WIAD19 Final Report

Global Executive Producer: Grace Lau

Executive Summary

For World IA Day 2019, 70 applications from the Call for Locations were received from June to December 2018.

Location applications received: 69

Only 1 application was not accepted due to lack of response from the organizer in previous years. Two applications were received from that location (Tehran) and they were encouraged to collaborate. I did not hear back from the repeat organizer and assumed that they were no longer interested.

Region	Accepted	Dropped	Total
Asia-Pacific	7	2	9
Europe and Africa	12	7	19
Latin America	10	0	10
Middle East	2	0	2
North America	27	3	30
Grand Total	58	12	70

Note: This included Silicon Valley since it was merged with San Francisco.

As in previous years, the distribution of WIAD locations was heavily North American-centric.

• 43% North America

• 27% Europe and Africa

• 14% Latin America

Locations that dropped: 11

• Amsterdam

• Berlin

• Houston

• Lisbon

• Melbourne

• Munich

• Palermo

• Raleigh

• Singapore

• Toulouse

• Trento

The number of locations that dropped increased began in November and lasted until a few days before the event in February. Reasons included:

• Lack of team, volunteers, co-organizer

• Fallout of speaker

• No venue

• Cultural barriers

Locations that held a celebration/event: 58

Was not able to verify which locations actually held an event.

WIAD19 Overall Retrospective

What worked well

• Airtable + Zapier helped automate emails and aggregation of surveys sent over the year.

• Having a regional director for Latin America helped with outreach and problem-solving.

• Illustration for the global theme helped create a more connected brand for the theme overall.

• Using IAI as a pass-through was helpful for some locations. Still had a lot

What didn't fare well

• T-shirt fundraiser. The whole production of it.

  • Typos

  • Marketing

  • Illustration to be optimized in print

• Impact of IAS Code of Conduct and questions on WIAD Code of Conduct -- Not to be taken lightly, we need to develop a stronger code of conduct, policy, procedures, and provide training for our organizers so that they can be prepared for any kind of incident -- emergency,

• Number of global team volunteers dropped over time from 4 to 1 due to IAI Board changes, work/life balance.

• Lots of questions about event insurance right before the event.

What could be improved or planned out for future years

• Having a WIAD organizer store to handle generic World IA Day merchandise and swag such as:

• • WIAD stickers

  • global theme stickers

  • diverse gender pronoun stickers

• Distribution of any sponsor swag

  • Optimal Workshop allotted 3 weeks to send out stickers, but not every location received them in time due to being held up in customs

• Late redemption of sponsor discount codes

  • Up until October 2019, we were still receiving requests from attendees to extend the Rosenfeld Media codes. Rules should be explicit about when these should expire and what to do beyond expiration date.

• Few redemption of sponsor discount codes

  • Better positioning of sponsor material.