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📧 Organizing Workshops

Table of Contents

This section is intended for individuals who don’t have an audience to deliver the AI 101 content to readily available. If you already have an audience that you’re planning on delivering the content to, you can skip this section. If that isn’t the case, you can follow the steps below to organize and execute workshops from scratch.

Outreach Process

Identify Potential Audiences

The material covered in our AI 101 workshop is broad and applicable to various groups of people. You can find some potential audiences for the workshop below.

  • High schools
  • Middle schools
  • University classes
  • University clubs
  • Friends and family
  • Local government organizations
  • Employers

Find Individuals to Connect You

The best way to get connected to potential audiences is through your personal network. Take time to go through your connections and/or LinkedIn to find individuals that are associated with organizations or groups that would be interested in hosting you.

From our experience, schools are the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to organizing workshops – a lot of the logistical considerations (i.e. venue, timing) are taken care of and they are eager to get their students exposure to AI. You can try reaching out to your alma mater, a personal connection’s alma mater, or school(s) that have a faculty member that you know.

Calling & Emailing

Scheduling workshops with organizations and/or individuals that you have rapport with is always the most efficient approach. That said, if you’d like to try to tap into communities outside of your network, you will likely need to leverage cold calling or emailing. Our suggestion is to leverage phone calls as your initial touchpoint. They are much more humanized in comparison to emails and allow you to build a baseline level of credibility.

If you opt for the cold emailing strategy, you can utilize the email template below. Feel free to utilize the narrative in this email template for your phone calls.

Outreach Email Template

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Subject Line: Artificial Intelligence Workshop @ [organization name] Hi [recipient name]! My name is [your name] and I deliver artificial intelligence workshops on behalf of A.I. for Anyone (AI4A). I’m reaching out to you because [organization name] seems like it could benefit from the AI 101 workshop, which teaches the fundamentals of AI in a simple and interactive way. I’ve provided some high-level information about the organization below, but please let me know what your availability is this week, so we can schedule a call. About A.I. For Anyone A.I. For Anyone is focused on increasing artificial intelligence (AI) literacy. Moreover, the organization’s mission is to: Empower our audience to adapt and prosper in an increasingly automated world, and Democratize AI knowledge to allow citizens to shape policy. We believe that education is the best tool to prepare citizens, especially students and low-skilled workers, for a world with increased human-computer interaction. By providing our audience fundamental knowledge of automation technologies, we hope to allow them to understand a rapidly changing job market and influence AI public policy. Thank you for your time. I look forward to hearing back from you!

Coordinate Logistics

When organizing workshops, make sure to coordinate the following logistical elements:

  • Date and time
  • Location / venue
  • Audience
  • Transportation
  • Security protocol
  • Computer / laptop
  • Projector / AV equipment
  • Transportation

Follow-Up After Workshop

After you successfully deliver a workshop, be sure to send a follow-up email to whoever hosted you in order to maintain a relationship with them. Once you build trust with an organization, it is much easier to organize and execute future workshops. You can find a follow-up email template below.

Follow-Up Email Template

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Subject Line: Thank You! Hi [recipient name]! I wanted to give you a HUGE thank you for your help organizing and running yesterday's workshop. You have been an absolute pleasure to work with. If it isn’t too much trouble, we’d appreciate it if you could circulate our post-workshop survey to everyone that attended. I think the audience gained a lot of value from the content and it was refreshing to see how engaged they were. I’d love to continue to partner together to deliver this content to as many people as possible. Would it be okay if I circled back with you in [intended follow up time]? Thank you again. Have a great day!

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