On the 30^th November and 1^st December, the world’s leading startup and tech festival Slush was held in Helsinki for the 16^th time. Slush is a nonprofit, whose event mission has expanded to in a major way – in the beginning, the purpose of the event was to bring together and celebrate the Finnish startup and entrepreneurial community through the event, to highlight the importance and local talent regionally and globally. The first event had around 500 attendees. Starting from 2015, the event has also been organised in Bejing and Tokyo and by 2019, the event gathered 25 000 participants around the world.

Today, the mission of the nonprofit is to celebrate entrepreneurship globally: the two-day event features top keynote speakers across various fields, the event prides itself on global matchmaking, breathtaking event production and a part of their strategy states that to be exclusive and enable as many matches as possible, the event sells 8000 tickets to startups and investors.

I had the opportunity to organise the SLUSH watch party in TAMK’s HUBS spaces and as such, decided to take the leap. The organising of the watch party was an interesting experience.

1. Using local platforms for marketing pay off
   The marketing of the event happened to be rather last minute, which is why the event’s visibility was rather little. Regardless, I got the experience of publishing news and events through Intra. I can recommend the experience to others as well: the landing page was clear and easy to use. In addition to this, the publishing was immediate and the guests that joined the watch party also said that they saw the news on Intra. To improve this, next time the free watch party could also be marketed on Kide.app, which is a popular platform for purchasing tickets to student events.
2. Talk to people
   Posters and visual 2D triggers only go so far – what matters more is the contact you create with the person and how well you can present the possibility you provide. People have interest towards what you say and appreciate the contact you make.
3. More events and marketing is needed regarding entrepreneurial topics in student life
   Above all, I was surprised by how little people were aware of what Slush is. In our brief discussions, students were interested in entrepreneurship but did not see it as a viable career option to them at the given point. The takeaway is that more should be done in order to highlight entrepreneurship as a viable career path for students to pursue during their studies or after graduation.