The charity had 3 weeks to organise 2 events. This short timescale meant they faced challenges and had to come up with workarounds:

• Finding representatives from the aviation industry who had time at short notice 
• Finding a college who could host an event 
• Getting agreement for students to miss some lessons 
• Strike action that prevented some stakeholders from taking part 
• Finding a time that worked for both industry and education over the next 3 weeks

This highlighted the importance of building relationships ahead of starting a project like this. It would have been very difficult to arrange events in 3 weeks if the charity hadn’t already had connections with local colleges and other organisations.

Finding a venue

To find a college to hold the event the charity needed to create an agenda that would explain to the potential host colleges what the event was for and what they would be doing. 

Because they work with colleges all the time, the charity already had existing relationships to pull on. Unfortunately, many colleges had existing plans and couldn’t authorise the release of students for the event, even if they could have hosted it. 

A colleague at CPC had a contact at a local college, so the charity was able to use that college for their first event. The college contact already knew about the projects aims, which made it easier to get their help.

Finding attendees

As part of the same project, CPC were working with a service design agency to carry out research into the aviation industry’s skills gap problem. Because the design agency had interviewed the heads of various companies in the aviation sector, they had contacts that the charity could use. 

The charity could expand their network in this way because the design agency and charity were talking to each other even though they were working on separate parts of the project. The new connections complemented long-standing relationships the charity had with organisations like the Royal Air Force (RAF). 

Finally, the charity carried out an ‘industry mapping’ exercise (by searching LinkedIn and other websites) to find extra attendees that made the event more appealing and diverse.  

Don’t be shy, just reach out. You’ll find people’s email addresses and phone numbers. Emailing is quick, but people like hearing a voice. You can pitch it as important for building corporate culture, for corporate social responsibility, or for recruitment. If you can figure out what the event means for them, you can make it a very easy sell. 

Unexpected problems

Some out-of-the-blue situations threw extra barriers in their way. All the college students they were hoping to work with suddenly became unavailable. But the charity discovered that Foundational Apprenticeship and Senior Phase school students could still attend. This highlighted the importance of being agile, responsive, and focusing on finding solutions. 

Obviously, school students don’t have the same knowledge of chemical processes that an engineering student would, so we revisited the agenda.

Through tweaking, tuning, and pulling on favours from industry the event went off smoothly.