Planning exercise (what to do before you go)
Summary: before you head to your next big journalism or community event, spend 15-30 minutes preparing. This will set you up to make best use of the resources that follow for after your event.
Who is this for? Anyone heading to a conference, training, workshop or event where they intend to learn something and/or be inundated or overloaded with new ideas and information. This may especially be helpful for a journalist who is a first time attendee of said event.
What you’ll need: a copy of the event schedule (often online, in a physical program or via a Guidebook app or similar), a notebook or online document where you will be organizing all of your thoughts for the event.
- Start by sending a copy of the schedule to your manager or someone in the leadership team of your organization. If it’s a conference where you’ll get to make choices about which sessions to attend, it’s worth finding out what catches the eye of your boss or boss’s boss. You don’t have to attend every single session that he highlights or that she finds interesting, but it should help you orient yourself to the event, its programming, and the priorities of your news organization.
- Give this person a day or two or even a weekend to review the schedule and give you their thoughts.
- Try to frame it as “is there any single session you want to make sure I attend?” Or “is there anyone from the speaker list you’d like me to meet with?” This makes it easier for your boss to skim the program and look for highlights, rather than asking him or her to set your agenda for you.
- Set some goals for yourself! Ask yourself, and even write out your answers if you want to hold yourself accountable:
- What are you hoping to learn at this event?
- Who are you hoping to meet?
- Which speaker are you most excited to hear from?
- Why did you want to attend this particular event, and how do you think it will affect your future work?
- What are you most hoping to bring back?
- New skills to practice
- Story ideas
- Presentation ideas (how to package a story across different mediums: social, off-platform, newsletters, etc)
- Workflow practices
- Get organized! Spend 5 minutes considering how you are going to collect all of this new information:
- Are you going to live tweet during sessions you attend? If so, how will you take those tweets and turn them into something actionable after the conference?
- For example: you may choose to use Twitter’s “favorite” function to save Tweets linking to resources or quotes from a panel discussion or workshop. Are you going to save them via bitly and make a link collection? Are you going to save them in a spreadsheet? Do you have a folder or link-saving protocol already (clipping to Evernote, saving to Pocket, etc)
- Are you going to take digital notes?
- Where will you store them? Google Drive? Apple Notes? Evernote? Somewhere else….
- Will there be a new document for each session or will you collect all of your thoughts in a single notebook or document?
- Are you going to take physical notes in a notebook?
- Sketchnotes can be very effective to help you retain big ideas and themes. Not sure what a sketchnote is? You can learn more here: http://rohdesign.com/sketchnotes/
- You may want to consider bringing a highlighter or contrasting color pen to help you identify ideas or resources you want to remember.
- Do you have any special icons that you use in notetaking to specify “New story idea” or “workflow inspiration” or other categories of ideas. (Need inspiration? Check out a tool like the Noun Project)
- Business cards!
- Do you have yours?
- How are you going to keep track of ones you receive as you meet people? (I always stuff mine into the plastic nametag holder)
- How will you follow up with folks after the conference?
- Email follow up?
- Do you enter all of your business cards into a rolodex or digital contacts list?
- Do you look up all of your new contacts on LinkedIn or Twitter?
- Consider sending a physical thank you to anyone who mentored you or spent significant time helping/teaching you in some way. (Pro-tip: buy these cards and a set of stamps ahead of time so you are all ready to write and send them when you get back from the event.)
- Work backwards from your post-conference deliverables (see later section on writing your first-day-back memo).
- Is your company hiring, and are you scouting potential job candidates?
- Has your organization launched anything new or shiny lately and are you listening to hear how people talk about it?
- Are you looking to expand your network or catch up with your boss or boss’s boss’s contacts?
- And if you’re hosting a session or giving a talk, remember that the first thing everyone will ask you is, “How did it go?” Be thinking about how you want to answer. You could go simple, like, “Great, thanks for asking.” You could also just stick to the facts: “Lots of people showed up,” or “I got some really nice feedback.”
- Are you going to live tweet during sessions you attend? If so, how will you take those tweets and turn them into something actionable after the conference?
Okay, that’s enough planning for now. Hopefully at this point you have:
- A targeted list of sessions to attend and topics you want to discuss
- A shortlist of folks you want to meet
- A method for organizing new information
- An idea of how you will present this information when you get back
This resource is part of the OpenNews After Party toolkit, developed by Emma Carew Grovum. It’s meant to help you get the most out of SRCCON—or any journalism event—and share what you learn with your own organization. The toolkit is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and we’d love to see you use or adapt it for your own event—all we need is a link back here.
We’d also be thrilled to hear how you put what you learn into practice, so please tweet us at #OpenNewsAfterParty, or if you have any questions, let us know!