a photo of attendees listening to Johnny Beirne
We’re looking forward to the next event on Thursday the 7th of May with speaker Justin Knecht from The Centre for Design Innovation. (click here and leave a comment to sign up)
After the first Open Coffee Sligo event we got some good feedback from attendees. Johnny Beirne’s personal stories about his experiences were practical and optimistic: help others to help yourself. This helped set the mood of good will in the group. After his talk I saw alot of card-exchanging and sharing going on.
I wanted to tell you about one of the good outcomes from our first event.
Anne Louise O’Donovan attended OpenCoffee Sligo 3 days after being made redundant from her full time accountancy job. She is seeing this as a chance to explore some creative ideas to develop her own freelance work. She wrote in shortly after the event:
“Thanks for organising a great meeting – it has opened up lots of possibilities for me and I have already set up a meeting for next week with one of the participants as a result. Also, thank you for the referral below. It’s great to air my ideas and get such good positive feedback. I have exams coming up in a few weeks which I have to concentrate on for now, but once they are over I will have time to launch myself fully into developing my ideas further. In the mean time I will keep up contact with those who have expressed an interest…”
It is a challenge to be out of work and keep your wits about you, I know what that is like, but I’m inspired that Anne Louise is looking to see how she may be able to create opportunities for herself to have a job with a flexible work schedule, and also help advise others on managing their small creative businesses. (Good luck to her on the exams!)
You can view Anne Louise’s profile on LinkedIn.
Can you think of ways you might be able to share recommendations for others in group? Pass on a referral or a lead?
You can see a list of the attendees from the first event:
http://opencoffeesligo.org/attendees/
Join the LinkedIn OpenCoffee Ireland group, making it easy to find out about other OpenCoffee events happening in Ireland.
This a great example of going beyond the anecdotal and showing how informal gatherings like this can be of real benefit.
If you think of the “normal” networking opportunities you have – conferences, seminars, etc – I often think the opportunity is skewed against the person does not know other attendees.
With Open Coffee – the fact that you are on your own or know none of the other attendees is no problem.
With the first event – I reckon I knew less than half those that attended; with many of the others – the introductions had been made through twitter and other online mediums.
So for those out there who might not attend because you don’t know anybody – don’t worry – you will afterwards.