Grow Your Network: 3 Event Strategies for Small Teams

Regardless of the size of your team, building a network of meaningful relationships is a potent strategy for achieving your business goals.

An effective way to build a strong network is to organise your own events.

If your team is small like ours (we are nine in our team!), and you think organising events is too huge an undertaking, we are here to assure you that you can do it! In this blog post, we share three ways organising your own events can expand your network and open doors to new opportunities.

Direct Engagement

When you organise your own events, you get to focus on attracting an audience that is aligned with your organisation’s goals and values.

This has intrinsic and strategic value. Your event is able to signal to others what you and your team stand for. When people RSVP to attend, there is a good chance that what’s important to you is also important to them. Your event then becomes a room full (or zoom full if it’s online) of potential allies from different backgrounds with varied expertise with whom you can work together.

As UX and UI designers, our 55 Minutes team advocates for accessibility and inclusion. As such, we recently organised an event on designing delightful digital experiences for the elderly. For this, we curated an exclusive invite list of the teams across Potato Productions — the family of companies we are a part of — where each entity is working on solving today’s and tomorrow’s problems through their own method and style.

A group shot from our event on Designing Delightful Digital Experiences for Seniors

Curating the invite list ensured that we got to directly engage with people and organisations that are aligned with our advocacies. Because of that event and as a result of that alignment, we are now in discussion with Spudniklab — whose mission is to bridge the digital divide — on how we can work together to address the struggles of our seniors.

A word on attendance. How many attendees signify success? That is up to you to decide. For us, we operate best when the group is 30 participants or less. With 30 or less, our team is able to make sure that we get to know the people in the room and have conversations that go deeper. With a smaller group, we can hyper-focus on delivering an experience that serves each person who said yes to our invite. It is important to us that people view our event as worthy of their valuable time and attention.

When we asked the attendees of our recent event to rate it from 1 to 5, 55% gave us a 5. The remaining 45% gave us a 4. For our team, this was the ultimate win!

Pradnya, a senior designer at 55 Minutes, presenting her research findings

Customsed Activities

When you organise your own events, you get to design interactions that are meaningful and memorable to people.

When we asked our event attendees what was the one thing that stood out for them, it was hands down (pun intended!) the hands-on activity.

Our hands-on activity had each participant wearing blurred spectacles and hole-poked gloves. They were then asked to use their smartphones to buy online groceries, book a ride or schedule a medical appointment.

Smeared spectacles and gloves with holes were used in our hands-on activity

This activity was to get them to experience what it’s like to use digital devices with deteriorating eyesight and impaired tactile skills. A simple simulation to get them to empathise with the elderly.

One of our participants, Meidi, struggles to use her phone wearing the specs and gloves

Nimeeta, one of the participants, had this to say about the activity: “It was an eye opening experience on the struggles the elderly go through. A reminder that we should be patient with them, understand them and not be quick to anger.”

As a human-centred design studio, we make sure that every aspect of the event — including the interactive activity — is centred on delivering a memorable and meaningful human experience. You can too!

A word on budget. Events don’t have to be expensive. In fact, a tight budget is an opportunity to be creative!

For our hands-on activity, we bought affordable spectacles and gloves from Daiso which we plan to use again in future events to make the most of our purchase. Our team helped customise the materials by using cheap nail polish to paint on the glasses. We also used materials that we knew participants would already have with them: their smartphones.

We didn’t hire a photographer. Instead, two team members took photos and videos. For snacks, we bought simple pastries and a team member baked a cake. You can definitely deliver on a great event, even on a budget.

The simple snacks during our event

Foster Community

When you organise your own events, you get to bring people together to connect in a way that matters to them.

Organising your own events allows you to bring together individuals with shared goals, interests and values that foster a sense of community within your network. By facilitating collaboration, knowledge-sharing and mutual support among attendees, you not only expand your own network but also contribute to the growth and cohesion of the broader professional community, which can lead to reciprocal opportunities and benefits in the future.

We had an engaging discussion during our event where people not only asked questions but shared their viewpoints on how technology can do better to address the pain points of the elderly. When there is lively and heartfelt discussion, it is a good sign that you were able to create a safe space where people are comfortable to be themselves and confident to share their perspectives.

A word on feedback. Make sure to ask for feedback from your attendees! Aside from gathering invaluable suggestions for improvement, we were able to get ideas on communities and organisations we could reach out to and share what we’ve learned on designing for the elderly — all through our feedback form.

In the end, it’s social capital

Organising our own events has enabled us to meet new people and foster budding relationships. We’ve made countless connections through our design thinking workshops as well as our events about designing inclusive user interfaces to empower the blind, and most recently our event on designing for seniors. These connections are our social capital that fuel our work of advocating for design thinking and accessible and inclusive design.

If you’re keen to find out more about how we organise events, or if you’d like to invite us to speak and share about design thinking, accessibility and inclusive design with your team or organisation, please write to us at hello@55mins.com!

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Mai is the content and marketing lead at 55 Minutes. Outside of work, you’re likely to find Mai taking long walks, baking cakes for friends or singing alto in the choir.