Story from Kyle Blain, DOSDA 2015/16
By Kyle Blain
In 2013, I was responsible for organising Jailbreak, a race in second semester where the teams have 36 hours to get as far away from St Andrews as they can. The event was well attended, and we decided to run it again the following year.
In 2014 Jailbreak unexpectedly became a disaster. Before the Jailbreak 2014 signup opened, we had sensed it wouldn’t go as well as expected, and later Charities Campaign had to cancel it because of a very low number of signups. The event is successful at every other UK university, and we still don’t know why Jailbreak 2014 didn’t work. Race2 went very well that year, which could have been a reason for the disaster, as well as it could have been the lack of effort put into publicity.
There was no one in particular to blame, especially because we didn’t know what the problem was. The most difficult part was telling those few that signed up that Jailbreak 2014 wasn’t happening. However, it was a failure Charities Campaign needed to become better.
The following year, we completely restructured Charities Campaign approach to planning, organising and advertising of the events. It was time to introduce new events that would attract more people with their novelty, but we learnt that we couldn’t bring an event from any UK university and assume that it would work here. A new and much more successful event was Charities Campaign Bungee Jump 2015. Aside from the effort from the Events team, Bungee Jump 2015 owns its success to Jailbreak 2014 failure. We tried a lot harder to push Bungee Jump 2015, which paid off in more than a hundred people attending. Charities Campaign also learnt to make decisions quicker and earlier to avoid disappointing people like those who signed up for Jailbreak 2014.