This past Friday night, as part of my THON org Apollo, I organized the State College Food Truck Fiesta. This event was one of the single largest things I’ve ever organized—we had over 1,000 attending on Facebook, 2,500 interested, and an estimate of about 2,500 people at our event. I was so ecstatic and totally floored to get such an incredible interest and response in our event. Organizing this event was easily one of the greatest organizational and leadership challenges I’ve ever navigated.
The idea for this event came about last year from our former president who attended a great food truck festival and was surprised such an event did not already exist in State College. My co-chair and I were the ones that really actualized the event. We honestly expected like 300-400 attendees but throughout the event the lines were up to 30 or 40 minutes in some places. It feels great to recognize a need or a huge interest for the community and be able to deliver it.
I experienced a great variety of leadership challenges and growth through event—including delegation, resisting my urge to be a micromanager, working with a lots of stakeholders, and coordinating lots of logistics. For one thing I did a bunch of interviews on camera and learned about how important it is to have good responses handy and maintain a consistent message. Organizing an event like this was just too much for one person to manage so I was lucky to have a tremendous and eager team. I have a huge attention to detail and get incredibly frustrated when thinks aren’t organized as specified and people are not reliable. I really worked on focusing on relaxing and rescinding my control of certain parts of the organizing. This demonstrated to me that this is challenge I will have to like address later on as I’m leading and organizing more people and in higher stakes situations.
Balancing stakeholders was another cool tension to work through—for the vendors doing well is essential to their financial success, Grace Lutheran, who generously gave their space, is highly concerned about it being returned them in a good state, and we were interested in having a great event. One of the huge reasons our event was so successful is that we had an incredibly consistent and well design social media campaign. We had an iconic logo that was all over the Facebook page, website, t-shirts—everything. Making your designs, demeanor, and message as consistent as possible is critical.
Organizing the festival was an absurd amount of work—we likely made over 300 phone calls. But it all felt very worth it seeing all of the attendees at the event, smiling and enjoying their delicious food and the lovely weather. I’m so proud of helping contribute in such a great way to a Penn State and State College tradition.
Tessa! I think it is awesome how you were able to take away so many learning moments from planning this event. It seems like you were able to take some time to reflect, which is always good. I find that when I do anything in regards to programming, I learn a great amount on my ability to collaborate with others. One can never accomplish a successful event without the help of others. It is good that you were able to work with others in Apollo. I am also happy to see that you were able to identify a skill that you would like to improve upon. Setting goals for the future is always beneficial. Well, I hope you have a great week Tess! Best of luck.
Tessa, it was awesome working with you on this incredible event. As you mentioned, I’ve never organized an event like this either, so seeing the fruits of our labor really made those 300 phone calls worth it. One thing I would like to see improve for next year is the overall atmosphere for the event site. As anyone who attended noticed, there were some long lines of hungry people. The long lines are unavoidable, but we should spend some time focusing on making the wait more enjoyable. We were fortunate enough to have some live performers, but we didn’t have the infrastructure to amplify their performance. Live music makes everything better, and I think this might have soothed some hungry hearts. Can’t wait to debrief the events and work to make this event better for next year!
Wow! Planning this event seems like it was a very good leadership learning experience! I really liked how you reflected on your personal traits that you had to suppress in order to make the whole event successful. The fluidity you showed is really illustrative of a good leader. Furthermore, the details of the campaign really shows all the behind the scenes work needed for something this large to come together. It also is reminiscent of how many major company leaders talk about “branding”, which your group seemed to accomplish by making your event logo iconic and recognizable through your message and your consistency. Congratulations, and I am very happy that this all occurred for a good cause!