This past fall, my team put on a kick ass event coined the Zaarly Survival Challenge. The event came out of our organization’s Entrepreneurship Immersion Program, headed up by sophomore Danny Smith. The program is a semester long consulting project where a team of Northeastern students partner with a startup to help build the business through marketing and operations projects.
For the fall semester, we teamed up with Zaarly, a web startup that enables people to ask for anything from other people nearby. Imagine it as modern version of Craigslist, except buyers can post what they want and sellers respond… very cool app. To bring the Zaarly brand to NU, our team created the Zaarly Survival Challenge, where we locked campus celebrity Drew D’Agostino in a homemade glass box in the middle of the quad for 24 hours straight. Drew had to use Zaarly to post what he needed to survive. It was a fantastic event and everyone involved had a blast.
This was a complicated event. We had to deal with:
- a ton of materials… we built a freakin’ glass box
- outdoor electricity and internet
- loads of cash transactions
- hundreds of attendees
- a team of 20 students working on the event in different shifts
- complying with safety codes to be outside at night at school
A particularly stressful challenge my team dealt with was when we found out 3 hours before the event was starting that the quad we were working in hadn’t been properly reserved with NU facilities. Which technically meant, we weren’t allowed to be there. Panic time? Maybe. Here’s what happened:
I walked right into the Student Activities office, asked to speak to the Asst. Director, sat down with her and explained everything, talked it out, and 10 minutes later I walked out of the room with the proper reservation I needed, despite their policy that reservations must be made in advance. This worked because I handling things personally. Not via email, not on the phone, but in person. This is by far the most effective way to really get stuff done.
So, the big lesson here is that if there are last minute event mishaps (and probability says that there will be), stay calm, handle things personally and be ready to get creative if you run into road blocks.