GDST Young Leaders’ Conference

This weekend the Student Senior Leadership Team attended the annual young leaders conference at Royal High School in Bath.

On Friday evening, we were told that our challenge was to design a digital campaign to raise awareness and fundraise for a certain charity. After being split up into groups and shown to our dorms, we began work on the time pressured task ahead.

On Saturday morning after a 6am start, we began to design our pitches, create the 30 second promotional videos, gather marketing research, find sponsorship, budget and develop social media accounts. We had to pitch our campaigns to a panel of potential sponsors who then decided whether they would fund parts of our project or not, in true Dragon’s Den style.

Some girls travelled to Bath town centre to ask the public their opinion of their campaign, others used the time to shop for merchandise to support their pitch or film their video. When they returned it was time to gather the whole presentation to be submitted with the info-graphics, videos, budget and finance proposal and Prezi presentation. This was very stressful for every group, especially as we knew that our formal dinner and ‘bucks fizz’ were waiting! After a lovely three course dinner with our teams, it was back to work, perfecting the final touches to wow the judges the next morning.

Sunday morning came very quickly after a night of little sleep, and all the groups gathered in the main hall ready to present. All 11 presentations were superb, with innovative ideas about digital marketing and fundraising events. One of our Heads of House, Tess Heaton-Harris was in the winning group, so congratulations to her, and thank you to everyone who made this weekend possible, it certainly was an enjoyable challenge.

Sally Croker, Head Girl, 6-2

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