Why I love planning community events one season ahead

Are you free six months from now at exactly 18:00? When you ask that question, most people laugh and say, « Yes, absolutely! »

That’s why I love planning the Swiss Service Design Network’s community events in advance and blocks.

Instead of looking for one guest speaker for next month, I’m doing it for a few months in one go. 

The beauty of asking so much in advance is that most of the time, people have nothing on their calendars yet. 

This has a few benefits:

1. It shows respect: if you talk to somebody and want to book them six months in advance, it shows you recognise that this person might be very busy.

2. It makes scheduling easy. I hate the back-and-forth when we try to find a date. If you do that via email or DMs, it can take weeks.

3. It makes you zoom out: you don’t look just for the next guest, but you look at a « whole season » and can try to great a great mix of diverse people.

4. It makes it possible to do the marketing in bulk: You can write all the bios once and prepare all the landing pages in one go. It’s so much easier to do it six times in a row than every month.

5. It allows you to get to other things: As this is all volunteer work, it’s really nice also to just make it happen, and then forget about it until the event comes.