Last month on the 1st of April, the Society of Young Publishers Scotland hosted their annual conference: Skill Seekers, Navigating the Rollercoaster world of publishing. I had the joy of working to make this conference possible, and I wanted to share some glimpses behind the curtain at my experience of planning a conference.
For a bit of context, I’m currently a publishing student in Scotland, and I have experience in planning events. In fact I love event planning, it’s one of the reasons I want to go into publicity for publishing so I can organize book and author events. When I was told about the opportunity to volunteer to plan the SYP conference, I was all in. I filled out their online application and heard back within a few weeks that they wanted me on their marketing/website team. This was in October of last year, and we had our first meeting to begin the planning process in early November.
There were four teams that made up the conference committee, exhibition, sponsorship, speakers, and the one I was on, social media/website. When I was offered a place on the team it was explained to me that they usually have separate teams for social media and the website, but this year with the number of volunteers it made sense to combine the two. This was slightly daunting to me, because while I have loads of experience in the world of social media, I had never worked with the website builder that SYP uses.
As a social media team, we began by developing our branding for the project, our fonts and color scheme. Meanwhile a graphic designer on our team was creating the lovely logo that would be featured in all our branding going forward. The whole process was so refreshing, because in my opinion, working in social media can be a double-edged sword. You’ll either get supervisors who micromanages your posts, even if they don’t understand social media, or you’ll get supervisors who never check or approve your posts, leaving you guideless. However, with our conference and SYP co-chairs we got the freedom we wanted with guidance we needed. Posting on behalf of an organization you aren’t familiar with can be menacing, you constantly second guess if you’re representing them in the way they want. This is why is so important to check in with your social media team, and why I was so grateful for the leadership for this conference.
If anyone reading this thinks they may want to volunteer for the conference team next year, I want to tell you that you should! Even as someone who has experience in the areas that I was assigned to, I still learned so much during the process. I also got to meet loads of interesting people in the industry, and almost every one of them was local to Scotland. The conference is run by young professionals, for young professionals. This meant that I was surrounded by people who were in my place only a few years ago, or they were my fellow students. Everyone was understanding of the challenges we faced as students volunteering in our free time, my amazing team let me lean on them when I was struggling with the load. So if you’re someone like me who likes to say yes to everything and them figure it out as you go, I think you’d enjoy this experience as much as I did. The free tote bag didn’t hurt either!
I want to give a massive thank you to the SYP conference chairs for allowing me the opportunity to help them with this conference, and to my social media teammates who were a joy to meet and work with!
MSc Publishing – Industry Accredited Postgraduate Degree 