So proud to have co-produced, organised, and delivered the online University Mental Health Day event held on 3rd & 4th of March for the Staff & Students of the University of Greenwich.
It was an absolute pleasure to be part of this event as we had to collaborate with a variety of students and staff networks across all campuses and ensure we created inclusive content that genuinely connected everyone.
Platform: Teams and University's webpage on their internal portal
Length: 2 days, 3-4hrs each day
Audience: all staff and students of the University
Adapting to the client's needs is very important to us.
A campus-wide in-person event by the University of Greenwich needed to be delivered amidst the quarantine restrictions and ensure that innovative and engaging means were implemented. Key terms of connectedness and collaboration were essential to be underlying the whole event process from beginning to end.
Creating an inclusive agenda representing all stakeholders
It was essential for all staff and student networks to be involved in the content creation as well as to be included in sessions in the agenda. We worked from the start by holding separate meetings with all different networks to identify their involvement in mental health at the University in general and assess how they could contribute and with what content. The biggest challenges were the limited availability of the stakeholders, clashing schedules, and sustaining high motivation and engagement amidst a very busy academic semester. Finally, our focus was always on keeping the overarching theme relevant across the different sessions and ensure that the agenda as a whole was aligned with the driving message from the Vice-chancellor and the University Mental Health strategy.
Accessibility was a top priority
When assessing all the characteristics of the project, it was clear from the start that an online event addressing both staff and students of the University had to be easily accessible and at a very reasonable cost. We suggested to the client that we make use of all the potential of their internal Comms team for promoting the event as well as work closely with their IT team to set up an event webpage on the existing portal which everyone could access already. We also decided to use Teams, which was already the conferencing platform all staff and students use to meet and collaborate and which was fit for purpose for this event without spending more funds on other platforms.
By using the existing systems, we managed to offer an 'open' and welcoming event where attendees did not have to visit and to use other tools and platforms; they could easily hop on and off a Teams meeting and also have access to the chat and shared documents for a long time post-event to view at their own time.
Project Management was an essential service
The post-event feedback from the University of Greenwich clearly showed us that our project management service was pivotal for the success of the event. All stakeholders were involved in a balanced manner, all aspects of content were adequately covered, the tight timeline, which was 6 weeks, was well-kept, all technical challenges were resolved swiftly so that the event was delivered on time and in budget.
The University Mental Health Day was such a rewarding experience for us and we certainly challenged ourselves considerably, but very proud we managed to find all the right solutions to create such an interesting event.
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