Marina Theodotou, TEDxNicosia founder and curator of TEDxNicosia 2011 & 2013, shares her side of the story for creating a TEDx event.
Today, over 10,000 TEDx events have taken place in 167 countries. In 2011, with an amazing team of friends and colleagues, I founded TEDxNicosia, the last divided capital in Europe. (www.TEDxNicosia.com). During our TEDx journey, I learned many things, but 3 stand out. (Truth be told, I always believed in these 3 things, in a visceral, gut-knowing way. TEDxNicosia served as proof). So, for #TEDx10000, here they are:
1- You only need 5 people out of 100 to make a difference, and Facebook.
Margaret Mead was right. 5% of the people can make a difference. And a lot of vision, persistence and hard work. Oh, and a Facebook page. As I embarked on this crazy idea of creating a TEDx event in Cyprus in Nov. 2011, I knew from my Six Sigma project planning days that it would require brains, hands and hearts. It also required tons of technology and social media to make it happen. Inviting four close friends and associates I had met in various other projects or socially was a gamble: l was up front with the fact that there was absolutely no money to be made in this. The benefits would all be intangible: passion, teamwork, ideas, gratitude, goodwill and may be a bit of local fame. The team was amazing: working late hours, after their regular day jobs for over three months to make it happen. Everyone had a superhero power, from logistics, to operational and supply chain management, to web design and development, to PR, film production and finance among others. But the superpower power all of us shared was passion. So we embarked to create TEDxNicosia. And we did. Out of nothing. The event grew from 1 to over 2,000 followers on Facebook. There have been four events so far in 24 months with total reaching in person and mainly online of over 500,000 people. That’s about half the population of Cyprus (estimated at 1.2 million) and about 2x the population of the last divided capital. Nicosia.
2- Being the change you want to see means tons of hard work on multiple fronts
Ghandi was right: you have to be the change you want to see. In communities plagued by the financial crisis it is incredible how start-ups and the private sector can contribute and lift the morale through initiatives like TEDx. While this may be a no-brainer for more developed communities where volunteerism for causes is advanced, in a community like Nicosia cause sponsorships were polarized between terminal illnesses and football. TEDxNicosia we created a paradigm shift by supporting women and men with great ideas and giving them a platform to share their ideas on peace building, country re-building, sustainability, entrepreneurship, personal growth, science, technology, marine biology, personal struggle and conflict resolution among others.The first event theme was Dream.Risk.Care.Live! and the second was RE-Think. RE-Generate.RE-Act. In a society where the power of voice had been traditionally limited to and by baby boomer men either elected, politically appointed or with old money, creating a new platform to share ideas worth spreading was unprecedented. Cyprus is ranked in the top 4 of 27 EU countries with the best-educated youth aged 24-36. Imperial, Oxford, Cambridge, MIT, Cornell, Harvard grads are almost a dime a dozen in the 1.2 million people country. But no one ever heard of them nor gave them a platform to present their research and ideas. They wasted away, mostly in dead-end government jobs.
TEDxNicosia, following the TEDx requirements of an online presence, created a new, digital and social media platform that became a podium for these amazing people of Cyprus and their ideas. It wasn’t easy.
It took tons of hard work concurrently on multiple fronts: vision, mission, team recruitment, team management, project management, audio visual planning, music selections, teaser video scripting, selecting catering, creating gift bags, printing programs, writing copy for the website, designing a smart phone app, drafting a risk management plan, setting up registration, creating a fail safe application process, processing payments, ticketing, PR, fundraising, persuading sponsors, writing press releases, making hotel reservations, arranging for t-shirt printing, cajoling unionized municipal theater staff, planning, planning, planning, rehearsing, keeping team spirits high and always looking ahead and making sure the TEDxer’s experience was at the core of everything we did. And above all, speaker recruitment. The whole raison d’etre of the event: Finding speakers with ideas worth spreading. It wasn’t difficult to do for the first two TEDxNicosia events. Each TEDx talk lasts 18 minutes. Every minute of each talk represents an hour of prep time. 23 speakers x 18 mins each. You do the math. Today all of the 25+TEDxNicosia speakers have gone even further creating successful, award winning start-ups, leading world-wide initiatives, running for EU Parliament, conducting acclaimed research, fundraising by running ultra marathons, writing acclaimed books, and making significant contributions in their communities and their world at large. After the followership success of the first year, TEDxNicosia secured an exclusive partnership and cash contribution from the country’s government owned telecom provider who showed unprecedented support and even installed free Wi-Fi available indefinitely in the municipal theater we hosted the event.
3- Vision trumps funding
Having a vision is like having a compass. Funding is great, it’s like a good pair of hiking boots to get you where you want to go. But, without a compass, they are practically useless. Our vision was to create change. Socrates said that the secret of creating change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting or changing the old, but on building the new. He was right. With TEDxNicosia we created a new platform for expression. We started with just a vision and zero funding. For those of us who recognized the need for change, through TEDxNicosia, the core team of organizers, speakers, volunteers, sponsoring partners and the audience strived and built, out of one idea, a new platform for expression, inspiration and networking for ideas worth sharing island wide. In a country plagued with a 45-year-old political impasse, over 40 years of UN presence on the island, stalemate peace negotiations and an economic quagmire led by a middle-aged, old school gerontocracy of men, nothing was moving. It was time for a new paradigm. There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. Ideas worth spreading know no borders and UN buffer zones. TEDxNicosia uncovered and showcased speakers from the north and the south of Cyprus, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, speakers from Greece and Israel for a truly regional dialogue. By the second year, TEDxNicosia was a major feature on prime time TV by the country’s largest media house and the evening news. It was quoted by policy makers, mayors and academics.
TEDx events generate amazing energy in a community and reflect the pulse of that community and even a country, sending poignant messages and ideas around the world. In retrospect, as the Founder of TEDxNicosia, I can attest that it was a truly life changing experience. I learned that social media can play a tremendous role in implementing change and rallying followers; that being the change you want to see is tons of concurrent hard work on multiple fronts and that vision trumps funding. Oh, and one last thing: finding one’s voice through a TEDx event was critical, but helping others find theirs is truly priceless.
Photo Credit: Andri Josef for TEDxNicosia.com.
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Original article on LinkedIn can be found here.
