price, and the number of people attending the event are not things that I’ve had to deal with with Engaged and Event Calendar. Social Media marketing and Influencer Marketing are the next two things that I had to do. Surprisingly, it’s the first time that I’ve really put effort into thinking about these two ways of marketing. I don’t want to make it sound like I’m bluffing or just talking way too good about myself, but it was pretty easy for me to think about, Social Media and Influencer Marketing is not that different in practice compared to what I’ve imagined. The YouTube advertisement and television advertisement as well, are things that I worked through easily.
Then, the Public Relation press release, the invitation, and the Post-Event Marketing were also parts of the easiest things in the project. I’ve had a lot of experiences with these since I had to do this for the two Day of Understanding projects that my office organized for the last two school years.
To view the group project, please click on the second picture from the top down. To see my parts of the project only, please click on third picture from the top down.