Setting up the programming for your IPC

Once you have your IPC up and running with a handful of events planned and completed, you’ll want to put more meaning or organization behind what the IPC is offering its members. If you’re wanting to be creative, coming up with the club’s event offerings is one of the most creative opportunities you can enjoy. This is also an opportunity to steer the IPC in a meaningful direction. As with any club activity or action, creating the club’s programming should be performed by the club’s steering committee. If the club is large enough to support it, a separate Activity or Programs committee could also be created to handle creating and managing club programming.

If you’re the only one creating the programming, you’ll need to have a calendar on hand. At this point I’ll tell you not to over-commit yourself. If you don’t have assistance, you need to figure out how much you can do and still have a quality product. If you want to expand your offerings, you’ll need to ask for help. As a note, never ‘volun-tell’ people what to do. This is a sure way of turning off your members, and killing your credibility. Instead, tell people about what you’d like to plan and talk it up. Always be open to feedback. Also, empathize that they have a stake in this and you’d like their ideas. With any luck, you may find your IPC’s future steering committee!

Your programming should fit in with your club’s strategy (refer to the “Creating a strategy for your IPC’ post). The events need to be designed to accomplish the club’s overall strategic goals. Creative use of events can be designed to help with this. Also, realize that some events we’ve covered so far in this blog may not be appropriate for your IPC. While a supper club would be great for social or professional IPCs, it’s probably not appropriate for a hobby or certain accountability IPCs. If you’re at a loss, casual meets are always good starting events. Even then, you’ll need to begin formulating events that propel your IPC in the desired direction.

As an example, let’s say you’ve just formed the Midtown Coders Bloc IPC. Your club’s strategy is to network local professional programmers, and to keep folks up-to-date with trends in the industry. You can establish a monthly casual meet to allow your members to just mingle and talk, and speaks to your networking strategy. Also, a member knows someone that is a jobs recruiter, and they’re willing to give a bi-monthly talk about local programming opportunities in exchange for a chance to meet and speak with IPC members. Another member loves hands-on programming, and is more than willing to host a quarterly discussion (we’ll talk about this add-on later) on certain programming topics. Both the recruiter and programming lover speak to the trends portion of your IPC strategy. This serves as your basic IPC programming. From there, the sky is the limit, if you have enough energy and volunteers to go around.

Adding a Cocktail Party to your IPC

IPCs are all about giving people the opportunity to mingle socially, and the cocktail party is a staple of active social-oriented groups.

In this blog, I’ve written about Salons, and these can often take a cocktail party-ish guise. But the difference between the two is substantial. You can think of one being somewhat smart and scholarly, and the other one being all about the fun.

Cocktail parties can keep the life of an IPC lively by keeping everyone busy on the social front. Most everyone enjoys talking, and this helps people get to know each other on a casual level. It also creates connections that give your club greater depth. Cocktail parties need not be stressful, so keep everything as simple as possible, and if you’re hosting, enjoy it too. You might be finding yourself playing social cop, but this, at least in my experience, is very rare.

Here's a couple of quick tips. First, you may want to monitor any alcohol provided or brought by guests, and keep folks honest about consumption. In my experience, most folks are reasonable about drinking, but there always seems to be person who has some issues with self-control. Also, make sure that guests are acquainted with each other so no time is wasted with awkwardness. Re-read the "Effective Introductions" post from last month to brush up on how to introduce guests.

Articles about Cocktail Parties:

Wikipedia, “Cocktail party”

Epicurious, “How to Throw a Cocktail Party”

The Spruce, “Everything You Should Know for Hosting a Flawless Cocktail Party”

The Nest, “5 Fun Cocktail Party Themes”

HuffPost, “10 Lessons We Could All Learn From 1960s CocktailParties”

wiseGEEK, “What is a Cocktail Party?”

Party Swizzle, “How To Compile A Cocktail Party Music Playlist”