Category: News

We are ramping up for our fist live event in over a year. Ignite Seattle #42 will take place at Town Hall on Thursday, Feburary 17, 2022.

At Ignite Seattle, our city’s largest open platform for citizen storytelling, it’s just a small team of volunteer organizers that make our sold-out shows happen.  And we’re looking to grow that team. 

If you’re not familiar with what our events are like, this short video explains it well.

1. Role: Event Marketing Lead 

This may be the most fun marketing job in the universe. You get to plan, design and execute on engaging with our active community of fans and supporters. Tell our story on our blog, social media and partner channels. Come up with and deliver on creative and fun ideas to raise interest and attention. Primary  goals include recruiting talk submissions, raising brand awareness and ensuring high attendance (safely) at our signature events. You need to be a self-starter who enjoys freedom, bias towards action and enjoys independence and a lot of creative control.  You’ll collaborate with our friendly leadership team, but one of our principles is if you’re doing the work, you have wide discresion on how it gets done. 

2. Role: You tell us!  

Our small team is always in need of more good, reliable people. You could be a programmer, a project manager, a writer, a videographer – whatever skill you have we can probably find a way to use it.  Your commitment can be small (help move things on the day of the event) or larger (contribute a few hours each of the 6 weeks before our big events). 

Rewards:  You’ll be part of a fun, smart and loyal team of volunteer organizers, well connected in the Seattle tech and arts community. You will meet many interesting and amazing people, work with a great team, and share in thrills at each live event. You’ll get to use skills you already have to do good in the arts community in Seattle. Ignite Seattle will likely be one of the most rewarding things you contribute to regularly.

How we work: We are mostly virtual (Slack), with monthly in-person meetings (when safe), and more as needed or when we get closer to the next event. We are all volunteers and happily wear many hats. 

How To Apply: 

1. Give us a brief rundown on your past experience (link to resume or LinkedIn is fine)
2. Tell us what you love about Ignite Seattle, and/or why you want to join the team?
3. Email the above to pr@scottberkun.com

We’re excited to announce partnerships with two new organizations which will help us make Ignite Seattle better than ever this year!

WeWork

We’re excited to announce our headlining sponsor for the 2018-19 Ignite Seattle season, WeWork!

WeWork is a global network of workspaces where companies and people grow together. We transform buildings into dynamic environments for creativity, focus, and connection. More than just the best place to work, though, this is a movement toward humanizing work. We believe that CEOs can help each other, offices can use the comforts of home, and we can all look forward to Monday if we find real meaning in what we do.

Even more exciting, WeWork is offering the Ignite audience one free week of coworking at their newest Seattle location, 1411 4th Ave. This offer is exclusive for the Ignite community! Learn more and get your free week.

The World is Fun

We’re also partnering with Seattle nonprofit The World is Fun to help us build a volunteer program and to allow us to accept tax-deductible contributions. This partnership means we’ll finally be able to get started on a lot of long-running ideas we’ve had for making the show more fun.

You might remember TWIF from founder Amy Faulkner’s talk at Ignite #34, where she described her mission to get Seattleites involved in their community through unique events and partnerships with more than 140 local nonprofits.

When asked why she was excited to work more closely with Ignite, Amy said “The World is Fun is a perfect partner for Ignite Seattle: We both share the goals of teaching Seattleites how unique, passionate, and connected they really are in an approachable and fun format.”

Ignite is thrilled to have the support of these two organizations, and this year’s shows will be better than ever!

Here at Ignite Seattle, our city’s largest open platform for citizens to share their stories, a small team of volunteer organizers makes our sold-out shows happen. Thanks to you, our fans, our events have become so popular now that we’re looking to grow our team.

If you’re not familiar with what our events are like, this short video explains it well.

We are growing our team and now have several roles we’re recruiting for:

1. Role: Event Producer for Ignite Seattle

The event producer for Ignite Seattle is the master of the back of the house at our events. They coordinate with our MC, volunteer wrangler and other organizers to plan each show, and then work directly with our venue to ensure everything goes smoothly. During the evening they are the primary showrunner (with help as needed from the MC and other organizers), to make sure people, equipment and fun are in the right place at the right time. They need to excel at planning, communication and real-time project management, and also have a love for live cultural and civic events.

As part of the organizing team, the producer may collaborate with the team (using Slack) between events to find speakers, improve our relationships with other organizations and help improve the quality and thoughtfulness of all our creations (website, videos and other media).

We do three events a year and all of our events are in the evening (usually Thursday night).

2. Role: Design-Master (Web and visual design)

As one of the premier live events in Seattle we need a web and digital presence that captures the fun, challenging and community building energy of our shows. As design master you’d lead the way in designing and building a web experience that enables visitors to easily find interesting talks from our past events and that helps sell tickets for upcoming ones. You’d also refine our brand and visual style, improve or create designs for our logos, t-shirts, slides and other digital and print materials. You’d get high-autonomy, clear goals, a fun team to work with, and a way to use your significant talents for good.

3. Role: Money-Master (Bookkeeper)

We excel at making the most out of our events, working mostly with volunteers to make everything happen. Yet we do have basic accounting tasks, including paying bills, collecting ticket revenue (from our venue partners) covering expenses, and doing non-profit accounting and planning, things most of us have only minor experience with.

We need an experienced bookkeeper to track our income and expenses, help us make sure we pay our vendors on time, and improve our financial planning and basic accounting.

4. Role: Sponsor-Master

For  years we’ve filled Town Hall Seattle, and now, The Egyptian theater, with sold out shows that provide a great platform for the amazing stories, projects and ideas Seattle citizens are working on.

We want to extend that platform to include a handful of select sponsors, trading resources we can use to improve our shows, for premier exposure to our audience and community.

The role would be to define our sponsorship program, recruit sponsors and manage ongoing relationships with them.

Minimum time commitment: a couple of hours a week between events, with spikes of 5-10 hours a week leading up to and during the events (3 times a year).

Rewards:  You’ll be part of a fun, smart and loyal team of volunteer organizers, well connected in the Seattle tech and arts community. You will meet many interesting and amazing people, work with a great team, and share in thrills at each live event. You’ll get to use skills you already have to do good in the arts community in Seattle. Ignite Seattle will likely be one of the most rewarding things you contribute to regularly.

How we work: We are mostly virtual (Slack), with monthly in-person meetings, and more as needed or when we get closer to the next event. We are all volunteers and happily wear many hats. You may get your hands dirty often, and have fun doing it, as we are a small, lean team.

How To Apply: 

1. Give us a brief rundown on your past experience (link to resume or LinkedIn is fine)
2. Tell us what you love about Ignite Seattle, and/or why you want to join the team?
3. Email the above to pr@scottberkun.com

The live experience of attending our events is a special thing. We know that people who come, and even speakers, can have a hard time explaining what Ignite Seattle is. It’s more than presentations. It’s more than storytelling and community. It’s more than a fun night. It’s…. MANY GOOD THINGS.

To help solve the problem, we’ve made a short video that tells the story. We hope you like it enough to share it! Kudos to Bryan Zug for putting this together.

Here at Ignite Seattle a small team of volunteer organizers works behind the scenes to make everything happen. Thanks to you, our fans, our events have become so popular now that we’re looking to grow our team. Here’s what we are looking for:

Marketing/Media Champion (P/T)

Ignite Seattle needs someone who can lead the way for our kind of storytelling on the interwebs. You will use your proven social media talents to transform our nascent marketing efforts before, during and after our events into a glorious wave of tweets, posts and shares, spreading the ideas of our speakers far and wide. Perks include working with a high fun / high trust team, your fill of good bourbon and wine and the joy of using your talents for the altruistic goodness of the Seattle creative community.

Minimum time commitment: a couple of hours a week between events, 5-10 hours a week, or more, leading up to and during the event (3 to 4 times a year).

The role: you’d lead our social media and other marketing efforts. This includes working with other organizers to define strategy and also leading the work to implement tactics. We all support each other, but we’d look to you as our marketing expert.

Rewards: none of us organizers are paid – this role is something you should do because you like Ignite Seattle, you love doing pr/marketing for cool projects, and you want to volunteer to be part of an important community (of ideas). You will meet many interesting and amazing people, as they (our speakers and audience) are the stars of each event – Ignite Seattle might be one of the most rewarding things you contribute to regularly. You’ll know much more about your city and what great things are happening.

How we work: We are mostly virtual (Slack), with monthly in person meetings related to the events and our speakers. We are all volunteers and happily wear many hats. You will get your hands dirty often as we are a small, lean team.

How To Apply: 

1. Study the marketing/media efforts Ignite Seattle already has. What two things would you improve first and how? (You won’t hurt out feelings)
2. Give us a brief rundown on your past marketing/media experience (link to resume or LinkedIn is fine)
3. Email the above to pr@scottberkun.com

We are proud to announce that Seattle mayor Michael McGinn will be giving his first Ignite talk at Ignite Seattle 18. Join us, Mayor McGinn, and all of the other speakers next week at Town Hall. You can buy tickets online now, or buy them at the door on Thursday.