In April 2021 I joined the first (and last) On Deck Course Creators fellowship in a bid to learn more about creating a transformational course for my social enterprise Visualise in Motion. Towards the end of the course, I was commissioned as Project Manager to support the Program Director Andrew Barry (also Founder of Curious Lion) in developing his ambitious vision for an external facing learning conference.

Within 5 weeks, we programmed 51 sessions/speakers from more than 15 different countries, across more than 10 different timezones, hosted in a 3 day conference.

My key deliverables were to:

• Manage the event programme and overall project timeline including scheduling all sessions according to appropriate timezones.
• Build & manage the event in the platform Hopin which included creating 51 different custom sessions.
• Manage the registration process.
• Coordination with hosts/speakers/partners including onboarding to the Hopin platform.
• Working with the legal team to draft any necessary agreements for hosts, speakers and partners.
• Create custom marketing assets for the comms team and all speakers to use.
• Advise on the strategic delivery (thinking solely about partnerships & long term planning).
• Support with any monitoring & evaluation reports necessary.

Fiona is a professional. I was so impressed with the way Fiona approached this project. She took the initiative from day one, creating thoughtful documents to project manage everything. She thought of everything too, pulling me in when decisions were needed. Fiona definitely knows what she’s doing organizing large events.

Andrew Barry – On Deck Course Creators Program Director