Organising the CPD Exchange Week #5

A weekly blog on lessons learned by PDNorth Events Lead, Lou Mycroft

I missed Week 4 in a blur, so many apologies to you all. 

Since the last blog, I’ve been involved in the #APConnect Live event. So much learning from this experience of running a virtual event, not least that I have to give people a break! Jo and Kathryn on our PDNorth team have spoken to me firmly about this and I’m taking heed. We met as a team this week and thrashed out a few of the details. We are not always in agreement but the joy of our little team is that we are not afraid to say so and we are always having a laugh by the end of the meeting 🙂 

What’s most important in planning events is to keep it simple. My instinct is to over-complicate so I’ve learned to take it down a gear over the years, step back, scrutinise and run through the steps again and again to make sure it all fits together. It’s amazing how fast time goes at events – whether they are physical or virtual. And at least there’s a moment at a physical event – usually in the afternoon – when the door closes on the final workshop and you can put your feet up with the team for half an hour. That *never* happens virtually, especially if you have social media streams happening too. 

So keeping it simple works against giving people lots of choices in a way, though I’ve also heard people get frustrated when they have too much choice! You can’t please everyone all the time 🙂 We’re going with three separate Zoom rooms, one for each of the three regions but this is where the choice comes in – the landing page will contain all the links so if delegates want to pop into another ‘region’ that’s fine. I love that idea. It helps individuals find their own level of ‘stretch’. 

We’ve lots more plans but they need a bit more mulling over. It’s Good Friday tomorrow and although it’s likely to be a weird Easter (virtual Mass, anyone? Flourless, eggless Easter cake?) I’m pretty sure the community spirit we’ve seen over the past few weeks will help us find some joy. We’re doing an ‘Easter Egg Hunt’, where the Easter Eggs are pictures in windows for children to see on their daily walks. What about you?