Founder Fridays Part Two: fundraisers, firsts and feeling the moment

During the month of July, Alex Rogers is sitting down with our founder, Meg Alexander, to chat about her life, career and how Grae came to be. Check back here at the end of each week as we share her insights on Founder Fridays.

Alex Rogers is an experience designer and community builder based in Oakland, California.

This week, we will hear from Meg on how she launched her career and some of the lessons learned that she carries with her today.

A: Today we are chatting about the first few years of your professional life. What is the one thing current Meg would tell her first event on-site Meg?

M: Drink more water!!

A: What's the first event you remember planning in a relatively professional capacity and how did you get into working in this space?

M: When I was 17, the summer after my senior year of high school, I was preparing to go to Syracuse University in the fall to study advertising. That July my best friend, her mom and her little sister were killed in a random home invasion. A month later, I went to Syracuse to start my first year of college but I had a lot of feelings I didn’t know how to process, and I was trying to figure out where to channel that emotional energy.

My best friend’s mom had MS and when we were kids my friend had started participating in WalkMS to raise money for the National MS Society, so I thought I could further the mission they had set out on - to find a cure for MS.

I had some friends who were willing to help, and the four of us decided to have a basketball tournament fundraiser in their honor. I thought we would raise a few hundred dollars with a couple of teams. We had a lot of energy to give to the cause though so we created sponsorship packets, got in touch with the National MS Society, talked to the city and the high school. We ended up with 36 teams registered and we raised $10k our first year.

The tournament happened another three times, and turned into an internship, which turned into my first job at the National MS Society, Greater New England chapter as Development Manager, where I managed their largest fundraiser, The Cape Cod Getaway, and assisted on production for the 50-some odd events they hosted annually.

A: That's quite a journey from something so personal to a career, and it sounds like it really impacted your time as a student.

M: It definitely had an impact. During my time at Syracuse I switched my major from advertising to Public Relations after that first fundraiser with the MS Society. I think one of the reasons I had not really considered events as a career initially is because I thought of it as party planning, and to me at the time planning parties didn't seem impactful enough. I wanted to make a difference in the world; I wanted to know how I was going to make my mark and shift something in the bigger picture. Advertising or PR felt like bigger platforms. My work with the MS Society showed me that events could be impactful. It opened a door for me to see that if the medium I wanted to use was events, that it was just as viable.

A: What is a specific moment you created during your time with the National MS Society that you are particularly proud of?

M: My first event with the National MS society was the Cape Cod Getaway, which is a two-day, 150 mile bike ride in New England that raises funds for the National MS Society. The event had 1500 cyclists at the time and the only moment when you’d get to see them all together was the start line. That year, on the drizzly morning in June, the opening ceremony concluded, the starting gun sounded, and all 1500 people clipped into their bikes and started their ride. There was something about the physical motion of that moment where you can see all these people beginning a journey.

It was so special for me and everyone there to see the number of people involved in that movement, in the quest to find a cure... I remember standing there in awe with tears running down my face. Seeing that all of these other people cared about a cause so close to me and knowing they had been fundraising for months and had now arrived at this start line. Many of them were there because they knew someone struggling with MS, or were living with the disease themselves, and to have that moment of unity and movement really amplified their power.

A: Yeah these experiences can be really powerful - you've been sharing a lot about experiences or events that you have been a part of that were sort of firsts. Doing anything for the first time is even more challenging but sometimes where those really authentic moments come in.. What's something unexpected that came out of an event you planned?

M: I have been involved in a lot of firsts and I have learned a heck of a lot from each of them, but the beauty is in that risk and in taking the chance. That’s where there is opportunity for greatness… it just doesn't always look the way you thought it would.

There is one event in particular that I'm thinking of, when I was a senior in college I started the Social Media and Acappella Conference [SMACC] and we had a really high set of expectations.

We got some investors on board who dreamt even bigger than we did and we ended up booking a 1500 seat auditorium, which cost most of our budget. We never stood a chance of selling 1500 tickets, not even a little bit. We were in Syracuse, NY talking about social media and a cappella in 2011.

So in the last couple of weeks we found ourselves needing to scale that down to a 200 person auditorium and cut our losses. You could have said the event failed if we measured it on ticket sales, and in some ways it did fail. However if we look at the long term impact on the a cappella side of the equation, 200 people met each other and went on to create bands together, to launch new festivals in various parts of the country that did grow and continue today. People that met that weekend went on to get married and move across the country to live together and create really beautiful and incredible art. I have a hard time calling that a failure. If someone told me when we started SMACC that all of those things would come of it, I would have been thrilled!

For me, there is something really special in a first, because you don't really know what it will become. You can have a dream but you have to let lots of people and environments shape it to create what it's supposed to be. SMACC became Boston Sings [BOSS] when the Contemporary A Cappella Society asked me to take another swing at it. BOSS was fiscally viable, and still exists today. I had the opportunity to assemble a team that even as I moved in different directions with my life, was able to sustain the event and has now served the national a cappella community for nearly a decade.

Interested in scheduling some time to chat with Meg about her experiences and expertise? Drop us a line.