Post-Event and Renewal

Wrapping Up Your Event

All that thoughtful planning and preparation, creative promotion, and perfect execution of your schedule during the event have paid off. Although you are probably exhausted, you should be proud to have supported your community! 

But just because the event is over, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to do. Event wrap-up is an essential part of organizing a Startup Week. This is the perfect opportunity to follow up with stakeholders to thank them, get their feedback, and maybe even gather visual material to help promote your next event.

Wrap-up emails

The wrap-up e-mail is an excellent opportunity for the organizing team to celebrate the success of the event and provide a recap to participants, mentors, sponsors, your venue provider, and everyone else who helped to make the event happen. A good wrap-up email makes your stakeholders feel like they were part of something truly special.

Your wrap-up email to sponsors might include more financial details, and your email to your mentors would include other mentoring opportunities within the Techstars network. Whereas your participant wrap-up email on Monday morning will include a reminder to redeem partner offers before they expire, an invitation to share their images or stories, and information about joining the Techstars talent network. We provide email templates to help you with this. 

Post-event social media and blog posts

Never underestimate the power of shoutouts on social media. Use Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or other popular social platforms to thank your mentors, judges, speakers, volunteers, and anyone else who deserves a shoutout. This gives them well-deserved acknowledgement for their efforts in front of a larger audience and helps them to share their experiences.

A post-event blog post is a great addition to wrapping up your event. Through your blog post you can share your personal experience as an organizer, and tell the story of your event and the story of some participants or teams. It adds a personal touch and helps create buy-in for future Startup Weeks or other community events that you might want to run.

Ongoing community engagement 

Now that you’ve expanded your network and bonds have been formed within the community through Startup Week, you can continue to engage with the community by running a follow-up event. This can include a participant meetup, panel, talk, or another networking or educational event, live or online. After an intense few days, participants often crave further interaction with the Startup Week group or local community, and a follow-up event is a great way to help them stay engaged and connected post-event. 

Team retrospective and wrap-up 

After your event it is important  to evaluate your success according to the goals you set for yourself in your first team meeting. It’s also a time to provide any feedback that your team has for Techstars, so that we can make sure we are delivering the best possible support to our organizing teams. 

Wrapping up Admin Tasks

Make sure that you’ve paid all your outstanding invoices and to reimburse everyone and update your budget tracking sheet, so that you can analyze the complete financial picture of the week and share it with financial stakeholders (the whole organizing team, your sponsors, etc).

Depending on your region, your sponsorship invoice should typically serve as a receipt to your sponsors, confirming the sponsorship that they’ve provided for your event. If your sponsor agreement so requires, make sure that you issue any additional in-kind donation or sponsorship acknowledgement forms or certificates, and follow up on any other requirements set forth in your sponsorship agreement. 

Community Leader Journey

As a Techstars Startup Week organizer, you are part of our extensive global network, and your journey as a Techstars community leader doesn’t have to end once your event ends. 

Renewal

Once you’ve completed your post-event wrap-up tasks you can start thinking about organizing another Startup Week. No city should have to rely on the same few people to run their Techstars Startup Week forever. Part of the role of an organizer is to help cultivate new leaders to ensure your community thrives.

Pass the torch

If you’ve organized more than two Startup Weeks in your city, if you’re planning to move away, or if you simply don’t have the bandwidth to organize events any longer, it’s a good idea to consider passing the Startup Week torch on to others in the community.

We recommend that you reach out to past volunteers at your Startup Weeks, or someone in your organization, social/meetup group, college, or university to ask if they would be interested in running a Startup Week. 

Another way to find successors is to reach out to your Techstars community support contact to register your interest in passing the torch. They will be able to connect you with new Startup Week organizer applicants and help form a suitable strategy. 

Meetups 

Some established organizing teams have hosted meetups or dinners with the specific purpose of connecting with interested individuals. Being able to have an informal conversation about the expectations for the role and being able to ask questions in-person can be an effective approach.  

Post-Event Guidance for Participants

Fairly often, participants are inspired to stay connected and become more involved in their local community and entrepreneurial ecosystem. When faced with these questions from participants, please share the following guidance and messaging. We also provide this information in the Monday post-event follow up email template for organizing teams to share with participants. 

Organize a Startup Weekend

Techstars Startup Weekend is open to all, and we encourage anyone who wants to support their community to apply to run a Startup Weekend. Please read through the Startup Weekend organizer requirements to evaluate whether you are ready for the challenge.

Virtual meet and greet

Curious to learn more about possible next steps for your startup? Join a Techstars Meet and Greet to learn more about our Give First culture, mentorship-driven accelerators, entrepreneur resources, and community programs in your city that can help accelerate your startup.

Accelerators

Ready to take your startup to the next level? Join one of Techstars’ three-month accelerators to gain funding, mentorship, and access to the Techstars network for life.  Applications open six times a year, and stay open typically for 12 weeks. After applications close, we’ll review them, and spend time getting to know even more about your team, market, progress, and idea. Learn more about Techstars accelerators. 

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