There is no such thing as an ‘obligation free’ quote

Although Open Day is an event, I have quickly discovered that Asha’s role is definitely more project management than event management! Open Day is Curtin’s largest recruitment event and in 2012 over 17 000 prospective students and their families attended Open Day, which makes it an extremely important event in engagement of Curtin's key target market and their influencers. There is a lot of work involved in perfecting the event – branding, marketing, communications, event management, public relations - and so many staff members from different departments within Curtin come together to work on the project.

My very first task was to look over what had been done for the ‘Fun Zone’ in previous years and come up with new and exciting ideas. This involved a lot of research of what is on offer in Perth in terms of performers and entertainment. Perth has an extremely small community of entertainers and suppliers so some of our options were quite limited, which created a problem as we needed our amusements to be family friendly, weather resistant, different to what other universities use at their open days and fit in with an overall theme for the Fun Zone. We initially considered having an amusement park attraction, such as a cup and saucer ride, but there is only one supplier in Perth and they are unavailable on Open Day. Considering that this ride could not be placed under a marquee in case of rain, this idea was totally abandoned.

I have also been heavily involved in negotiating with suppliers, which has been extremely interesting. As soon as an external businesses realises you are from a university, sometimes all they see are dollar signs because they assume Curtin has endless amounts of money to spend. This can be extremely frustrating as Open Day does have budget constraints, but some suppliers would still email-stalk me even if I had told them we were unsure or would not require their services. There is no such thing as an obligation free quote! Despite this being a frustrating experience, studying public relations has taught me to always be professional when communicating with stakeholders, I had to maintain a professional line of communication with all suppliers as someone at Curtin may need to use them in the future and I needed to maintain a good reputation with all suppliers, even those we did not use on the day.   

In my first week as Open Day intern I was introduced to the amazing project management software – Trello. Trello looks a little like a Pinterest board but allows you to collaborate with co-workers to see who has completed what, you can have boards with titles such as ‘Do,’ ‘Doing,’ ‘Done’ and drag specific tasks to different boards once you are completing or have completed them. My boss and I are using it to communicate (and remember) all the tasks I have completed or need to complete.  I would highly recommend it for anyone interested in project or event management!

The Power Of Negotiation

The ability of manipulating negotiation power is a critical part of negotiating professionally and successfully; and taking over the control to shift one side to the other through effective negotiation skills will lead to desire outcomes.

The dilemma involved a recent negotiation with a large global event ticketing organisation. In order to increase the number of ticket sales for the coming annual charity event - Men in Black Ball, it was decided that it would be more efficient to promote ticket sales on a better well-known event ticketing company simultaneously with Momentum's website ticket sales.

The ticketing company wants to charge an initial fee of $1,000, on top of the agreed price of $50 for each ticket sold, which a non-for-profit and charity-based organisation like Momentum would be struggling to pay off. In fact, charities do not usually get charged initial payments; not even mention about it being a relatively large amount.

Charity event organisations survive based on sponsorship founding and the excess profit gained from events to supporting charities. Barbara, who is a very confident and assertive negotiator, effectively used her perceived power to win the deal. She first disagreed with the initial payment and acknowledged the financial situation of our organization. In fact, Momentum was offering many benefits to the ticketing company include prime position, promotion of organization names and logo on associated activities and shows. The deal encourages a win-win situation which the ticketing company should not be greedy about the extra payment. Barbara requested to negotiate with a higher level positioned manager. It was like a fighting competition, which Barbara was absolutely a stronger fighter. I was staring at her with an admire look in the eyes listening to the conversation; she has turned the other party speechless a numerous times.

Two minutes later a manager called back from the ticketing company and offered a lowed initial payment of $500, which can be paid after the deal. Barbara smiled and agreed. She did her little calculation and acknowledged that if she can sell three tickets that would cover the payment.

‘Have you learnt how to negotiate?’ with a confident smile Barbara asked. I kept on nodding my head.