COM461 - Final Project
The final project for my COM461 Event Planning class asked a group of us to plan an event from start to finish. In my opinion, my group pulled it off. We presented an event we were genuinely proud of: the PVD Spring Craft Beer Festival. The process was rough at times, but we walked away with no regrets. Sure, there are things we could have done better and on a tighter timeline, but with the work we put in together, I'm very happy with how it turned out.
Here's a bit of honesty about how I came into it. When the group was deciding which event to plan from the list of suggestions, I hadn't been contacted yet. I wasn't part of that first conversation. So when I found out we were doing a beer festival, I was neither thrilled nor disappointed. That said, I'd be lying if I claimed I wouldn't have preferred an on-campus event. On-campus is where I feel most confident, since I have real experience with the logistics, especially budgets, public relations, and marketing. But I got over that quickly and jumped into making the group's choice work.
When we first met as a group, the first thing we did was divide up the tasks and talk through which parts each of us wanted. I was the first to speak up, and I claimed the marketing section. I could list plenty of reasons why, but two stand out. First, I'm a creative person, and projects like this are where I get to let that creativity run in a class setting. Second, while marketing on campus is my comfort zone, I wanted to challenge myself by building a marketing campaign for an event off campus. Just like that, the marketing section was mine.
The Logo
As the project moved along, I wasn't given much direction on what the marketing section needed to be. So in the first meeting, I told the group I'd take care of the event's logo and color palette. The logo is the first image in this gallery. After a long stretch of research and exploration, I landed on a design featuring a Bavarian man holding two cups of beer, set in spring colors to match the season. Not long after I finished the first draft, I sent it to the group, and there were no objections to making it our official logo. That first draft ended up being the final version.
The Color Palette
The color palette came next. The idea behind the 16-color palette was simple: it's spring, and in spring, the more color the better. So I pulled in every color I could think of, drawn straight from photos of trees, flowers, water, and nature. Narrowing it down was harder than I expected. The first draft had 21 colors, but several were too similar to each other, so I cut the ones that overlapped until I had a clean set of 16. Just like that, the palette came together.
The Poster
The poster was the easiest task of the whole process. The design took me under 20 minutes. What I find worth noting, though, is that the poster ended up using all 16 colors from the palette. That wasn't intentional. But once you start adding details like flowers, plants, and background, you need a lot of color, so I had no trouble putting the entire palette to use.
Eventbrite and Digital Marketing
Next was posting the event on Eventbrite, and this was genuinely eye-opening, probably the most important thing I learned in the project. It isn't all that different from Bryant's Engaged platform and event calendar that I'm used to from my job, but things like ticket pricing and tracking the number of attendees were new to me.
From there, I worked on social media marketing and influencer marketing. This was the first time I'd really put serious thought into either one. I don't want to oversell myself, but both came more naturally than I expected. In practice, they weren't far off from how I'd imagined they would work. The YouTube and television advertising pieces came together easily too.
PR and Post-Event Marketing
The public relations press release, the invitation, and the post-event marketing were also among the more straightforward parts for me. I'd built up a lot of experience with these through the two Day of Understanding events my office organized over the past two school years.
To view the full group project, click the second image from the top. To see only my contributions, click the third image from the top.