This week was the week of our seminar, so we were really busy getting everything for the day organised. For myself, the main things that I was doing was checking in on everyone to make sure everyone knew what they were doing and were fine, organising group meetings and taking minutes, and ramping up our promotional strategy which included releasing our promotional video, helping to print out and distribute our posters, and spread the word on our social media accounts.

We had a group meeting on Monday afternoon where I took minutes and posted them in our Google Drive and our Facebook group. I also checked in with the group halfway through the week to make sure everyone was on track.

The main aim for that meeting was to make sure we hadn’t looked over anything and that everyone was aware of what the plan for our seminar was. During this meeting it was decided that we should have a fruit platter as we had heard that other groups had received negative feedback for not having a healthy alternative, so I offered to organise this out of my own pocket as we hadn’t originally budgeted for a fruit platter.

After our meeting, Henry, James and I printed and put our poster up in Building 9, 80, 94 and the Swanston Library to promote our event. I also took a photo of our poster and put it up on our social media to further promote our seminar.

I also contacted the steering committee with questions that my group had about technical support in the seminar room, the recording of sound in the room, and other bits and pieces that we had initially overlooked. My main contact was Kevin during this time who was fantastic in replying quickly and helpfully.

For our social media campaign, I aimed to post two posts a day, usually one referring to either our guests or a news article related to the Australian film industry, and one a funny meme with details of our seminar to get people’s attention. I posted these on our Facebook page, Facebook event and the RMIT Adventure Facebook page. I sometimes posted them on the Media RMIT Facebook group and my own personal Facebook page to spread the word about our seminar.

On the day of our seminar, I met with our group as per our call sheet, and we split up into different teams. I helped to bring our catering table down to Building 80 and helped Caley and Gina bring theirs and my food to the building and began setting up. Once we set up the catering table, I checked with everyone that the technical equipment was working well and there were no issues, and made sure everyone was confident.

During the seminar, I posted some of the main quotes from our guests onto our Facebook page, the RMIT Adventure Facebook page, and the RMIT Adventure twitter. I also checked with Krystal and Henry that the prize winner was established.

After the seminar, I helped to pack down the catering table and transport our stuff back to our cars.

This week everything for our seminar started to pull together. Everyone has shared their excitement and happiness with how we are progressing as a group and we are all looking forward to our seminar next week.

We had two meetings this week, one on Wednesday to check the progress of everything, and another one on Friday where most of the group shared what stage they were at with their tasks. At Friday’s meeting we finalised the poster to be distributed on Monday (our next group meeting) and we saw the almost completed video as the team were editing it.

I recorded the minutes for both meetings in our Google Drive and also posted them on our Facebook group so everyone was on the same page and knew what needed to be achieved in the days leading up to our event.

I used the steering committee’s pre-seminar form to navigate each aspect of our meeting and make sure each part was discussed in depth; noting the progress of each part in the form which is in the steering committee’s submission folder.

This week I also started ramping up our social media and promotional strategy to get as much interest in our seminar as possible. After speaking to my friends who I had invited to our Facebook event, I realised that it wasn’t clear that the seminar is free and is open to everyone (not just RMIT students) so I made sure to include this information in the description of our event as well as each social media post. As can be seen in the following screenshots, both our Facebook page and Facebook event have seen a dramatic increase in audience engagement, post reach, new likes, and new people clicking ‘join’ on our event.

I increased the awareness of our event by posting on our Facebook page as well as our Facebook event, using a combination of recent articles relevant to the Australian film industry, memes to get people’s attention, our promotional video, and text stating where, when and what our seminar is all about. These were posted every day according to the social media strategy and timeline outlined in our document in the Steering Committee submission drive. (The posts on both the page and event are exactly the same).

I also posted some of these to the Media RMIT Facebook group to increase the awareness for our seminar. This included a general post inviting people to join our Facebook event (our seminar), a meme related to trying to find jobs and how our seminar will assist in this area, and also our promotional video.

After the last seminar ended, I began also using the RMIT Adventure Facebook page to promote our seminar, posting the link to our Facebook event inviting people to join it, the information on our first industry guest, and the promotional video.

I organised the next group meeting which will be held on Monday to finalise aspects including the staging, poster (and distribution), guest bios, and run down of the day.

This week our group met during the mid-semester break to catch up on where everyone was at in their specific roles. Caley and I set-up the social media pages for our seminar, including our own Facebook page and Facebook event, inviting people to join our seminar.

Once these social media sites were set-up, I asked my group members to invite their Facebook friends to both our page and event to generate interest in our seminar.

I also contacted the steering committee on behalf of the poster team to see if there is a budget for printing our posters. I got back to my group with the news that we would have to finance the printing of our posters ourselves and began organising collection for that.

I also provided feedback to Krystal for her staging document and directed her to the props department in building 5 to start seeing what furniture we can book for our seminar.

I took part in the two meetings our group had on Friday (before the seminar & after) and directed each different team to including their documents to the Steering Committee’s Google Drive folder and updating their checklists document to make sure we are on track for our seminar. I communicated this through our Facebook group to make sure even those people who didn’t attend the meeting/s still knew where we are currently at with our seminar.

I posted the meeting minutes in our group’s google drive shared folder and also posted them in our Facebook group so everyone knows what they need to do until our next meeting.

I also began organising another time in which the entire group can meet to see where everyone is at and make sure everyone is on track for our seminar, as well as collecting money for catering, our raffle promotion and our poster printing.

During this time, I also updated the steering committee’s pre-seminar checklist form with where the social media and promotional strategies are at currently. I invited everyone from my group to the steering committee’s google drive folder so they can submit their documents and update the steering committee as to what stage each particular team is at. I also uploaded documents detailing our social media strategy and our promotional strategy and timeline as to release of certain marketing material.

This week I endeavored to try and find some props to use for our seminar’s candy bar at a reasonable price, with the main aim to find some popcorn containers. I found a pack of 10 popcorn holders for around $3.50 at a local party shop and took photos to show my team.

I also found a string of lights that could be included in the design of the candy bar – possibly around a ‘Candy Bar’ sign. I found this at Typo which we could get half price because of Gina’s contact if this is a prop we wanted to include.

I posted this in our Facebook group to get feedback from those responsible for staging and the team overall.

I notified Caley and James through our Facebook group about the Steering Committee’s guest contact form so that they were aware that it needs to be filled out as guests are contacted and their responses and I linked them to the document.

I contacted my group through our Facebook group to see if we could organise to meet before the next seminar so that we could get everyone together before people took off after the seminar. I organised for us to meet at 3:30 in front of the lecture theatre so we could then find a space nearby where we could discuss the progress of our seminar.

I wrote up a table of the meeting minutes from this week’s meeting in our Google Document, inviting members of my group to add anything that I might have missed which I notified them about through our Facebook page, which is where I also posted the meeting minutes in question. I also asked about the confirmation for our next meeting in terms of time and place to finalise this decision.

This week our idea for our seminar started to become more clear and the ways in which we could achieve this became more evident. I created a Google Doc in our Google Drive as a place to begin drafting the questions for our seminar as well as the overall structure of the seminar. I wrote questions that are specific to advice for working in the film industry and how to make a career out of your passion. I also wrote them with the idea in mind that all of our guests would be able to answer them, creating a discussion type session rather than interviewing one guest at a time.

During the social media seminar, I observed how the seminar ran, and thoughts I had on what aspects worked and which in particular didn’t. I then brought these notes to my discussion with my group and raised points such as; having the host of our seminar be seated at the same level as the guests, having a discussion type seminar rather than interviewing one guest at a time so they don’t feel left out, and having a competition and giving away prizes to increase audience participation.During our meeting I also brought up the problem I’ve been facing when it comes to trying to come up with a short and clear social media name and hashtag to use for when we begin our promoting for our seminar. This was something we all discussed and decided we would all think about and readdress it next week. I requested that the team creating the graphics and poster could come up with at least social media graphics so that the social media team can begin promoting the seminar. I compiled the meeting minutes into a table in our Google Drive.

I then posted these minutes in the Facebook group so all members could view what was discussed and what action will be taken by next week, especially for those who weren’t at the meeting.

I also created a Google Doc for ideas and suggestions about marketing techniques including competition ideas, and social media names/hashtags. I contributed my own ideas to this document to communicate them to my group, suggesting different ideas for competitions and combining print and social media marketing to attract people from outside of class to our seminar.

I then also communicated these ideas to my group through our Facebook group and invited them to contribute their own ideas, and comment on the ones I had made.

This week I lead our group’s discussion on the state of our organisation for our seminar. This included discussing and finalising our top three guests that we would like to invite and allocating specific roles for everyone so everybody could start actively working towards our seminar. I compiled these in a Google Doc on our Google Drive, breaking down the roles into tasks to be completed before the seminar and those to be completed on the day of the seminar, which Dominic then compiled into a table.

 After allocating roles and deciding on our top three guests, we set tasks to be completed by next week which include having a pitch from those creating the promo video, a pitch from those creating the promo poster, and a pitch from those responsible for organising the structure of the seminar, script and questions for the seminar.

I posted the minutes from the meeting on our ‘Meeting Minutes’ Google Doc in our Google Drive with subsequent tasks to be achieved listed. I also posted this on our Facebook Group to remind everyone of the tasks to be achieved and inform those who couldn’t be in class as to what was discussed and decided upon.

I also posted the files from Blackboard relevant to our seminar, including the checklists, equipment forms, and media releases that we are required to submit as part of our documentation. I accompanied this with a note that there were a couple of things we overlooked during our discussion so that we members of the group can have a look at everything we must check off and see if the roles we overlooked are something they would like to do, so we can discuss these next week.

This week I lead the discussion on suggestions for guests to invite to our seminar. I used the Film Victoria Industry Directory as a source to help find guests who have worked in various roles within the Film industry and provided the link on our Facebook group so all members could utilise it to find guests they would like to invite.

I contributed to the Google Doc that Dominic set up for our group and posted quite a lot of suggestions for Australian industry professionals that we could invite. Along with using the Film Victoria Industry Directory, I also used the website http://www.imdb.com/ to investigate the working history of the people I had in mind.

During our discussion we realised that a lot of our suggestions were men, and we made a conscious decision to begin researching women and also people of different ages and ethnicities to gauge different perspectives during our seminar.

We also discussed different possibilities for the format of our seminar, and we decided that a talk show style hosted by Jim would be a great way to interact with our guests equally and invite the audience to engage with them as well.

At the end of the meeting, I posted the minutes on our Facebook group and Dominic then posted them on our Google Doc Documentation file. I posted the group’s agreed decision for all members to comment on the Facebook post with their top 3 guests that they would like to invite, so that by next week’s meeting we can all agree on the 3 we would like to approach first. I also reminded all members to see if they can find any catering options through their own connections.

This week our groups were finalised and I was happy to be in the ‘Film’ group. We discussed our initial ideas of what we would like to do for our seminar and decided that it would be interesting to invite guests who have a background working in different roles within the film industry. This would provide us with interesting questions and insight into pathways to work in the film industry, as well as whether specialised roles are sought after in the industry or if having various skills was more attractive for employers.

During this initial meeting, I set up our Facebook group so that we could all communicate easily and delegate tasks to one another. I also posted in the group to communicate with members who had to leave class early to keep them updated as to what stage the group was at. I let them know about the overall theme of the seminar series, and the deadline to give the title of our seminar to the Steering Committee inviting all members of the group to comment with their suggestions for a title. I also suggested that guest suggestions should be on a separate thread in our Facebook group.