Events

These are a key part of setting up and sustaining your committee or organising group for your community.  

Initial interest event for starting a commiittee

See the 'Building a committee' page in our toolkit for advice and guidance around running an initial interest event to set up your committee.  

Interest Events to recruit new members

Once you have established a committee or organising group, it's helps to regularly run interest events to recruit new members to support the sustainability of your community and to give students a regular chance to join.  This could be running something once a year or once a semester or however often works for you.  For example, the Psychology Disability Committee runs an interest event once a semester, usually in Week 6.  

You can run it in the same or similar way as an initial event, or do something completely different.  The important thing is to share:

• What the committee is all about.

• How being a member works.

• What you get out of being a part of the committee.

• How potential members can let you know if they want to join.

Events can be a key part of building community within your department, college or other Univerity organisation.  Find some guidance below to help you with running events.  

Being Resilient

Many events you run will have low attendance, particularly at the start of your journey, so don't be discouraged! A lot will depend on things like the size of your department, how well-advertised you are, how easy it is to find the room, and purely how busy students are.  Some things to think about:

• Be mindful of what's going on within a course or across the University to help you plan when to run events.  Particularly thinking about planning anything around or during exams.

• Some events work well as a one-off, such as a talk or fundraising event.

• Some events (such as study sessions) are perfect for a recurring event - why not try a trial a recurring session by running it monthly for fortnightly for a semester.  Then check in and see if demand and availability of committee members is high enough to continue or even consider increasing how often your run the session.

Social Events

Social events can help students build community, and feel more confident in themselves. These events are important to help improve the wellbeing of students, and many can be run as recurring events, or run at a regular time slot. Many of these ideas can also be adapted to be more relevant to your department or to disability if you'd like, or these events can just be run as accessible and inclusive events.

Likely you will have a small budget, if you have any at all. Consider events you can run with low- or no- budget. Some ideas are:

• Coffee and chat

• Origami/bring your own crafts

• Film night

• Quiz night

• Bring-a-board-game event - perhaps find a pack of cards and ask participants to bring any games they enjoy, or loan some from colleges if they have them available.

• Presentation night - find a room on campus with a screen and you're good to go! Perhaps gauge interest first so you know you'll have a few presentations, and get your committee to bring some

Accessibility-focussed Events

Think about what events could be valuable to your members and what disabled students in particular may struggle with.  Some ideas around this are:

• Body-doubling study session.

• FAQs around disability support - perhaps a ‘coffee and chat’ event where older students can give advice to new students about how to get support or what helped them - could be like a ‘buddy’ event if you have enough students willing to share their experiences!

• CV writing or other career support.

• Drop-in information session on something such as Disability Student Alowance - perhaps you could partner with the Disability Support team to provide this.

• Perhaps link your events to some of your campaigning and organise a student get-together (see the Project page of the toolkit for more information around Campaigns).  

Letting people know about your events is key to helping them be successful:

• Make sure to give plenty of time to advertise events whenever possible.  It can take a little time for people to register new information, so you want there to be enough time for people to register the event but not too much time that they forget about it.  Two weeks is a good minimum to aim for with the maximum of about a month.  

• Advertise through as many mediums as possible - posters, screens, emails and social media.  That way potential attendees can hear about your event in multiple ways, helping to raise awareness.  

• Put posters up in as many key places as possible.  The back of toilet doors work great!

• See the Promoting the Community page for guidance around promoting your events.

• See the website page for if you want to use a web page to help with promoting your events.  

First event 

Should be something open and relaxed! Ours was a ‘Origami and Hot Chocolate’ drop-in session, with biscuits, tea and hot chocolate available. We also ran a trial for a recurring event - 'Study with Us,' intended to be a drop-in, body-doubling session.

Key thoughts and features

• Free to attend - don't add unnecessary extra barriers.

• Clearly labelled as drop in - this meant that timings were very flexible, people weren't worried about being late, and everyone knew that it was a casual event and what to expect. We did this by using posters, with additional information on our website - check out the Promoting the Community section for more advice on this!

• Clear that this was run for and by disabled/neurodivergent students but open to everyone - this was important so that people felt welcome, no one had to question if they were ‘disabled enough’ to turn up, people could come along with friends if they felt more comfortable, no one had to disclose a disability to come along, and it also doesn’t separate disabled students from non-disabled students.

• Advertised as far as possible in advance - so people know your event is happening! We struggled with attendance with some of our events when we couldn't advertise very far in advance. If you can't advertise in advance, it may be worth choosing a very visible room so people can drop in easily.

• It would have been helpful to have an easy way for people to give feedback - we added a short feedback form after our next events, but without a clear instruction to fill in the form we haven't had many responses.

Recurring Events

When events are recurring, they can take extra planning to help set up, but once you've done the hard work, it can hopefully become something you look forward to each time.

Here are a few things to consider:

• Running a trial event is a good way to gauge interest

• Think about what times are convenient for most people - particularly in a School with lots of labs and practicals, there are very few times that every student is around. Consider if you want to vary timings to each week or run on a biweekly schedule to allow more people to go, or if you want to keep the same timings for structure, consistency and ease.

Running Interest Events

This is a reflection of the process of setting up and running the first meeting

• Email sent out in weekly year emails with date and time- no one attended from this method of advertisement.  You can find the email template for this through the following link: Chemistry Email Template.

• Posters got one attendee and two QR code scans (7 were printed and in major areas around department).

The event was run, and had an attendance of two people (one of which was my friend who I asked to come). The meeting was a great discussion of the ideas of setting up a community and discussing issues surrounding accessibility, despite the few attendees. This gave me lots of ideas of what people (though only few) wanted from a community. The main points were:

• An outlet to discuss struggles.

• A platform to create change within the department.

• A study group, to use body-doubling.

• Resources wanted:

  • ‘How to survive labs’.

  • List of lab adjustments that can be made.

  • SSP FAQ.

  • General signposting to university services.

This initiative failed to get a wider idea of what a larger group (10+) of disabled students would like regarding a community due to the poor attendance. A few things to keep in mind are:

• Chemistry students are very busy! Finding a time and date that works for many people is very very hard.

• It is much more effective to get up lots of (flashy and eye-catching) posters early! This increases the amount of impressions you will make and increase the attendance.

• Add “bring a friend” to event advertisement to increase comfort in attending and expand the network/awareness.

• Remember that timing is crucial - most disability claims made at the start of year and after January exams, therefore it is good to promote resources and communities then.

I’ve helped run study sessions, ‘crafternoons’, movie nights, a mixed-department quiz and committee interest events. If I were to pick one key insight from running these events, it would be: don’t worry! We have consistently had low attendance at our events and I still think we’ve managed to build a little community, and do something genuinely useful for the department of Psychology. 

Our most consistently successful event is the study session.  It’s a great event to run if you aren’t sure what would work well in your department because we all have to study! It’s also great if you have a relatively small committee, because that way your members aren’t taking time out of their busy academic schedules to run an event; they can run an event while getting work done! It’s also relatively resource inexpensive. 

We’ve been lucky in Psychology Disability Committee that we do actually have a small budget, so we’ve been able to have tea, coffee and biscuits in our study group, which is certainly nice. We also have a small box of stim toys. If you don’t have a budget, that’s okay, you can still book a room and body-double, that’s the most important part. 

We haven’t used our budget for much else; the biscuits and stim toys come out at most of our events, and the rest of the events are largely self-sufficient (e.g. craft night where people can bring their own supplies, movie night with a movie someone has access to, quiz made online). 

General advice for running events:

• Advertise well: poster in your department, send out emails, have an active social media account, connected to similar initiatives. 

• Keep consistent dates: if you run it every Tuesday, keep doing that! People stop looking at the actual date, and just start to go with routine. Also, simply having a consistent event is nice for community building; people know where to go and when, to hang out with other disabled people. 

• Safeguarding: discuss safeguarding with your staff contact before running these events. You are just a student, you don’t have formal training to manage most situations, so you need to have discussions about what occurrences would require you to get a staff member involved. 

• Promote your social media: if you have people in a room, because they’ve come to a quiz, or a study session, you have a captive audience for promoting your social media accounts, which should then encourage people to come to follow-up events. 

• Combine with other groups: if you can, doing ‘mixers’ is a great way to get your name out there - people can’t come to your events if they don’t know who you are. 

• Keep notes: take note of what works and what doesn’t; it can take time for the value of an event to be evident, so it’s good to have reflections recorded.