The Events Committee now has a new name: Quality Assurance Committee (Q.A.C.). This fits better with its role of improving the quality of the events that are organised by AEGEE locals. They also have a new team, the AEGEEan interviewed them on the recent changes.

AEGEEan: So, you are a new team. What are the roles of the members of the team?

Q.A.C.: Yes, a new team with new ideas and a new approach to the work! The team now consists of a speaker: Antonis Triantafyllakis (AEGEE-Heraklio); plus five Quality Assurance Responsibles: Patrick Scholz (AEGEE-Aachen); Hilde Lahaije (AEGEE-Utrecht); Margarita Simonova (AEGEE-Moskva); Réka Salamon (AEGEE-Aachen); and Andrew Bartolo (AEGEE-Valetta).

The Quality Assurance Responsibles have already split the AEGEE locals among themselves, in order to have a better system to keep track of events and to improve communication with locals. We are planning to create Facebook groups and have one representative from each local for bidirectional communication between locals and the Q.A.C. Our priority for now is to reach all locals and explain why we should focus more on “quality events” and how cooperating with us would have great benefits for them.

What are the reasons behind renaming the (former) Events Committee?

AEGEE means a lot of things for all our members, but for many it is a learning platform for gaining competences we cannot get elsewhere. The Events Committee’s role in this was not very clear to the Network. Non-formal education is an important aspect of our work as an organisation, but that has to meet certain standards. With renaming the Committee, we set a clear aim: we want to raise the quality of events  by putting more emphasis on educational content.

A better organised event with the right logistics and content will produce happier participants. Plus it will help keep a clear overview of AEGEE’s impact on its members and help us having a further recognition of non-formal educational tools, which is one of AEGEE’s greatest strengths.

How exactly are you planning to introduce this new system to the Network? Do you think the locals will be more interested in cooperating with the Committee this time?

We want to establish a constant communication with the locals and the Network Commission is already helping us with this. We are not here to annoy everyone with our forms; but more helping hands will result in making the organisation of events easier. The locals can contact us at any time with their proposed event and we are more than happy to:

1. Aid cooperation with another European Level body (especially in case of thematic events).

2. Help with the promotion of the event (we are thinking about an Events Newsletter).

3. Our guidelines and forms can make planning easier – so locals don’t have to start everything from scratch.

Will locals have to submit a forms and get “quality checked”? And how complicated is this new system going to be?

No more complicated than using Intranet… The locals have to submit the Assessment Form (which will become available on the Members Portal later). Once their event is approved, they can upload it on Intranet and the promotion can begin on EVENT-L  and other platforms. Once the event is over, locals should fill out an Evaluation Form to give us proper feedback on the outcomes which they can also use for an internal evaluation of the event.

Anything else you would like to share with the AEGEEan?

Yes, ‘Quality Indicators’ is just the fancy new term for ‘I can help you with that’. Check out the presentation of the brand new Committee and don’t hesitate to write to us any time.

Written by: Lia Tuska (AEGEE-Kastoria & AEGEE-Sofia)

The need for quality events with good thematic content has been long recognised in AEGEE and last year, the Events Committee (EVC) was created to help the event organisers achieve just that. As the next step, the EVC decided to organise a workshop at this Agora to create a discussion amongst members from different locals about what makes a good event, share their experiences and hopefully give them some new ideas which they would put to use in the future.

Clarifying priorities and expectations

The workshop started with a discussion about the priorities of organisers and the expectations of participants in regards to an event. Marit Veeber from the EVC was very happy to see that everyone agreed upon the content being the organisers’ top priority, but it was also agreed that different participants come to the event with different expectations, and whilst the content part may be the most important for some, others come for company and the social programme.

Do’s and Don’ts

Then the topic was changed to giving tips and tricks, and the participants of the workshop came up with following pieces of advice:

•  Have clear task division among your team!

• Have a set time frame of all the things that need to be done during (and also after and before the event) – make sure that all members of the team are aware of this and stick to it

• Leave time buffers that are long enough between activities

• Make sure that the participants know whom to turn to when they get lost

• Double check everything

This last tip was mentioned during the second part of the workshop: risk management in event organisation. Then the discussion was continued with considering different things that could go wrong during an event and how recognising and addressing some possible issues before they arise (using common sense, of course) can help the organisers be much less stressed during the event itself.

Here are some suggestions

• If the event is dependent on some sort of outside factor which one cannot influence (e.g., the weather), it is always advisable to have an alternative activity which could be the replacement in case everything does not go according to plan (e.g., raining cats and dogs could ruin the prospects of a beach party)

• Inform the participants to bring their European Health Insurance Cards to the event, advise them to get travel insurance and know where the nearest hospital is

• Main organisers should also think about themselves and from the very beginning have a right hand person who also has all the info about the event so that the team has someone to turn to in case the main organiser, for some reason, is unable to perform their duties (e.g. illness, exams, travelling before the event etc.)

• while planning the budget, leave about 10% for unforeseen expenses – and also think about how this money is spent if non-necessary for emergencies (otherwise one might be asked to give it back).

Written by Marit Veeber, AEGEE-Tartu & Speaker of the Events Committee

Who are the Events Committee (EVC) and what do they do? Look no further, the answers to these questions are right here:

As AEGEEans we strive for many things – European integration, peace and stability, making education better for young people and many more. We tend to externalise all of these things in many ways, but one of the most widely used tools are events, which bring together people not only from the local sphere, but also from Europe and beyond. In the beginning of AEGEE one had a decent grasp on how many various events were organised and to which extent of quality, but as time progressed, with the growth of our association this had become a bit vague and not really orderly. Because of this AEGEE started producing events just for leisure purposes and with it forgetting its important mission.

Changes to be done

Comité Directeur realised this fact during the term of 2010/2011, after which three people were recruited to bring the change, to recreate the aim AEGEE had lost in the past, and to ensure that AEGEE as an association would be using one of its most important tools in a coherent way.

Increasing the quality of events

As for many new beginnings, the development of the Events Committee was difficult at times, because it was enforcing a new way of managing things, but despite this, it is visible that after six months of work, events are becoming more rich with content and organisers are using more effort in the preparation stage.

Nowadays, the Committee has implemented several changes in its work in order to try and make the approval process as simple and smooth as possible: there is a prepared application form for would-be organisers, which can be downloaded and filled out before contacting the Committee, and instead of discussing the applications at meetings, it has been decided to have one member in charge of reviewing them and answering the submitters.

New blog on the way

In the nearest future the EVC will launch their own blog which will aim to encourage all the locals to share their success and upload the template of their successful events to the database. In such way the committee will help young locals to gain ideas from more experienced locals on what kind of events can be organised and how to properly structure the programme.

Apart from this, on the website, the Events Newsletter will be revived. Short articles from events which took place within previous month will be published there. Also, there will be a short overview of events taking place within next month and events for which the application deadlines are within the following two or three weeks.

Basically, the EVC will try to make their website as informative as possible in order to improve the communication flow between the Committee and the Network.

Written by Alla Resheten, AEGEE-Kyiv, and Marit Veeber, AEGEE-Tartu

The above published photo of the NWM in Tübingen last year was one of the first events when the new concept of event quality and the idea to create the Event Committee was introduced to the Network.