Monday, December 5, 2016

Steampunk!


At the District 84 Spring 2016 Conference, Susan and I introduced the Fall 2016 Conference theme: Steampunk.


Immediately we were inundated with questions like "What is Steampunk?" and "Where do I find Steampunk costumes?", but those who already knew about Steampunk were incredibly excited and eager to lend a hand!

How It All Started, Really

The story actually began several months earlier when our club-mate, Bob, was elected to be the District 84 Club Growth Director. This put him on the path to be the Program Quality Director the following year, and the PQD responsibilities include organizing the semi-annual conferences. Bob came to my wife and me asking us to please be the co-chairs for one of his conferences. The theme had not even been determined yet, but seeing as how we had inflicted this poor soul on Toastmasters (or was that vice-versa?), we agreed to take on the Fall 2016 Conference. Or rather, I told my wife we can do it even though she worried that it would be too much to do!

HPL

The first step, of course, was to order our High Performance Leadership manuals and set up our evaluation committee. Never pass up an opportunity to use the HPL; it is by far the best program in the Toastmasters curriculum. The committee gave us feedback on our first 2 projects leading up to establishing our mission, vision, and core values:

Mission

Our mission is to present an entertaining, educational and inspiring, conference at a quality so high that all attendees have very memorable experiences for their money and time.

Vision

A conference that
  • captures the imagination;
  • that is so well organized that the effort seems invisible;
  • that is so well documented that all future conferences are even better than before;
  • that inspires participation and attendance at higher levels than before;
  • that is a value proposition so good that it sells out early;
  • that has high theme participation from all types of attendees;
  • so memorable that attendees will be talking about it excitedly for many years!

Core Values

  • Legacy - Leaders Let Go
    • Including next conference chair and past conference chairs
    • Encouraging conference volunteers to try something new that just might fail -- and just might succeed!
    • Record steps, decisions, schedule online for continual access 
    • Encourage recording of feedback for things that work and things that don’t
  • Value - What’s In It For Me
    • Market conference price vs. cost of raw value for all contents (4 meals, keynote, 8 humorous speeches, 1 test speech, 8 evaluations, roast)
    • Market the entertainment value because people pay more for entertainment: 8 humorous speeches, roast, keynote, STEAMPUNK
  • Quality - More Than Before
    • Engaging sideshows for in-between times
    • Swag to brag
  • Memorable - Sensual Engagement
    • Video recording of speakers
      • Permission required, of course
    • Theme music?
    • PR team (per district / area)
      • Beforehand: generate buzz
        • Talk up Steampunk
        • Pitching the conference via social media and other avenues
        • Contacting VPPRs and/or Presidents directly for distribution network
        • Profiling conference team
      • During: create memories
        • Pictures, posts, videos (vines)
        • Record from each individual attendee willing to share

With these set, Susan and I prepared the introduction skit above at the Spring 2016 Conference, and then we presented our Mission and Vision to the District Executive Committee the next morning.

Steampunk The Gathering

For the next couple months, we tried to gather what information we could about previous conferences and Steampunk. From past conference chairs we get lists of to-dos and not-to-dos and what-not-to-forget as well as scripts. Bob gave us the responsibilities that each Division took on for the conference. From that information, I created a spreadsheet in Google Sheets as a checklist with due dates and responsible parties. This way we could share the spreadsheet for others to see at any time.

District Officer Training

At the District 84 Officer Training Susan and I reprised our conference skit.

TLI

July brought officer training, also known as Toastmasters Leadership Institute, or TLI for short. (I personally find this a silly acronym. TMI is commonly used for "Too Much Information" so my first thought upon hearing TLI is less than flattering. But I digress.)


We were asked to promote the conference again, hoping to reach more members. There were actually three Institutes planned, one for the Tallahassee area, one for the Jacksonville area, and one for the Orlando area. The Jacksonville date we could not attend due to a friend's wedding, but we did make our way to Tallahassee as well as to the Orlando Institute which was easy since it was close by.


In addition to our own presentation, there were little pamphlets showing the conference book cover as well as the size and prices of the ads for the book. A bit poster of the conference book cover was also on display. These were quite helpful in promoting the book; we just needed more of them and sooner!

Communication

Before the July DEC meeting, we contacted each Division Director one-on-one to establish rapport, acquire contact methods, and find out preferred communication channels and availability. We asked each Division Director for a convenient time for conference calls and the result was nearly unanimous in favor of Sunday evenings at 6.

The methods we used for communicating with the PQD, Division Directors, Contest Masters, Chief Judges, and others with roles in preparing for the conference included:
  • Sharing documents in Google Docs including task checklist and scripts
    • We took advantage of limiting who could view, comment, or edit files as well as accessibility on multiple platforms
  • Skype group chat
    • We used the group chat for our voice conference calls
    • We also used the group chat for sharing messages and pictures at other times. Anyone who was not logged in at the moment got to see the messages when they next connected to Skype.
    • Although the conference calls supported video, too, we had little need for it.
  • Dropbox
    • For sharing large files such as video files, music files, and graphic files
  • Text messaging
    • Sign of the times!
  • Phone calls
Our Sunday evening conference calls were bi-weekly at first and then weekly as we approached the conference. We probably should have used an established agenda, but generally we went through each person available for updates and asked about tasks in the task list. Thankfully none took that long, and only once did a problem even occur. All told, that is good interaction!

One difficulty proved to be that not everyone participated regularly in the conference calls, so we were lacking information about the progress of certain tasks. Attempts to get that information outside through direct contact sometimes worked, but not always. That lack of visibility led to unease on our part, but thankfully it all came together in the end.

Promoting

Our primary job as conference co-chairs turned out to be promoting the conference to other Toastmasters within the district. After our introductory skits, we took advantage of other events to demonstrate and explain Steampunk, such as when we were participating in contest roles and at Halloween-themed meetings:

We also promoted on social media, particularly the Facebook event for the conference. Serendipitously, a Steampunk Industrial Show took place in nearby Mount Dora. Also by chance, my first couple weeks on a new job were performed in San Francisco where we had a chance to visit a Steampunk store named Distractions where we found the perfect outfits for the conference itself. We also got a direct look at true Steampunk technology at work at the Cable Car Museum!

Division Contests

We were asked to attend and promote the District Conference at each of the 8 division contests. We had to split up for Divisions B and E since they coincided, but we did manage to get to all of them, even the Hurricane Matthew-delayed Division F contest.

Each Division was also challenged to promote the Steampunk theme with a prize of a reserved table at the conference to the winning Division. Several Divisions took this challenge to heart leading to a wonderful display of artwork, decorations, and costumes!

Division G

I am still trying to find pictures from the Division G contests on October 1. The costumes already on display were only the beginning of the creativity that would explode in the next 6 weeks.

Division D

Standing Room Only defined the Division D contest at the Maitland Public Library on October 2. There were some very nice Steampunk decorations and many costumes.

Blowhards

Hurricane Hermine hit Divisions G and H at the beginning of September disrupting power and communication for several days. Hurricane Matthew threatened to do far worse to Divisions A, B, C, D, and F the second week of October, potentially landing as a Category 4 hurricane. We live in an inland county and at one point the forecast said we could get 110+ mile per hour winds. Fortunately, Matthew took a slight turn to the west and weakened, sparing us from far worse destruction than we actually experienced. In the end, wind speeds stayed under 50 mph for us.

Due to the mandatory evacuations across Brevard, Flagler, and Duval counties, several area contests in Division B (Brevard) and the Division F contest in Jacksonville that had been slated for October 8 had to be rescheduled.

Division C

The show went on in Altamonte Springs on October 9. The costumes were creative, and the decorations were wonderful, but they were all overshadowed by the Time Machine built by the Division Director.

Decorations continued to get even bigger in Tallahassee on October 15.

Division B

Division B has a tradition of making quite a shindig out of the Division Contest. This was a half-day conference at the Hilton Melbourne Beach Oceanfront. Rather than going for Steampunk decorations, the theme was expressed via table centerpieces.

Division E

The Winter Haven Hospital auditorium was a spectacular stage for the Division E contest. The decorations continued to get even larger and the costume participation was superb! Alas, finding actual pictures online is a much more difficult task.


Division A

The month wrapped up with back-to-back contests in Jacksonville on October 29. The first took place in the morning downtown only a few blocks from where the Florida-Georgia game would be played a little later. Everbank's auditorium proved to be the biggest stage of all the contests, even bigger than the District 84 Contests. Decorations were mostly found on the tables in the dining area, but several costumes were walking around.

Division F

Finally, the rescheduled Division F Contests took place at Christian Family Chapel. Bob took umbrage at his depiction in the decorations, and the costumes were fun, too, though many of them were simply the same ones we saw that morning.

The Hat

A common theme in Steampunk is the tech decorated top hat. When we ordered our first costumes, I got a plain top hat and some Steampunk decorations. At first, only a few decorations were on the front. With each District and Division event, I added more to the hat. By the District Conference, the hat had become completely covered and crowned.

Decorations


Steampunk decorations are plentiful and easy to find these days, but they are NOT cheap. For 50 tables, we needed three centerpieces each (both dinners and Saturday's lunch) plus additional decorations for the registration, raffles, and other stations outside the banquet room, we were budgeted a whole $400.

Lucky for us, the Division Director in charge of decorations had experience as a party organizer, a talent for inventive repurposing, and a sudden availability of free time as a result of recently resigning from a stressful job. One decorating party focused on turning cheap  plastic top hats into old patched leather top hats. Miami Dolphins football balloons became dirigibles. The results were wonderful!


Trophies

When we sought for Steampunk Trophies for the speech contests, we found the PERFECT trophies:


Unfortunately, at a minimum price of $150 each, a need for 6 winner trophies and 16 participant trophies, and a budget of under $600, this sadly was just not possible.

In the end, we found bronze-colored globes for the winners and small gear trophies for participation. Well within our budget, and still reminiscent of Steampunk.



Swag

We attempted finding some worthwhile Steampunk-themed swag. The best we found was wooden gear trains and gadgets, but of course the price was far beyond what could be considered.



Other gear-themed items similarly were too much. We did find bronze-colored metal mugs and shot cups that we could put a logo on, but the batch size necessary  was orders of magnitude beyond the number we needed. Finally we found Discount Mugs which could provide us aluminum shot cups with logos for a price we could afford -- as long as we simplified the artwork for our logo.

Bob had the logo pre-printed on paper bags just the right size for our conference books. This saved the registration team from having to put labels on bags instead. The paper bags were much cheaper than past conference bags, and much more apropos for Steampunk, too.

Spring Cleaning in the Fall

Our PQD's pet project to add greater efficiency to our storage and transportation efforts came to fruition in October. With a bit of help, we got these nice new carts loaded up and ready to move quickly on a moments notice. As a result, loading and unloading the truck became a matter of minutes instead of hours. I suffered the only real injury unloading at the conference on the 10th as I caught the first cart to keep it from falling off the truck ramp. Small bruise, nothing serious, but it sure looked impressive catching the falling shelf full of (light) stuff!

Our Costumes

My original costume was simply obtained via Amazon plus a cane from Spirit Halloween.
Susan's costume for our first presentation included a corset she had gotten from Walmart once upon a time during a Halloween costume clearance. She realized she already had the perfect shoes from another shopping deal in years past. Only a couple more things were needed:
Later, after eating better and exercising more, she was able to fit into the corset she really wanted to wear from Pyramid Collection. Her black skirt was a simple skirt she already had that she got from Torrid.

Susan's red skirt as well as her green dress from the conference and my outfit and cane came from Distractions in San Francisco. To finish off our outfits, I got new spats and Susan got Steampunk shoes.

The Venue

In January, Susan and I along with district officers visited three potential venues in Orlando, Jacksonville, and St. Augustine. I had attended Toastmasters conferences at each between 2003 and 2006, so they were all capable. The visits were arranged by a professional conference coordinator the district had contracted specifically for this. The World Golf Village Renaissance put forth the most effort with comped rooms and complimentary desserts at dinner. The contract was negotiated with the coordinators help, and Bob did his best to make sure all our needs had been included.

Susan and I made our own site visit in August to start planning out our ideas for the available space. During this visit a couple problems arose. We were told that we would only have one of the side halls for all our tables, and it was the same hall where all the educational sessions would be happening on Saturday morning. With all the tables we would need for Registration, First Timers, Raffles, Credentials, and Vendors, that one hall would have no room left for people to even walk through.

The second problem was partly our own making since we were unaware of the food conditions in the contract when we discussed having breakfast served in the same room as the Hospitality Suite. The contract negotiations had apparently gotten stuck at one point on this with the hotel agreeing to remove their no-outside-food prohibition but also refusing to agree to allow outside food.

The ensuing discussions with the venue did not include us, but we did hear about them. The venue had fired most of their sales staff and subsequently booked other conferences that were happening at the same time, and those conferences were using the same pre-conference space we needed.


By the final site visit in early September, these issues were still unresolved, so we were doing our best to plan for contingencies. We expected the registration desk would not be available until maybe an hour before registration began, so we let the Division Director with that responsibility know to be prepared for short set-up time. When we found out this could apply to all our pre-conference stations, we let everyone know to prepare ahead of time as much as possible. Given we were still two months out, this gave everyone plenty of time.

After much back-and-forth through the coordinator and a few threats of canceling the second year of the contract, we had access to the space we needed although not as early as we wanted, and we had agreement to serve our own breakfast in the Hospitality Suite room. The silver lining to all of this was that the coordinator learned a lot about what our needs were which she set about immediately to address for the Spring 2017 Conference.

Conference Book

The primary function of the conference book is to provide information about the conference itself: the schedule of events, the classes, the presenters, a venue map, and other information relevant and useful to the attendees. To help pay for this conference book, ads are sold, and since we are selling ads we want the conference book to be of the highest quality affordable.

The conference book from the preceding conference was printed the night before the conference at a very high cost. With the 2016-2017 year, the district created a Conference Book Chair, giving the planning and execution of the conference book to a specific individual. This chairperson added a very valuable twist by printing pamphlets early in the year that had the same cover and dimensions as the conference book and contained the exact shapes and prices of the ads along with deadlines and submission information. If any one idea should continue beyond the Steampunk conference, this pamphlet is it.

With a dedicated coordinator, the deadlines for the conference book were set and maintained, allowing us to go to print 10 days earlier, thus reducing costs. Although the conference book ads did not actually make a lot of money, what they did make paid for the cost of the book itself. That by itself was a huge improvement and a big win.

Programs

It fell to us to design the programs for Friday night, Saturday lunch, and Saturday night. Our first efforts were clean and simple, but the feedback we received was that a more engaging and artistic output was desired. With that guidance and a look at the very busy programs for the last conference, we added steampunk artwork as a background, including purple-themed steampunk for the roast.

The new programs proved to be very visually engaging, and Bob certainly liked them. Other feedback we received indicated that they were hard to read, a concern we certainly had. We also goofed in putting the costume contest before the evaluation contest Friday night, but an announcement cleared that up. Lesson: Proofread and prove it can be read!

The Lead-In

The week leading up to the conference of course had to be a hectic mess. To go along with crunch time on the job for me, we had the U.S. Election, our daughter managed to get herself lost an hour from home while running out of gas and without money to get home, Susan took a 52-hour trip to California to see her son's play, all before we could get to the hotel in order to prepare for the conference.

With the new roller carts, we had the truck unloaded quickly. Our "war room" office set up in the boardroom was set up in under an hour. Thanks to our checklist, scripts and certificates were already printed leaving only binding to be completed which took Bob about half an hour. The carts also allowed our in-house A/V guy to set up much quicker. The truck was also used to bring in the many decorations needing only final assembly.

In the end, the only difficulty was that first cart nearly falling off the ramp. Thursday evening was very relaxed other than our District Director getting caught in rush hour traffic out of Orlando. We had time to enjoy dinner and get to bed early. From what we heard about past conferences, this was very unusual; the night before is typically high stress with a lot of printing, setup, and organizing still happening. Preparation seemed to have paid off.


Friday morning the preparation began in earnest after breakfast: assembly of decorations, folding of programs, and later the movement of tables and decoration from the staging area in the ballroom to the storage room and the pre-conference area. We also set up -- and played! -- Susan's grandfather's victrola for display at the registration table.

Finally, it was time.

The Conference

Pictures galore from the conference hit social media. Happy to add more; just let me know!

Costume Parade

Our idea of a parade for the costume contest worked perfectly for getting us pictures of all the wonderful costumes. Unfortunately, we fumbled with names when it came to handing out the winner, but we did get it right and the results were awesome!

How We Fared

How did we measure up to our Mission, Vision, and Core Values? This is what we thought:

Mission

Our mission is to present an entertaining, educational and inspiring, conference at a quality so high that all attendees have very memorable experiences for their money and time.

We believe we achieved our mission.

Vision

A conference that
  • captures the imagination;
    • Met! So many learned and enjoyed the theme.
  • that is so well organized that the effort seems invisible;
    • From feedback of non-insiders, we believe we met this goal.
  • that is so well documented that all future conferences are even better than before;
    • A lot of documentation has been generated including this blog post and provided to the next conference chair. Whether or not this helps future conferences remains to be seen. So far, we consider this met.
  • that inspires participation and attendance at higher levels than before;
    • Theme participation appeared higher than past conferences. Attendance was not as high as we wanted though it was higher than the previous district conference at this venue. We did cover the contractual minimums, but in terms of the vision we did not meet this target.
  • that is a value proposition so good that it sells out early;
    • We hit the first 100 registrations in less than half the time of previous conferences. We were at 200 very early as well en route to about 300.
    • We covered our hotel block requirements three times over, and the hotel did in fact sell out of rooms but that was due in large part to the other conferences the hotel also booked. We heard there were some people who opted not to attend when they discovered they could not get a room at the hotel.
    • This part of our vision was met.
  • that has high theme participation from all types of attendees;
    • This we certainly met. Theme participation was seen from all ages and all divisions.
  • so memorable that attendees will be talking about it excitedly for many years!
    • Here's hoping!

Core Values

  • Legacy - Leaders Let Go
    • Including next conference chair and past conference chairs
      • Information from past chairs was invaluable and we did include the Spring 2017 conference chair in our preparations
    • Encouraging conference volunteers to try something new that just might fail -- and just might succeed!
      • Division Directors had many of their own ideas they were eager to implement, so we did not need to instigate anything. We did ask for a certain approach to recruiting contest volunteers which was attempted though difficult.
    • Record steps, decisions, schedule online for continual access 
      • Done with Google Docs and extremely effective
    • Encourage recording of feedback for things that work and things that don’t
      • We are the only ones recording anything, but at least we got the feedback and our doing our best to sustain the lessons learned
  • Value - What’s In It For Me
    • Market conference price vs. cost of raw value for all contents (4 meals, keynote, 8 humorous speeches, 1 test speech, 8 evaluations, roast)
      • When we made this pitch, it proved convincing to many people.
    • Market the entertainment value because people pay more for entertainment: 8 humorous speeches, roast, keynote, STEAMPUNK
      • From the feedback received, we made the value clear. 
  • Quality - More Than Before
    • Engaging sideshows for in-between times
      • These plans never coalesced.
    • Swag to brag
      • We got the swag, but not much there to brag.
  • Memorable - Sensual Engagement
    • Video recording of speakers
      • Permission required, of course
      • Didn't happen. I meant to record the keynote, but got caught up in the costume contest judging
    • Theme music?
      • Oh yeah!
    • PR team (per district / area)
      • Beforehand: generate buzz
        • Talk up Steampunk - LOTS!
        • Pitching the conference via social media and other avenues - Mostly social media and email
        • Contacting VPPRs and/or Presidents directly for distribution network - Didn't happen
        • Profiling conference team - Didn't happen
      • During: create memories
        • Pictures, posts, videos (vines) - Not organized, but plenty shared
        • Record from each individual attendee willing to share - Didn't happen

In Conclusion

We neither sought nor desired to be District Conference Chairs; honestly, we were surprised by Bob's request that we take on this endeavor. For the sake of a friend and his confidence in our capabilities, we accepted. The High Performance Leadership Project helped us focus our plans and establish our higher-level goals and values. After that, we did as much planning and preparation as we could and fit in as much fun and socializing as possible.

Presenting The Results

To complete our High Performance Leadership projects, here are our Presenting The Results speeches from the HPL manual.

From the overwhelmingly positive feedback, we consider this Steampunk Conference to have been a great success. We have grown from the lessons we learned and the friends we made. Hopefully those who follow will remember and continue to benefit from our efforts. In the end, we had a wonderful time partying like it's 1899!

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