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Ignite Anchorage 3 Debriefing

2010 March 3
by Dean

First of all – HOLY CRAP YOU PEOPLE ARE FRELLING AWESOME! The sponsors, the volunteers, the speakers and the audience. All of you blew me away with everything you did to make Ignite Anchorage 3 a huge success. The whole was indeed greater than the sum of its parts. Ignite Anchorage 3 was the biggest and the best Ignite Anchorage event yet. Thank you!

Executive Summary

  • 1 band
  • 2 a cappella performances
  • 11 speakers
  • 2 PowerPoint karaoke competitors
  • 77 attendees
  • 8 volunteers
  • $674 raised

Fundraiser

Through ticket sales we raised $674.00 to donate to Alaska educational projects. When you purchased your ticket you were asked to vote for which Alaska project on DonorsChoose.org to fund. The overwhelming winner, by a margin of 2 to 1 over the project getting the second most votes, was Young Adult Literature for Rural Alaskan Eskimo Students in Togiak, AK. Our fundraising goal for this event was to raise enough through ticket sales to fully fund one project. Through your generosity we met, and exceeded that goal! Not only did we fully fund Young Adult Literature for Rural Alaskan Eskimo Students, but we had money left over to partially fund a second project. Second place was nearly a five-way tie, but GPS Units to Document Glacial Retreat in Juneau, AK received one vote from someone who purchased a ticket at the door, and that one vote broke the tie and we donated the remaining funds to that project.

Project Amount Donated
Young Adult Literature for Rural Alaskan Eskimo Students $521.04
GPS Units to Document Glacial Retreat $152.96
Total $674.00

Since we weren’t able to fully fund GPS Units to Document Glacial Retreat, we want to challenge the Ignite Anchorage community – especially those that did not get to attend Ignite Anchorage 3 – to help complete its funding. The project needs an additional $343.50 to be fully funded. Please help by donating whatever you can.

Speakers

We had more speakers at this event than we’ve ever had before and they were all great. They were funny, serious, thought provoking, inspiring, challenging and most of all – awesome. In order of appearance:

We owe special thanks to Mark Horvath for taking time out of his busy schedule to present at Ignite Anchorage 3. Mark just happened to be visiting Anchorage this week as part of his invisiblepeople.tv project and he agreed to speak at our event while he was here. Through invisiblepeople.tv, Mark is working to humanize the homeless and to tell their story. Mark’s presentation was extremely moving and inspiring. If you are attending SXSW this year don’t miss marks SXSW Interactive session A Conversation about Social Change through Social Media.

We will get videos of all the speakers online as soon as we can.

If seeing these speakers inspired you to become an Ignite speaker then email your topic proposal to Ignite (at) IgniteAnchorage.com. It’s never to early to start planning and our next event will likely be held in October or November.

PowerPoint Karaoke

We tried this for the first time and it was brilliant. We used slides contributed to Ignite by Alistair Croll of Ignite Montreal to put together two random sets of PowerPoint slides. Then we asked two volunteers to get up on stage and give a three minute presentation based on slides they had never seen before. The audience really seemed to enjoy the competition and our challengers made it look so easy that we have several volunteers to do PowerPoint Karaoke at our next event. After both presentations we asked the audience to choose a winner and we awarded prizes.

1st Place - Ignite Anchorage coffee mug and a $20 Kaladi Brothers Coffee gift certificate Ryan Lawton
2nd Place – Ignite Anchorage coffee mug and a $20 Kaladi Brothers Coffee gift certificate Don Makoviney

It was very close but Ryan edged out Don, probably because of his home field advantage. Thanks to Ryan, Don and our generous sponsor Kaladi Brothers Coffee for helping us add a new feature to Ignite Anchorage. We’ll definitely be doing PowerPoing Karaoke again at our next event.

Musical Guests

We’re very grateful to the band Mystery Lady and to Marian Call for playing for us at Ignite Anchorage 3. They were both terrific. We tried having live music instead of a pre-event contest and we think it’s a better fit for our community and our events. We even had some musicians in the audience volunteer to perform at future events.

Volunteers

Our volunteers are awesome and we’d like to give a great big thank you to (in alphabetical order):

Now that we’ve thanked them, we do have one complaint about our volunteers that we need to get off our chest: There aren’t enough of them! Our events are growing and we need more volunteers to help organize and run them. We had a few snafus that having more people involved and helping at the event probably could have prevented. If you are reading this and you would like to volunteer for our next event (tentatively to be held in October or November) then email us at Ignite (at) IgniteAnchorage.com.

Sponsors

We continue to have great sponsors that are involved with making Ignite Anchorage possible and we hope they will continue to be involved in our events. We extend our sincere gratitude and a heartfelt thank you to:

Conclusion

If you took photos at Ignite Anchorage 3 we would love for you share them with us by adding them to the Ignite Anchorage Flickr group.

If you see a speaker, a sponsor or a volunteer give them a big hug and say “Thank you!”

Email your topic proposals or ideas to Ignite (at) IgniteAnchorage.com.

We’ve got a list of things we need to fix and improve for next time. If you have any suggestions for improvent, new ideas or even complaints email them to Ignite (at) IgniteAnchorage.com.

Thank you, and we hope to see everyone at Ignite Anchorage 4!

from → Global Ignite Week, Ignite Anchorage 3

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