ETOL Film Night 2020 Creative Reflection
By: Katelyn Mallett
Tags: Film, Creativity, Innovation, Projects, Outdoors

By Katelyn Mallett and Briana Hamilton

What is ETOL Film Night?

Katelyn and I are fourth year Bachelor of Health and Physical Education students; majoring in Ecotourism and Outdoor Leadership (ETOL). ETOL is an outdoor education based program focused on the facilitation of sustainable tourism with a leadership development twist. This past November, our fourth year Applied Leadership class facilitated the 19th annual ETOL Film Night, which showcases outdoor adventure and nature based photography and films made by students, alumni, and outdoor enthusiasts. The event doubles as a fundraiser for the Allan Derbyshire Student Award, which is an award that aids senior ETOL students by partially funding their individual graduation requirements that are above tuition, including wilderness first aid, outdoor expeditions, and advanced certifications in such areas as guiding or instruction.

Throughout this blog post we will take you through our journey of how we utilized the creativity based principles learned in MGMT 2275 to excel in the delivery of this event.

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

The Planning Process

What Was The Task?

This project, while daunting, presented Briana and I with a fantastic opportunity to both develop our leadership skills and develop our creative competencies in a working environment. We first defined what our overall task was and what problems were standing in the way of this because of Covid. Our task was to host a seamless film night for our viewers, and the problem was we were unable to do this in person as film night traditionally is hosted. Learning about creative practices, such as how to explore problems thoroughly pushed us to not stop at just defining Covid as our problem, but dive deeper into what the root of the problem actually was. We finally arrived at a problem definition of having to avoid a large in person event was making keeping the event as engaging as it has been in past years quite challenging. Once we had fully discussed our this the next step was brainstorming and leveraging all the strengths and opportunities within our class of 19 students. The strengths our class had varied from students with an extensive background in video streaming and technology, individuals who stood out as confident leaders and idea generators, strong backgrounds in marketing and social media use, skills in design and creating artwork for the event, and everything in between. The wide range of competencies present within our community filled gaps where other people had weaknesses, leading to us being an incredibly strong, well rounded, and diverse team. Opportunities we could leverage included lots of people available for task completion, ETOL Film Night’s pre-established following, and access to an abundance of university resources (such as a broadcasting team). Even though this night was going to be challenging, having these strengths and opportunities definitely helped guide us to success.

Brainstorming

Next was the brainstorming phase. Here Briana and I shared our wealth of knowledge on successful methods to capture and manage ideas, such as mind maps, and journaling. For this we dedicated an entire week to class discussions and creating mind maps around how we would solve this problem. We then judged these ideas carefully against variables such as financial and time cost, if we had the appropriate skills and resources available, and if the ideas would meet the audiences expectations. We used this criteria as well to rank our ideas from most to least feasible. Two constraints we faced were budget, and knowing we couldn’t deviate too far from the norm of film night because of its pre-established repetition. This meant our options were something cheap that would keep the previous years layouts and content. As learned in class about how constraints enhance creativity, we saw these as an opportunity to push ourselves rather than a reason to be discouraged. We eventually settled on hosting the event as a live stream through Youtube, keeping the same layout as in previous years.

In this stage we saw first hand the value in learning the lessons we did in this class alongside planning this project. The lessons of collaboration magnifies creativity and great ideas come from many were present in this experience with how many people we had and how discussion based our meetings always were. We were able to come up with diverse and innovative ideas because of all our team mates from different backgrounds and strengths contributing their opinion. This also meant that most potential problems with our solution were quickly addressed because we had people analyzing its viability from all different angles.

The Execution

Planning

ETOL Film Night is an event that the students in the class have been looking forward to since their first year of university. Not only is it a capstone project, but is a project fueled by passion, and is ultimately a highlight of each school year. With this, comes a lot of emotional attachment to the project. Although this is typically a strength within planning the event, the uncertainties of Covid, planning the event without meeting in person, and having to deliver a whole new type of event, fostered a lot of stress and was, at times, discouraging to the class. Katelyn and I reminded the class, however, that creativity is fun, and although this project will certainly be stressful and challenging, it provides us the opportunity to tap into our innovative ideas and create something bigger and better than before. This perspective ultimately shifted the class into a more positive mindset and inspired them to think outside of the box.

When it came to getting the ball rolling, based on personal strengths and interests, the class organized themselves into teams. We formulated a marketing team, a fundraising and donation team, a production and content team, as well as a merchandise team. In addition to these teams, we had an individual designated as the overall Event Coordinator, which ensured all the pieces of the puzzle, or work from each team, fit together. At this point, each team reviewed the mind maps made in our first brainstorming session as a class, and reapplied the creative process to not only fine tune a mind map for each team’s specific goals, but to promote the generation of new ideas. This approach helped us plan our implementations well as each team could primarily focus on a specific area of the event, ensuring all components of the event were well planned and thought through from start to finish.

More Constraints

In the early stages of executing the event, we had a solid plan in hand, however, that wasn’t enough. With Covid being a real threat that could change our plans at any moment, we had to come up with several contingency plans in case we needed to adapt at a later date. We had to consider what to do if we could no longer present the show live through live stream (in case restrictions tightened, or completely shut the venue down)… we had to consider how to deliver prizes to winners if our curbside pick up didn’t get approved by the University… and that’s only a couple on the list. At the end of the day, however, these constraints enhanced our creativity as we had to imagine how this event could still be successful if our plans got pulled out from under us. We had thought of every scenario possible, which challenged us to be extremely insightful and adaptive.

This event also had to be planned using a very small budget. We only had $600 to work with, even though costs to host the event easily tripled that (the venue to run the live stream cost $550 on its own). Having such a limited budget challenged us to think of approaches that were extremely cost effective, but also provided a good product/event. A solution we thought, for example, was only ordering samples of merchandise for display and waiting to order the merchandise once the purchase specifics came in, and allowing the class to purchase the samples so even if no orders came in for that product, we weren’t left in the negative.

Risks

Photo by janilson furtado on Unsplash

In addition to these constraints, we faced various challenges that required risk taking. The first risk we had to take was putting deposits down and making payments for things, such as the venue to record the live stream in, and merchandise that had a minimum order requirement, before we had any additional guaranteed income. Aside from pinching pennies in other aspects of the event plan, there wasn’t too much we could do to minimize this particular risk. However, we cross referenced previous years’ ticket sales, and agreed that this risk was actually quite low and feasible to manage.

Another risk we faced was that we had a silent auction (as opposed to past years doing a raffle). Considering the primary audience of the event is students, this formulated two risks: 1) prizes not being affordable, thus not inclusive to the demographic and 2) certain prizes not selling at all. To minimize this risk, we placed the starting bids and bidding increments very low. We also provided a handful of door prizes to provide the students a chance of winning. Our plan for if items didn’t sell, was that we would post them on a Facebook auction after the event (which is open to the public) and would donate the proceeds from that to the cause.

A third risk, and truthfully the biggest risk, was hosting an online event in general. Technology in itself posed several risks including ticket sale malfunctions and live streaming malfunctions. Both internal and external threats heightened this risk as there were components out of our control, such as, wifi/internet connection of viewers, or our website or even live stream crashing. In order to minimize this risk, we held a live stream rehearsal, tested all videos on YouTube to ensure royalty free was actually used in all films and didn’t pose any flagging of copyright, as well as did test runs of ticket purchasing and merchandise orders. These trial runs not only made us familiar with the platforms, but helped us tweak and adjust our approaches prior to the event itself.

The constraints, in conjunction with the above risks, required us to be courageous in our innovations. Not only did we have to plan several contingency plans and methods of communication between viewers and the class, but we had to explore these risks thoroughly and judge our ideas carefully in order to reduce or eliminate the risks effectively.

Although the constraints and risks posed as obstacles in themselves, through the executing stage of the event, we faced other unexpected setbacks and obstacles to overcome. For example, there was a delay in getting bank accounts set up with our ticketing system, which delayed the launch of our ticket sales by over a week. We also ran into the problem of merchandise products being out of stock, which delayed our ability to display real examples of merchandise, as opposed to prototype images of the items, and also delayed the delivery of the orders to our customers by more than a week. Thirdly, we faced internal obstacles related to team dynamics that resulted in conflict and tension. As these obstacles came about, however, we were not discouraged and did not let these setbacks hinder our success and progression.

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

The Evaluation

Evaluating our Innovations

Through our MGMT 2275 class we learned many ways of evaluating our innovations ranging from the physical numbers of the event and the ROI, critically analyzing the valuable contributions to the outdoor community these innovations made, and reflecting on the professional skills Briana and I learned from this project. The primary goal of this event was to fund raise at least $4000 for the Allan Derbyshire Award. Considering so, the evaluation of our ROI was the first evaluation we completed. We are proud to say that we were very successful reaching our goal. Our total expenses equaled $1346.79, while our total revenue equaled $10,074.94. This means we made a profit of $8728.15, which is not only more than double our fundraising goal, but resulted in a 648% ROI. These statistics provided us with a clear indication that our innovations were indeed effective towards our primary goal of the event. There were, however, other evaluations that needed to be done. As a class, we held a communal debrief of the event and the following are evaluations we summarized:

We were pushed to innovate and be online which created a platform to be more accessible in the future. Although adapting to the challenges with planning this event online was not an easy task, the innovations we were forced to create made valuable differences and opened various doors for Film Night in the future. This year, we had people from all across Canada, the United States, Mexico, and even Europe purchase tickets and virtually attend the event. Even when the event returns to being in person, incorporating the livestream component to increase accessibility of the event has proven to be very beneficial. Furthermore, although there were concerns about having a silent auction as it may disclude the student population due to affordability, it contributed immensely to the success of more than doubling our fundraising goal, as it was a lot more profitable than a raffle. In the future, it could be beneficial for the event to have both a silent auction and door prizes, as opposed to door prizes alone.

Creating Community

By the end of it, we felt a lot more comfortable and confident with each other to share insights and ideas. We had built a strong relationship within the class where we offered each other the space and support to freely share ideas, while also pushing each other to grow through providing critical feedback on each other’s thoughts. This demonstrated how communities best nurture creativity because this free sharing of ideas meant we could build off each other from all different angles and develop unique and innovative solutions. Even past just our class we had a community of alumni, professors, and other involved outdoor professionals that pushed us to be our most creative self. They all offered tips and tricks from when they planned this event themselves, and provided valuable insights towards our ideas they had developed from experience as audience members.

Challenges

As highlighted, Covid created a huge challenge for this project. Adapting to this unique semester meant we all had to be more prepared, flexible, and resilient than in usual semesters as we watched the most anticipated event of our entire degree slowly get shifted into a platform none of us were familiar with. From here, the entire class learned the true importance of being prepared for the worst to happen when event planning, and to keep in mind that challenges are valuable opportunities. This also forced us to learn a multitude of new skills such as how to run a live stream, how to create a silent auction, and how to find new online only outlets for engagement, which will all be incredibly useful as Covid has a permanent impact on our industry.

One of the biggest personal challenges for us was working on such a big project with a new team of people we were relatively unfamiliar with. We initially found it quite intimidating trying to share opinions and ideas while also feeling like an outsider. We also found it quite challenging to gauge how everyone would react to our ideas and working styles as we both had personal relationships with very few of the class members, meaning that sometimes we held back with sharing thoughts. This also meant that neither of us could pick a team based on who we knew we worked well with, because we had yet to establish that with this new group of people. From here we both learned the importance of being approachable, inclusive, welcoming, and positive while establishing productive working relationships with new faces and establishing yourself as a leader. We also saw first hand how working with new people with such diverse opinions can push you to think outside your normal box and create projects to a higher level of depth.