Gala Dinner Success!!

On the 13th July, we held our main fundraising event for the Winnovator Challenge a 1920s Gala Dinner with a murder mystery, live music and a raffle (not sure we could fit much more into one night)!

This event has taken us months of planning and preparation, and without sounding too confident it went off without one hiccup! This event really showed too us as a team at just how far we have grown and how well we have learnt to work with each other. We had 95 people attend, with attendees being Portsmouth Water employees, directors and managers, external stakeholders and also the general public. It is fair too say that we reached a lot of people about Water Aid and the work they carry out, whilst having a laugh and a dance too!

The event was held at Langstone Hotel on Hayling Island, it has the most beautiful room which over looks onto the sea, and the sunset that night was extraordinary. Attendees enjoyed a 3 course meal, with coffee and a few drinks, and were able to witness the magic and partly chaos that is Smoke and Mirrors. Smoke and Mirrors are an external company who perform Murder Mystery’s around the U.K and they sure entertained everyone with a murder called A Turn for the Nurse. We then held a raffle which had over 23 prizes and raised an extra £410 for Water Aid! Later on we had Lemonade provide some live music for everyone, and everyone had a wonderful time listening and dancing to some amazing covers.

We had 9 sponsors for the event, who were Stonbury, Majestic Marine Services, European Geophysical Surveys, Solent Excavations, Cappagh, Trant Engineering, Bridges Electrical, HydroCo and our headline sponsor Ancala and Portsmouth Water. This night would not have been possible without them, so we thank them kindly for supporting us and Water Aid and the amazing work they carry out across the world.

With all of this being said its time to announce our final total raised from the night… We raised a huge £3118.83!!! Thank you to everyone that attended the night, donated a raffle prize or sponsored the event, we really couldn’t have made such an amazing figure from the night and just can’t explain how grateful we are for your support! This means that we have currently raised over £7500!! and it keeps going up every single day!

Now onto the last few events of the Summer before the final total… We are edging closer too that £10,000!

gala dinner 1
Gala Dinner Speeches on Water Aid

 

 

Back to the drawing board…

Here at PW Tiger HQ, we have been beavering away at solving our hygiene challenge, which is to design a multimedia toolkit on hygiene for children aged 6-14 years old. Whilst we don’t want to give anything away too much, after receiving some intel from Water Aid we have established that we needed to complete re-design our solution!

***Everyone gasp, grab all of the highlighters and start drawing spider diagrams immediately!***

We have been working on Solve since the challenge begun back in March, so to suddenly change our plan of action with only two months to go is going to be very difficult. But in the name of hygiene and not being a team that doesn’t like a challenge we have come up with a new solution which we hope the judges will love.

With all the support we have received from Portsmouth Water we are no longer just designing this solution for the children of India, but also for the schools and children that Portsmouth Water support in the community. Having the companies support with this solution means the world to us a team, as it shows to us that what we are doing will make a difference to not only the community in India but also to the community that we work closely with. We hope that what we deliver in two months time will be fun, interactive and educational for both the children of India and Hampshire.

Wish us luck and watch out for little snippets of what is too come in our multimedia toolkit!

Some challenges we have faced so far…

This post isn’t about our failures but rather where we have recognised where we have struggled and where we can continue to develop in the next half of the challenge.

  1. Cancelled events for Fund
  2. Hayley (Chair) being off sick for a month
  3. Tiger Toolkit and sourcing cost effective products
  4. Sponsors and communicating with them about our main Gala Event
  5. Sponsors donating raffle prizes
  6. Last minute presentations
  7. Board meeting nerves
  8. Holidays
  9. Running out of rice…
  10. Being a team of 6 and the extra workload this requires

This list just touches on some of the challenges we have faced, however it isn’t all of them and when we submit our Learn final submission we will be elaborating on all of these challenges and how we overcame them and how they helped shape us as a team.

For the next half of the challenge we would like too:

  1. Focus more on Solve and ensure that we complete a sustainable product that can be used by the market audience and achieve all of its learning outcomes
  2. Engage with our line managers more and make sure that we are developing in a way that is suitable for each of our careers
  3. Raise LOTS of money at our 1920s Gala Dinner! (PS buy your tickets if you haven’t already!)

This is just the tip of a very big iceberg but we don’t want to give away too many of our ideas and where we have already developed!

 

Time to face the Winnovator Dragons… #businesspitchtime

In April we submitted our business pitches for Fund, Learn and Solve to the Winnovator Dragons…. Thankfully they loved it, and we secured a £500 seed fund!

We worked well as team during this as all of us had very busy work schedules in the lead up to the submission. This meant that we only had one evening to be able to film 6 minutes worth of video- next time we hope that our schedules will be a bit clearer and we won’t put ourselves under so much pressure… (just one of our lessons learnt so far).

Our chief producer was Georgina, and our editor was Hayley, you can see the magic they produced here on the Portsmouth Water YouTube page. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5rabLFs-8lhbfVQDZnkd2w

We had several outtakes during the filming of our business pitches, but our key point that we wanted to convey in the videos is that we are passionate and enthusiastic about the work we are undertaking for Water Aid. We did this by trying to make our business pitches fun and creative as possible, and just wanted to make the judges have a smile whilst they were watching us pretending to skydive and being interviewed by Dawn (our learn team leader).

We are now looking forward to all of our planning and developing for all three sections of the challenge, and hopefully impressing the judges in the final submission! Thank you Water Aid Winnovator Team for supporting us with this journey!

Pub Quiz and Just Giving

On Thursday the 29th March 2018, we held a pub quiz just before the long Easter Weekend for Portsmouth Water Staff and invited the local public to join in too.

We had 6 teams who played to be crowned pub quiz champions and the evening went down a storm. Drinks were flowing and people were cleverly working out the answers, but the night was great fun and the winning team kindly donated their winnings to WaterAid!

In total we raised £153.88 which brings our total too £631.01!

We have also gone live on Just Giving, so if you would like to donate to our cause please follow this link https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/portsmouthwatertigers.

We are in the process now of submitting our business pitch and once we have finished the submission we will be uploading the videos online so that everyone can see what we will be getting up too!

 

 

World Water Day!

On Thursday the 22nd March 2018, the world celebrated #worldwaterday, and the Portsmouth Water Tigers felt that we should plan our first event to be tied in with this important day.

World Water Day is about focusing the worlds attention on the importance of water, we did this by raising awareness on our social media platforms, throughout Portsmouth Water by holding an Easter Bake Sale and Dress Down Day and also by lighting the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth blue.

The theme this year for World Water Day was Nature for Water. We held an Easter Bake Sale, which involved many employees of Portsmouth Water donating baked goodies that featured eggs, chicks, and rabbits, all things associated with Spring time. We also asked the company to dress down for the day, whilst wearing something blue.

The team worked really well together to host these two events, and whilst we all had to work on our confidence at asking people around the company for donations to #wateraid, we all took turns and everyone did a fantastic job at working together.

The event was a huge success, and whilst we haven’t completed the final count yet, we have raised over £400 already, meaning that we have smashed our own personal target of £250!

Thank you to the Portsmouth Water employees and Public who kindly donated, and also to our team of bakers from Portsmouth Water who provided some of the most delicious cakes, including a Portsmouth Water Tigers logo cake which was quite incredible!

Now onto the next event- Pub Quiz!

 

 

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Portsmouth Water Tigers!

0AB3C2E1-EAA5-4623-B498-616D390FC73DHello! And welcome to Portsmouth Water Tigers Blog!

We are a team of six, who have taken on the Water Aid Winnovator Challenge 2018. The Water Aid Winnovator Challenge, is a an employee development programme which is run by Water Aid. It helps professionals develop skills in leadership, creativity, design, team work and lots more whilst at the same time as raising awareness for Water Aid. This year the Winnovator Challenge is focused on Water Aid in India.

The programme has three sections: The first is Solve. Solve has three challenges which you can choose from- Water, Sanitation and Hygiene. The idea is that all three challenges are real-life problems, and this year they are focused on real problems in India. The Portsmouth Water Tigers have selected the Hygiene challenge for 2018, as the challenge is to design a multimedia toolkit that will teach children aged 6-14 years old and to implement it across India. PW Tigers decided that this challenge suited them because Portsmouth Water already works with the local community here in the UK and educates young children about water, so we felt that we could really utilise those skills and hopefully come up with a fun and educational toolkit that will save young lives.

The second section is Fund. The target this year is to secure a £500 seed fund from Water Aid and turn that into £5,000! However we do love a challenge and have set ourselves the enormous bar of doubling that in an attempt to raise £10,000. We will do this by hosting lots of events throughout the next 6 months, so please follow us on our website, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram to keep in contact.

And last but not least is the Learn Section. This section is all about learning and developing us as professionals, and encouraging us to use CPD (Continuous Professional Development) those dreaded letters and recording our goals and difficulties we come across in the next 6 months.

Our team consists of Roxie, Dawn, Georgina, Steve, Matt and Hayley and we are the Portsmouth Water Tigers. Why did we choose Tigers as our team name, well thats easy. We wanted a name that represented something about us, but also connected us to India.

The Royal Hampshire Regiment (active from 1881-1992) were nicknamed The Hampshire Tigers.  Who is the biggest cat in India, the Tiger. So we chose Portsmouth Water Tigers as our team name, a name that relates us back to our home county and a provides a bit of History of Portsmouth, but also takes us far away to India.

We will be updating this website regularly as well as social media. You can follow us on Twitter @PWTigers, Facebook at Portsmouth Water Tigers or Instagram @Portsmouth_Water_Tigers.

We hope you enjoy reading our updates and following our progress!

The Portsmouth Water Tigers

 

PW Tigers Snow Photo
Team Photo