History
The Tennessee STEAM Festival was founded by the Discovery Center in 2017 with the goal of demonstrating how science, technology, engineering, art, and math exist all around us in our daily lives. Organizations from across the state offer special events and programming throughout the festival, covering a variety of topics and helping connect what students are learning in their classrooms to different careers. Many of the events are free to attend.
Key Responsibilities
As the STEAM Festival Coordinator, my key responsibilities for the festival included:
- Deciding festival run dates
- Updating sponsorship and ad forms
- Creating and managing registration forms for the event hosts
- Communicating details of the festival with new and repeating hosts
- Maintaining communication throughout the festival with 74 event hosts
- Creating graphics for the social media account
- Designating “signature events” for the program
- Co-creating/approving yearly graphic design package to be used in all publication
- Distributing print and digital materials
- Approving the press release
- Updating and maintaining the Tennessee STEAM Festival website
- Creating individual webpages for 131 individual events
- Assisting with the design of and approving the printed Festival Guide
- Coordinating which staff members are attending which events
- Tracking attendance numbers from all events
- Maintaining financial records and staying on budget
Specific Contributions
Beyond my key responsibilities, I took actions to specifically solve challenges and elevate the festival, such as:
- Expanding the festival to two weeks based on the feedback of previous hosts to ensure that more organizations could participate
- Launching an active social media profile with multiple posts each month to increase reach and engagement
- Streamlining the registration process to be less redundant and time-consuming for event hosts
- Expanding the host kit by adding hashtags, a brand kit, templates, pre-made social media posts, and a digital copy of the Festival Guide
- Personally inviting specific organizations to participate in the festival and providing insight/feedback into their event offerings
- Expanding what information was included on the event webpages and how that information was presented according to guest feedback
- Writing a comprehensive guidebook that records all of the details necessary for future coordinators to run the festival
Through these actions, we were able to:
- Set a new record of 43,000+ participants (the previous record of 35,000 participants was set in 2019)
- Set a new record of 25 participating counties
- Increase traffic to the Tennessee STEAM Festival website from 8,000 visitors in 2023 to 13,000 visitors in 2024
Warner Park Naturalists lead guests in habitat exploration 
Budding archeologists practice digging for and identifying fossils at Fort Negley 
Young artists color a community mural at the Nashville PBS “Leonardo Youth Maker Mixer,” where they also were treated to a preview of the new Leonardo da Vinci documentary by Ken Burns 
Guests explore food chains at the Nashville Zoo 
Young scientists practice coding at the UTC Challenger STEM Learning Center 
A young architecture receive instructions on how to build with a rigamajig kit