Carnegie Mellon's Activities Board
Concert Coordination
2023-2026
Role: Concerts Chair
Events Coordination
Music Industry
10%+
Of CMU's Student Body Surveyed
40%
Concert Attendance Increase
7
Large-Scale Concerts Organized
Overview
For three years, I organized concerts from the ground up, bringing notable artists like Fetty Wap, A Boogie wit Da Hoodie, Malcolm Todd, and more. During my tenure, I increased concert attendance by 40% by creating a student-inclusive artist selection process that created more engagement for our live events.
Role
As the Concerts Chair for Carnegie Mellon's Activities Board, I was responsible for organizing concerts for students on campus, from artist selection to day-of operations. I coordinated between vendors, tech production, artist agencies, touring management, and university stakeholders to maintain tight schedules and clear communication. I also managed a $300k annual budget, ensuring all vendor invoices and artist contracts were in order.
Challenges
Students didn't feel involved in Activities Board
Although the Activities Board purpose as an organization was to create events for students on campus, oftentimes, students would say that they don't feel involved in what the Activities Board chose to do. This also meant that students didn't care as much about what events were hosted.
The Concerts Committee's artist selection was too closed-off
The artist selection process for concerts used to be kept within the Concerts Committee. This meant that they used their knowledge of music trends and best judgment to select artists, but this did not involve the input of the students who would these concerts were atually for.
Restructuring Artist Selection
When I stepped into the Concerts Chair role, I decided to make the artist selection process much more transparent and student-input-focused.
Student Surveys
Ranking Artists
Student Engagement
Student Surveys
Designing surveys for student input
In these surveys, we asked students about artists they would suggest for concerts. We made sure to include suggestion categories for small, medium, and large concerts to gauge the range of artists we could potentially bring for our different concerts.
We also increased our outreach methods by posting about the survey on our social media, sending out college-wide emails, and postering across campus.
Ranking Artists
Letting the students choose bidding order
Once the survey results were in, we organized the data and made a note of how many times certain artists were mentioned.
After the most popular student-suggested artists were listed, we omitted the ones we already knew were out of our budget and then requested the quotes and availability of the rest from our agent.
After we narrowed down the list, we allowed students to submit their ranking order for who they wanted to see the most. This compiled overall ranking would become our bidding order for who to send bids to first.
Things don't always go according to plan
In this case, our top three student choices for artists had to reject our bids, and we were getting close to our set day for confirming an artist for the concert…
But time opens the window for more opportunities
As we were running out of both time and artist options, our agent suddenly provided us two potential artists that were within our budget and availability…
So we sent out another ranking survey, which Fetty Wap, a new addition to the list, won by a landslide.
Student Engagement
Student involvement made students more interested
2,000+ students across CMU's and the University of Pittsburgh's student body registered for the concert.
A 40%+ increase from the 1,300 students that registered for the first concert I organized.
Some of my other notable concert work
Fall 2023
The Driver Era
Winter 2023
Audrey Nuna
Spring 2024
Ruel
Spring 2024
Flyana Boss
Spring 2024
Lyn Lapid
Fall 2024
Malcolm Todd
Spring 2025
A Boogie wit Da Hoodie
Spring 2025
Isabella Lovestory
Fall 2025
Sarah
Kinsley
Fall 2025
Grentperez
Spring 2026
Rebecca Black
Spring 2025
Fetty Wap
