How we’re planning to let Kiss My Disco grow, by letting it go

Kiss My Disco looking back and looking forward

Kiss My Disco started off as an idea between us and Nick at Freshtrack DJs workshops. We’re both big fans of the fantastic work that’s been done over the years to make club nights inclusive and accessible for people with learning disabilities (and both been actively involved in the scene) but wanted to see what could be done to encourage people without learning disabilities to join in the fun, drawing inspiration from the amazing work done by Heart N Soul at their Beautiful Octopus nights at the South Bank.

The other thing driving us was we had no money so wanted to work out how we could run our own nights on a shoestring budget and hopefully share what we learned. We often get asked why there aren’t more events in other parts of the country and we wanted to find a way come up with a simple model so people could run similar nights elsewhere.

We’ve now just run our 27(ish) Kiss My Disco night, with Freshtrack DJs and due to the amount of work we’ve got going on with our Gig Buddies project we’ve made the decision to hand over the reins completely to Freshtrack. This will enable Freshtrack to continue to develop the club nights while we concentrate on developing and sharing the Gig Buddies model. I say ‘27 (ish)’ because we’re not quite sure how many there have been. Early on we did a few extras in day centre settings but soon decided that this wasn’t what Kiss My Disco was about – for us it is all about finding ways for people to mix with other people in their community.

It’s also taken a little while for us to build our audience. Kiss My Disco was born out of a not quite successful night we put on with two other partners which was far too complicated and ended up not making any surplus. The lessons we learned from this were:

• Only work with partners who truly share the same vision
•  Don’t provide food
•  Don’t run your own bar

In effect there’s very few elements that are needed to run the nights:

• A good mailing list and a good PR plan
•  An accessible venue
•  A bar
•  Good DJs

I’m going to write a separate post on the Stay Up Late site about our top tips for a good club night but this post is really to look back over a really successful project and wish Nick well as we’re sure he’s going to take it from strength to strength and we’re still going to support them as best as we can.

The truth is though that even now we’ve got the publicity working efficiently each night probably takes up a day and a half of my time and I now need to be spending that time on other things.

So this isn’t the end of Kiss My Disco – in fact I think it could be the making of Kiss My Disco as we’re not going to be holding it back from being on more nights and in more places.
The lesson for us as a charity is that we have to think about what we can and can't get involved in, no matter how fun or exciting, so that everything we do has the most impact and works towards our purpose as a charity.

And for those of you wondering why we came up with ‘Kiss My Disco’, which some people have commented is a bit rude, well it was inspired by Simon, the lead singer of Heavy Load and it’s probably a lot ruder than you think! It also sums up what the nights are and aren’t about in 3 words.

Over to you Nick…!