A couple of weeks ago we took part in the GDST Young Leaders Conference.

The event was hosted at the Royal High School Bath and we started the weekend by being split up into 12 teams with 140 other students from the schools across the trust. To inspire and teach us about leadership which was the focus of the weekend, we begun by hearing from two guest speakers Ann Daniels an Arctic explorer and Ann France a ceo of chartered management institute

In order to get to know our teams a little better, we took part in some team building exercises involving the British Army. This involved working as a team to complete tasks and solve problems. Once we had familiarised ourselves with the member of our teams, work begun on our hypothetical charity campaign and commenced with talks from each of our charity clients. An ambassador from my chosen charity, United world schools, informed us of the work that they are doing to help educate children in some of the poorest area of the world such as Nepal, Myanmar and Cambodia. We were then given our brief and started to generate some initial ideas for our sponsorship pitch, market research, presentation and promotional video. Here is the video that my team produced for our campaign. 

We resumed our work early on Saturday morning when we properly started to expand on our ideas. Our group came up with the idea to contact Lego for sponsorship and produce an online challenge involving Lego to forge a partnership to raise awareness and funds for the UWS campaign. In our sponsorship pitch we managed to secure our requests for £6000 investment as well as access to the high profile social media following of Lego and their celebrity ambassadors.

With our funding secured and our finances calculated, we turned our attention to building a solid campaign that we could present to the judges. To do this, half of us took to the streets of Bath to gauge an unbiased opinion on our ideas and execution in a market research exercise. Meanwhile the remainder of the team stayed at the school to work on bringing the face of our brand to life; designing a logo, promotional posters and creating our short 30 second promotional video.

Throughout the weekend part of our challenge was adhering to strict deadlines. By 7pm on Saturday evening each team had to have completed several documents outlining the brief, a concise promotional film detailing this and a final presentation that would be our final pitch to the judges. With our campaigns completed we celebrated our hard work with a formal dinner- I think we can all agree this was our favourite part of the weekend.

On Sunday it was results day and a chance to get to see what everyone else had produced. We all had a chance to present our campaigns to a panel of judges including our charity client, fundraising managers from the GDST and the CEO, Cheryl Giovannoni. Amongst us there were some great successes. Emmy and her team won for Frank Water and Alice and her team won for their charity, The Rainbow Trust.

Overall the experience was truly enlightening. In just a weekend we gained an insight into the demanding process of imagining, executing and presenting an entire charity campaign. In the process we all had the opportunity to meet and work with some lovely people and hear from some inspirational speakers.

Written by Freya, Year 13