Now that you have created your calendar, you it is time to hit the bulk of your work: meeting and planning.
Schedule Meetings
Since your calendar is now officially finished, look back and determine where you want to schedule meetings for your committee. These meetings are where you will spend the bulk of your time. Whether it's brainstorming, planning, or just looking for a source of sanity, your meetings will be your main source of information and productivity. Schedule these meetings in a logical manner.
In my personal experience, I found one or two meetings a month was sufficient until the month of the event, when we held weekly meetings. Obviously the bigger your committee, the trickier scheduling meetings is going to be, so try to be flexible! If you aim your meetings on the weekends, be open to Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays.
Part of scheduling meetings is realizing they can easily change, and it is a bit difficult to schedule them too far in advance. So in the beginning, just make sure to allot a few days a month for meetings, then you can more specifically plan them as they get closer.
To make communication amongst your committee easier when planning, I suggest have some kind of group platform where you can talk and post events. I personally utilized a group text message and a Facebook group, which easily allowed me to post events and updates, interact with the committee members, and see who'd be able to attend or not. Other platform's I'd suggest trying out are GroupMe and the Remind app. GroupMe allows you to create a group chat and create events, and the Remind app helps when sending out reminders to the entire group. Both are free apps that are easy to use and extremely helpful, but a plain old group text is equally as sufficient!
Screenshot of an event on the Find Your Sunshine Committee Facebook Page
Meeting How-To's: Agendas, Leading, Motivation
Here are just a few pointers when planning your meetings! I know when I first started planning meetings, I had no idea where to begin, and I just wanted a clear conci
se description of what I needed to do. Hopefully this can do that for you and clear some things up that you might be unsure about.
Agendas
One important thing to do to help organize yourself and plan meetings is: creating agendas! Agendas are super helpful when you're not exactly sure where to start. Putting together an agenda means outlining what you want to discuss during the meeting. This also allows you stay on track throughout the meeting and not get too off topic. You can do this by simply writing a bullet-point style list of the points you want to address/activities you want to do. Once you've created the bare outline, which will be shared with the committee during the meeting, you can make a copy for yourself and add more details or points to bring up, so you can have your own set of notes for the meeting.
Something I began doing with my agendas this past year is making them digitalized in order to be more eco-friendly. Typically, I would just print out multiple copies of the agenda for each meeting, pass them out, and then everybody would tend to scrap them afterwards. This year, I started posting the agendas as a Google Doc to our Facebook group at the very beginning of the meeting, and then the committee would be able to open it during the meeting and follow along. It was also very helpful to send to members who couldn't attend, or to look back on when trying to remember what occurred at past meetings. I highly suggest using this style of digital agenda, but feel free to explore and get creative with the agendas you have at your meetings!
A screenshot of one the Find Your Sunshine Committee Facebook Page's posts about an agenda meeting.
Leading
The idea of leading meetings and a committee all on your own might seem a bit nerve wracking, but as long as you stay organized and passionate, all will go well!
I will extremely nervous when I first started to lead meeting. As an introvert, l'm used to staying in the background of a conversation, not being at the forefront leading the discussion. I felt like it was something I'd struggle with, but I soon would realize it was not as scary as I thought it would be. Firstly, I realized these were friends that I was working with, so I could be a bit more casual, but still a little bit professional in order to stay on track. Then, in the first few meetings I held, I realized I didn't have any issues talking or leading the conversation when I had meticulously planned meeting and when I was excited and passionate to get to work. As soon as I realized that, it all became pretty natural and I really looked forward to each and every meeting.
Motivation
It is super crucial when you're in the thick of the planning process and meetings that you keep your committee and yourself motivated. This will ensure that you don't run into as many ruts while planning.
Something that took me a while to learn when planning meetings, is that doing is much more efficient than telling. What I mean by that is, I used to just tell my committee what it was they needed to go home and do. I soon found, it was much more effective to devote the meeting time to actually doing the task rather than having them do it later. My committee was mostly comprised of busy teenagers, who like myself, have rather crazy schedules. I didn't realize at first that already asking them too commit their time to attending meetings and working at it home didn't exactly provide successful results or keep them interested or motivated. The issue was, they didn't really have time to complete the tasks I was asking them to do outside of the meetings, so they didn't feel like they were contributing anything of major significance. However, once I began allotting time for those tasks in the meetings, I saw a dramatic rise in participation and motivation.
Also, in addition to your committee, it is essential to stay self-motivated. It may be a bit difficult at times, especially when your in the midst of a lot of planning, but remember to keep the end goals in mind and keep moving forward!
As always, if you have ANY questions, please feel free to email me at find.your.sunshine.concert@gmail.com and send them my way!