Frank Morton 2024, Swansea co-chairs Charlotte Todd and James Rees – both event first-timers – share insights and tips for the next wave of prospective Frank Morton hosts
FRANK MORTON is a very special event for chemical engineering students, helping build a great community within universities – an opportunity to meet representatives of top employers, compete against other universities and round it off with an evening celebration.
Knowing what a successful event looks like and how to achieve it can be overwhelming for organisers. So as hosts of Frank Morton 2024 (winner of the award for best event from Swansea University Students' Union at the Society Awards 2024, no less) we are here to provide some guidance.
The beginnings of any successful event. Choosing your team wisely is paramount. You need members who are not just willing but eager to roll up their sleeves and get stuck in. That will make life much easier for anyone leading the committee. With at least 12 committed members, you'll have no problems organising a successful day.
Having a good treasurer who knows how to budget and send off and keep track of invoices is really important. Start early, stay organised, and keep that budget sheet updated. It really helps. We used a contingency of 10% to make sure we didn’t go into the negative.
Not everyone will match your level of commitment. We had issues with committee members and volunteers dropping out or not being able to make it on the day. Keeping a team motivated and positive for the nine months of planning is difficult but by bringing a positive attitude and offering incentives such as a free ticket for the rest of the day you can retain a lot of people.
For major roles, it can be worth having multiple people assigned to them in case of dropouts and to decrease the pressure on your committee. It is also worth having some smaller roles available to those who are not able to dedicate a lot of time to running or organising the event.
Clear communication will bring everything together smoothly. We utilised Teams to keep everyone on the same page, with designated channels ensuring everyone knew their roles and deadlines. Great communication can work wonders in keeping everything on track.
To attract as many companies as possible to our networking event, we created a brief which detailed the logistical and financial information of the event. The brief was started in August 2023 when Swansea had just won the bid to host. However, due to some other factors, the brief didn’t get released until November 2023, with a deadline of January 2024 to get in touch with us regarding sponsorship. The bureaucratic processes of a lot of companies and the Christmas period meant the two-month window was too short and most sponsors contacted us after our deadline had passed. Therefore, we extended the window.
We suggest future committees prioritise getting a draft of a brief completed. This should include sponsorship package details, price, sports offered, plot sizes, catering, etc.
This takes a lot longer than you will initially anticipate so start near enough as soon as you win the bid. Then get it proofread by other committee members, academics involved in Frank Morton and your university’s employability team. Once all the details have been confirmed, the best way to reach companies is to use your university’s employability team’s contacts, your society contacts and your academics' network as well as contacting IChemE to send out an email to all members about the event with the brief attached. In our experience, most companies had heard about the event through the IChemE email. For our event we offered two packages: one which included a plot which included ample plug sockets and internet access, a catered lunch, and snacks during the networking morning and a second more expensive option which included the option to send us social media content to post on our pages and a dodgeball game.
The heart and soul of Frank Morton – competitive chemical engineers. With Josh Patteson, Nada Dadilahi and Teilo Crow leading the sports coordinators, the Swansea team pulled off a fantastic event. Having organised and strong sports leaders is vital to making sure everything runs well on the day.
Booking venues early is really important. Make sure you use your university's resources when planning and organising the event. For us, they were able to help make the planning and setup run smoothly. Contact your student union events team early on to make use of their experience and knowledge of event planning. This was really great for us as it meant that most of the setting-up went really smoothly and the team was able to give us great advice, even being able to help us secure additional volunteers as well as security for the day.
And volunteers? They're vital in making sure everything runs like clockwork. Incentivise their participation, we promised free tickets to anyone who volunteered for at least three hours. This way they were still able to participate in the events on the day.
Organising the sports is a big challenge – ensuring you have all the equipment, rules, referees, and timings can be one of the most stressful parts of the day. We decided to contact our different sports societies to help secure much-needed equipment and also get advice on how to run each sport. Many of the societies were kind enough to let us borrow some of their equipment but that didn't prevent an issue on the day when we still didn’t have dodgeballs. Thankfully, we were able to negotiate with the sports centre and they allowed us to borrow some. Frank Morton will throw unexpected challenges at you but it's important to stay calm and work on finding solutions.
Communication is key, not just within your team but with fellow universities too. Use social media, group chats, and emails to try and get maximum participation. Don't hesitate to reach out directly to other chemical engineering departments; the more students who attend, the better the competition. We had a Whatsapp chat which included sports reps from each attending university. The groupchat was promoted on social media but we only sent invites to the universites' official Chemical Engineering Society pages. We also had a Facebook and Instagram page to promote our event. Internally, we posted on our Canvas hub and made announcements during lectures.
Now, let's talk weather. We lucked out with sunny skies in Swansea, but that's not always the case. Have a plan B ready for if it rains. Frank Morton is usually in February so rain is more likely than you might think. Think of indoor alternatives and contingency plans to keep the day going, come rain or shine.
Aside from superstitiously avoiding any comments on the weather, we made sure we were prepared just in case it decided to pour down. We booked out the indoor facilities at the sports park early on. The staff there were really helpful and gave us a tour of all the indoor facilities, showing us which sports could take place inside if the weather was horrible.
Above all, don't forget to savour the moment. It's easy to get caught up in the chaos, but every now and then, take a step back and soak in the joy of the event you’ve made happen.
One of the biggest advantages of Frank Morton 2024 taking place on a Monday in February was that there was not a lot of demand for venues, so future committees should find it easier to find venues and acts with availability.
The main factors which you must consider when choosing a venue are the capacity, the proximity to other Frank Morton activities, the capability of the venue to host the evening entertainment, safety and, of course, the cost. It is very common that the main evening event venue is a nightclub or concert venue as the staff will have a lot of experience in hosting these events and will be able to assist with security, setting up the acts and sometimes even sourcing acts.
One major worry for all evening organisers is that attendees will leave straight after the closing ceremony, so the best way of retaining these attendees is to have acts. It can be very daunting to try to find acts which you think others would like. Therefore, the best solution is to provide a variety of different acts and get feedback from as many different chemical engineering students as possible on your choices, then promote these acts.
For us, we decided to cover as many different musical tastes as possible by having a rock band (The Stray Pursuit), an ABBA tribute, and a DJ sourced by our venue, Sin City.
When preparing for Frank Morton it is imperative that you seek as much help as possible. Often a lot of help and information comes from places you would not expect! We had help from our student union, academics in our faculty, previous attendees, venue owners, and IChemE, while our steering committee comprised of former Frank Morton organisers Daniel Rhymer and Rhiannon Thomas. We were also invited to sit on the IChemE South Wales committee as student members by Darren Oatley-Radcliffe which gave us some fantastic contacts, help, and funding.
It is easy to forget that the vast majority of attendees will have little to no knowledge of your campus nor your city. Therefore, logistics are essential. Firstly, keeping an avenue of communication open is important. We did this by having a sports rep Whatsapp chat with students from the attending universities, where we posted the itinerary, suggestions of coach parking, Google Maps links to the different venues, and shuttle bus timetables.
Due to the large number of attendees who do not have a great knowledge of the area, hosts cannot expect them to walk long distances to venues, especially to the evening event. Therefore, coach hires are essential. For our event, we started on Singleton Campus and then hosted our evening event in Sin City which is approximately a 40-minute walk away. Leading 500 students through the city for 40 minutes is dangerous as it is likely that students will get separated and lost, tiring, as many students have been participating in sports, and time consuming.
To reduce the number of coaches needed for the event, choose venues which are within a short distance of one another and have volunteers who can greet the arrivals and help them navigate. It is also worth allowing for delays when creating a timetable.
One of the major problems we had very close to the event was that one of our initial venues, who had stated that they had the capacity to host our evening event, only had the capacity for 400 students (more than 500 students attended the event). As soon as we heard this, we adapted our plans, arranging a meeting with another venue to organise having our event there. We contacted them directly through their email listed on their website and, using a contact provided to us by one of our lecturers, explained what our requirements were to host an event this size: approximate number of attendees, setup requirements of the acts, bag drop area requirements, how tickets will be processed and times which we will need the space. Our tickets were in the form of a QR code which could be exchanged for a wristband. Many of the attendees did not end up collecting their wristband or only wanted to attend the evening events, however, so the venue connected to the student union’s native page to process QR codes.
Hosting is a once in a lifetime opportunity so we would very strongly urge any interested parties to consider submitting a bid. We are hoping to build a line-up of future hosts which will give future committees a longer planning period. To find more information about submitting a bid, contact Charlotte Todd over LinkedIn. Good luck with submitting your bids, we really look forward to reading them.
All images courtesy of Stay Focused Photography
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