Creating a Digital Marketing Workflow for a Virtual Startup Weekend

Creating a Digital Marketing Workflow for a Virtual Startup Weekend

Last weekend, I had the honor and pleasure of organizing a virtual Startup Weekend, which you can find here: https://www.facebook.com/StartupWeekendTW2020/

This was my first time organizing an event of this type, add on to that the virtual aspect of something that should be super hands-on and heavily depends on being in a certain high-intensity environment. 

Well, we pulled it off, and it’s not without it’s ups-and-downs. But I’m super happy that I got to experience this and look forward to many more events of this nature in the future. 

I currently help lead the marketing and design efforts in an organization called Techstars, a global accelerator for startups. They have a division in Taiwan that focuses on Ecosystem Development, currently named “Taiwan Startup Community” powered by Techstars in Taiwan.

(If you ask me, this is a perfect time to create a whole brand architecture for their EcoDev Division underneath their umbrella brand “Techstars”. And since the new brand strategy and brand identity is “techstars_” with the underscore serving as a “connection” why not use that as the connector to “tw” representing “Taiwan…”? So the brand identity for the Taiwanese division would be techstars_tw. HQ was adamant about not using “Taiwan” because it would mean they have an accelerator at this location, which they don’t usually use a country name, they use a city name…but I digress) 

The whole point of this project is to build up an “ecosystem” for startups to grow and develop into larger more productive companies that will hopefully provide economic growth to the local community.

Startup Weekend is one of the many initiatives that they run on a local level, bringing the community together. 

I’ve learned a lot throughout this process so I’ll most likely create a few more posts following this one as we start to collect what others thought about the whole experience and digest internally how we can improve upon this. 

Since I lead the marketing and design aspect of the program I wanted to create a post on this specific topic. 

First, I created a marketing and communications workflow that centralized all of the content being created so that it was easier to locate all the files going around internally. 

I used Airtable to create a database with multiple tabs: first, you might ask why not something like Asana or Trello. 

For marketing and communication workflows, something like Trello is perfect for smaller-scale tasks and projects, as I use it with our other online events, but I thought Airtable had a great function that allowed me to better organize the digital marketing content into a few different groups by way of how it allows you to visually show your content. For example, we know that Trello’s strength lies in that it’s a “kanban” style organization system, that allows you to move “cards” in-between “lists” so that you can visually track your content/ideas. 

Airtable (www.airtable.com) has this but within that Database, it also allows you to create multiple spreadsheets with categories. Here are the tabs I created:  

• Content and media workflow in Kanban style which lets me track the progress of certain content pieces: what’s an idea, what’s been done, what’s ready to post, what’s been posted, and what’s paid vs. what’s organic. How you track the progress is really up to your workflow and how you mentally group the stages, but this is great for an overview of where everything is. 
• MarComm Content Gallery – This view displays “cards” in a “gallery” view. This function is by far one of my favorites. I can create a visual database with all of my visual content and add all of the post captions that I want with that image. I can just share this tab with all of our organizers and people can use this to share whatever content we have. 
• Quick Links – Using a table/spreadsheet to create a database of all the links to resources we have as well as our social media links 
• Event Organizing Meeting notes + video recordings – a list of links from each organizing meeting, allowing quick access to meetings

Here’s a screenshot of the MarComm Content Gallery:  

View the airtable database that I created for this event here: https://airtable.com/shrhwu4F6zvyUMazU

One quick finding that I got from this is that no matter how organized you are if the system is too complicated for others they won’t use it. And the other side of that coin is: if you record a training video explaining in detail how to use it, and people still won’t use it, then it’s laziness. This is where I think this fell short though its either too complicated or people are lazy. 

I think this workflow has such great potential to be amazingly useful for a team. 

I look forward to seeing how I can develop this Digital Marketing Workflow for Virtual Events of this scale.