When I was 16, myself and 10 friends teamed up to organise a charity ball in aid of Cycle Against Suicide.
When I was 16 my school brought my year to a big Cycle Against Suicide Event in the RDS. From talks by mental health advocate, Bressie to famous Irish athletes, I found the whole experience completely inspiring. So did my friends. In fact, we were so enthused by the whole experience that we decided to do some kind of fundraiser for them. Taking inspiration from an older girl we knew, we decided to hold a charity ball.
Issues we overcame
1. Inexperienced and underage
Pretty soon into the planning process, we realised that because we were underage, it was necessary to get our parents on board so that we could secure the venue and get insured. This took a lot of convincing but we did it in the end
2. A gaggle of teenage girls
Together, we were a huge group (10 girls). To avoid descending into chaos, we knew we had to delegate and be democratic. For this reason, we set up a recurring meeting each week and agreed to make decisions purely based on votes. Then we delegated two girls to each aspect of the event. These included ticketing, venue, promotion, raffle and finance.
3. Initial low ticket sales
At first, our ticket sales were much lower than we expected. In order to draw more people in, we had to think outside the box. In the end, we took inspiration from some underage events that we had attended to the year previous. These events successfully used special celebrity guests as their USP. While quite D list (Geordie Shore cast members) the promise of their presence sold tickets. So, we thought it might work for us too.
We felt a rugby player would go down well with our audience and I set about contacting various Leinster players. After MANY failed attempts, I personally facebook messaged Ian Madigan and pleaded our case. Thankfully he obliged and we began to advertise him on socials as our 'celebrity guest'.
The end result
The promise of Madigan attracted a huge audience and caused us to sell out! The event itself went off without a hitch (a relief to our parents I'm sure). Moreover, we raised 5000 euro for Cycle Against Suicide!
I learnt so much about teamwork, event planning and marketing from this event. Even now, I am so proud of what we achieved at such a young age!
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