This is the first of a regular column from our winner of The Spark, Jonathan Booth.

Jonathan is launching the UK’s most accessible – and stylish – ballroom event, Mystery Ballroom.  Aimed at the masses, from those who’ve never danced a step in their life through to enthusiasts, it is designed to be an experience that allows everyone to get in the spirit of ballroom.

In these posts he’ll chart the road he’s taking to launching a new event experience, and the lessons he’s learning along the way!

Evening classes might seem too time consuming and potentially expensive for those looking to get a new event off the ground, and this would undoubtedly prove true if they were considering classes in the History of Art or Pottery.

However, winning The Spark competition has given Mystery Ballroom access to a course in Digital Marketing provided by General Assembly, which is pretty useful when it comes to understanding how you should actually sell tickets to a new event.

Each class has given Mystery Ballroom some tangible work to put towards the development of the event’s digital presence and created some transferrable skills that can be passed on to other members of the team.

The course has coincided with the development of the first iteration of mysteryballroom.co.uk, which means marketing analytics have been implemented correctly from the outset.

The class breaks down in to 18, 3-hour sessions, carried out on Tuesday and Thursday evenings each week between 6pm and 9pm. The class is made up of a diverse range of people from a variety of sectors including travel, charity, video production, fashion, journalism and graphic design.

People get to know each other as they present work they’ve been carrying out on the course and peer review is encouraged. There are of course cheaper ways of educating yourself about digital marketing, via online tutorials for example, but I’ve yet to find an effective alternative to the classroom setting where you experiment with ideas in a collaborative way and get input from people outside your own industry.

Our teacher is a professional practitioner who runs her own consultancy. Excluding areas of professional client confidentiality, we learn about case studies they have had a direct involvement with. An innovation that really enhances the General Assembly offering is the implementation of Schoology, this is a web based platform that allows one to communicate with other members of the class and access course resources.

Each class is co-ordinated with another member of the General Assembly team who sits in on the class and posts links to resources relevant to the module being discussed and moderates the message board. The primary benefit of this approach is that the collective knowledge of the group is captured, for example when anyone recommends an online tool, book or article it gets posted to Schoology so it can be referenced outside of class.

Now a third of the way through the course, the value to our event is already clear and I’d encourage other event practitioners to consider what courses may allow them to upgrade their skills sets whilst simultaneously producing relevant work towards the development of their event.

For more information go to http://generalassemb.ly/education/digital-marketing