Nottinghams's Meet & Greet

A guide to Nottingham's Meet & Greet

Download a PDF copy here

Event Name

Meet and Greet

Type of Event

Social

Number of weeks preparation time needed?

1 week needed to prep for the event but need to book a room as soon as you decide a date as at the beginning of the year every society will be wanting to get a big room for their meet and greet.

Number of committee members needed?

It's the first big event so get everyone involved.

Any help from outside organisations needed?

No

Stepwise guide to preparation in the run up to the event

1. Decide a date and book the room
2. Decide on the activities and games you will be running

3. Make a short presentation that you will deliver at the event to outline the events and ideas you have for the year

4. Plan out the meet and greet to make sure each committee member knows what's going on and when. This includes who is talking during the presentation and in which order as well as the order of activities and what they entail.

5. Food! always a huge incentive, think about how much you will need and allocate a committee member to order and collect

Start promoting at your freshers fair, send out messages and update social media regularly. There will be a lot of new students coming to the meet and greet and they will not be very familiar with the campus so set up meeting points

 

Guide to running the event on the day

Make sure that those committee members that will be at the meeting points know what time and where they need to be.

The rest of the committee should get to the room at least 45 mins before meet and greet is going to start setting up the room.

5 mins before the event is set to start have a couple of members stand outside the building to let those arriving know where to go

As students arrive, introduce yourselves and give them name tags. We wrote down their names onto labels which they stuck on their tops. We also put numbers on the labels which would be their groups for later.

Hand out the ice breakers; we gave everyone a sheet with 15 questions on and a pen. We told them to find someone who fits the questions and for each question they had to find a different person, allowing people to get to talk to each other. (15-20mins)

Next, we had our presentation which allowed the committee members to introduce themselves and let everyone know of the plans for the semester.

First activity: Dastaar tying competition. We got everyone to split up into the groups as allocated by the numbers on their name labels. The group picks one person to tie the Dastaar on within 5-10mins. We asked the old committee to judge which one looked best.

Second activity: Gol Gappa eating competition. One member from each group nominated. Who can eat the plate of Gol Gappai the quickest?

Break for food

Third Activity: Quiz. We got everyone back into the groups and got them to work together to answer the questions.

We ended with a short Simran session (5mins)

 

Did you face any issues when planning or carrying out this event? How did you overcome these?

The main issue we had was finding a big enough room as all rooms had already been booked. We ended up getting 2 small rooms which had a retractable wall in between them so it wasn't too bad, but this did mean there was a pillar in the middle of the room which was just annoying.

When students were coming to the event, we didn't have a member on the ground to receive them and tell them were to go. students were struggling a bit to find which room was it. we couldn't come over this.

 

What could you have improved upon and what would you do differently if you ran the event again?

If we ran the event again I think we would have picked fewer activities to do and just allowed people to socialise.

What are your top tips and take-home messages?

Make sure the committee is talking to members; get involved with the icebreakers and activities and get to know the kinds of people that have come to the meet and greet.

Keep it chilled and relaxed; don't worry if activities are taking longer than planned and you can't do activity you wanted to esp. if this is because members are socialising and getting to know each other.