2 weeks ago we had our second Impact event at Team Academy Amsterdam, maybe to refresh your mind; Impact is a youth driven social enterprise, ran by students of Team Academy. We believe that the world needs more people who come together to imagine, design, and implement bold solutions to today’s most pressing social, environmental and economic challenges. That is why we provide fun, inspiring and engaging trainings as well as events that empower people who would usually not meet to collaborate radically and unleash their full change-maker potential.
Our 3.5 day impact program takes your through 4 stages;
- Inspiration
Meet the changemakers, who have found a way to tackle global challenges in your city or have started their own projects. Then, you will discuss and exchange ideas with all participants - Release your creativity
Brainstorm your interests, passions, strengths and transform them into project ideas. Pitch your new ideas, find a team and start realizing the projects right away. - Reality Check
With your team, you set out to test your ideas right away, for example by organizing a first short and spontaneous campaign, by interviewing passers-by’s or by meeting potential partners. - Make your project, take off!
Get feedback by experts and finalize your project. In the afternoon, you will pitch this very project to a jury who will counsel you on how to continue after imp!act – if you wish to do so. Finally, it’s time to celebrate all those achievements!)
For our second Impact event we had the goal to get at least 20 participants, we used different channels on which we engaged to get participants. Eventbrite was our register platform. Our channels to get our participants were Facebook, Meetup and word to mouth. A week before Impact started we got to an amount of 24 participants who signed up through Eventbrite, Impact is a free event we only ask a small fee for the food during the days.
The day that Impact started we were in good mood and were ready to make some impact! At 6:00 PM there were 4 participants, at 6:30 PM there were 7 participants, this left us in a situation we didn’t expect to happen. We were disappointed at first but the people that attended were coming from far and wide, as it goes with entrepreneurship we needed to react fast. Bye bye disappointment, and let’s focus on the people that were at our event. How can we still make this week valuable for them? Because in our case we figured: the people that show up, are the right people.
We made the choice to make it optional to come the next day, have some nice breakfast together and see where to go from that point on. We had a difficult choice to make; we needed to make a decision if we should cancel the coaches and jury that were going to help during the week. As we teach our participants during the event, entrepreneurship is about building, pivoting and seeing opportunities in difficult situations, so that is what we decided to do as well. We decided to go on and to give it our 100% in the upcoming 3 days, so that we still could make it valuable for the people that were there, because again; they were the ones actually taking the effort to show up. The biggest change that we made was to transform the program towards a more individual level than team level. This way people would get coaching on a more personal level and more development towards their own projects. After a great week of coaching, testing and developing it was time for the smaller team to pitch in front of our jury. We could see the development the team made and it was a great experience to hear them pitch and receive feedback in front of a professional jury.
Even though the amount of people was less than we expected we had the feeling we were working twice as hard. We were engaging more on everyone personally, instead of guiding people to engage on each other. Besides that one of our Impact team members was in South-Africa during the event, so we were running the event with three instead of four trainers. But staying positive in hard situations and just keep on going made us prove ourselves as a team. By giving us our best effort and to make the best out of the situation we got a 5 star review of our participants with great feedback that we can take towards our upcoming events! Besides that we got 5 star reviews we now have 7 new Impact ambassadors!
At Team Academy we learn to ‘Build-Measure-Learn’, for us as a team this has been the best example of this. Now it’s time to take all the things we learned into account and to start building further, even though it didn’t exactly go as planned we are happy it went this way. Maybe not the quantity we expected but definitely the quality.
We would again like to thank all our coaches, jury and participants. Without you we couldn’t have this week to create impact.
Thanks,
Stefan Buijsingh
Get in touch with me via stefanbuijshing@teamacademy.nl.
Read more about Impact here, or on their website here.
