The organiser takes responsibility for running the group. They need to be reliable, organised, and have enough free time – about 1-2 days each month. It helps if they have good communication skills.
Some groups share organisation to reduce the amount of work for everyone. Make sure everyone understands this committment before they join. It can help to use online tools like Google Drive or Dropbox to share files and documents between members. It can also be useful to keep meetings to the same day each month to make it easier to plan. For example, you might all decide to meet on the second Saturday or the month.
The organiser will:
- Find and work with venues for in-person meetings
- Work with the member artists who will present at each session
- Communicate with group members about when the meetings are happening
- Arranging refreshments for in-person sessions
- Arranging equipment for in-person sessions
- Make sure everyone has a meeting link for online session
- Send reminders to members about the next meeting
- Booking / liaising with occasional visiting speakers (if appropriate)
Tips for organising
Fees for organisers
You can apply for funding to cover the time it takes to organise sessions. Arts Council Engalnd’s project grants would cover this, for example. Funding applications and reporting however take a lot of time. It can be more effective to reduce the work involved by planning better, using online tools to organise and schedule meetings, and working together. Useful online tools include:
- shared calendars like Google Calendar with links for online meetings, a note of the agenda or details of the artists presenting, and link to their work
- scheduling assistants like Doodle to quickly find dates to meet between groups of people
- online conferencing tools like Zoom or Skype to include members in hybrid or online meetings. Note that may online video conferencing tools route their networks through China. Paid Zoom accounts can choose different data centres instead.
- online storage like Google Drive to compile documents and notes of decisions about how meetings will be run
Share the workload
Be clear about how long anyone is expected to organise meetings. You might decide to change organiser every 6 – 12 months to share this work.
It can be hard to share organisation between members at the same time. This can lead to more work for everyone if someone doesn’t have time, and makes it more likely that something will going wrong. You can get information from members to make it easier, however. You might, for example, ask each member to suggest a venue for in-person meetings, or get recommendations for guest speakers.
Decisions
One of the most time-consuming things about working together is making decisions. It’s best to schedule planning and review meetings to talk about how the group is going and any changes you need to make. Stick to the decisions reached to reduce the organiser’s workload and run the group more smoothly.
Clear roles and boundaries
Clearly define the role of the organiser so the members understand what they do. The organiser should repeat that their tasks are as often as they need to.
Efficient communication
Email or WhatsApp groups can be a good way of keeping in touch. Decide how the group will communicate and when they need to copy in more members to avoid too many messages. For example, members who can’t attend can just message the organiser.
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