Share your experience of organising!

Have you recently organised the gift of a lifetime? Or managed to pull off the party to end all parties? Got an Organisational confession you just have to get off your chest? We want to hear from you!

Click here to submit your story!

You know the feeling: you’ve put a ton of time and effort into organising something for your colleagues, friends, family, and yet no-one else sees all that hard work! The endless hours surfing the web for ideas, the spreadsheets, the late nights, the lists within lists within lists.

We see it - this is also our reality! We too are Organisers, blessed (cursed?!) with being able to pull a group together and make something happen. If you’ve recently had to organise something and you want to let off some steam, or share a funny story, call out an ungrateful friend, or even confess how it all very nearly went horribly wrong, we’d love to give you the airtime!

Share your story here

Our site is visited by hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world, who are trying to organise that perfect something, just like you have done. We’ve got a sneaking suspicion that they want to hear from you, about that thing you just organised.

We’ve pulled together a few questions you might have about this, read on to find out more!

How is this whole thing going to work?

Send in your stories, and we will start to collate them into blogs around similar subjects. You might have a really long story to tell, in which case we might publish it as a whole blog! Or, you might have a one-liner confessional that you just have to get off your chest, in which case we might group a few of those together into a post that makes sense for other Organisers to read.

Don’t worry, we will let you know before we publish anything so you can have a final veto on it going live!

What about my privacy? Or the privacy of my friends and family?

We will try to do very little editing of your stories, so please bear that in mind when you are writing and sending them in. If you don’t want people to be identifiable, please change their name and any identifying information. And let us know if you want to be anonymous (totally fine!) or if you would like us to credit you with your story and link to your social media profile or website (also totally fine!). This is your story, your facts and figures, you let us know how you’d like them to be shared with the world.

On the subject of privacy and what to share, please be thoughtful when sending in your stories. We don’t want to receive any hateful, illegal or explicit content, or content that you don’t have the right to share, and we certainly won’t publish it. We hope that goes without saying, but just in case…

Will I get paid for my writing?

We want to provide a space for our Organisers to share their experiences, so they can get things off their chests and hopefully help impact someone else who is also in the middle of organising something. We’re expecting these to be real-life anecdotes, stories, tips and tricks. At the moment, we don’t have any plans to pay people in exchange for their stories.

However, if you do have a passion for writing and have a lot of stories to share about organising, let us know! We’d love to hear from you.

What should I write about?!

Here’s an example of a story from our CEO and founder, Amy, who got so fed up with being left holding the bill for everything that she went ahead and created Collctiv! You might only have a few lines to share - or a whole flipping journal full of organising experiences, good and bad! - whatever it is, we’d love to hear it.

Get started now!

Let me start with a story about the first time I went on strike and refused to organise another thing for my good-for-nothing, ungrateful friends (love you really, guys! 😘). I was standing at the top of San Marino, serenely gazing down on the beautiful Italian countryside, when I heard her say, ‘Why did we bother coming to this place?’. A white-hot rage shot up my neck as I turned around, taking in the grumpy indifference in her face, voice and posture. It was the final straw. I was done. But that wasn’t where it started.

A few years ago now, I found myself in the pub with some friends at the end of a long week. The wine was flowing, we were all quite happily blowing off steam about the terrible weeks we had all just had in our respective jobs. Someone in the group piped up with the suggestion that we all needed a good holiday, a time to reset and relax, to gain perspective and just because we all deserved it. We all emphatically agreed, merrily nodding along and adding ‘hear hear!’ at opportune moments, like politicians drunkenly debating things past 4pm.

I drained my glass, thoughts of sipping sangria on sunny Spanish sands skipping through my mind, as an unnatural hush gently floated over the group. It was the moment - the one I can never resist - the time for someone to take some action and turn dreams into reality. And like a compulsive fool, I raised my hand into the air.

‘If we’re serious about a girls holiday, I’ll get it sorted!’ I cried, waving my empty wine glass in the air like a baton, or, perhaps, a gauntlet. All at once, their cries of gratitude and excitement rose to hit me, and like an addict embracing a familiar hit, I soaked it in, beaming back at them all, eyes brimming with the sweetness of life, and love, and friendship.

The next morning, I woke up to a familiar dreaded, sinking feeling. It wasn’t the hangover, it was the recollection that I had done it yet again: put myself forward for organising something, and now I was going to have to just grit my teeth and get on with it. It’s not that I mind organising stuff - though I really detest the sheer amount of admin that it brings - and I do prefer knowing what’s happening rather than having to turn up someone blindly trusting that someone else will pull have pulled it off. Still, I knew what was coming, but there was no way out other than forwards.

The months leading up to the holiday passed in a blur. It was an extremely busy time at work, I was in the middle of moving house and a family member had become really quite poorly, which took up a lot of my limited spare time. Still, I persevered with the holiday, dragging commitments bit by bit out of my friends like confessions out of seasoned criminals. One friend in particular, Betty*, was infuriatingly absent from the whole planning process.

Each time I would message the group with a suggestion as to where we could stay, or a place we could go to eat, or a potential activity we could do as recommended by Lonely Planet, TripAdvisor, Reddit or any other of the multitude of places I’d been trawling for ideas, she would be completely silent. Nothing. Not even a ‘sounds good’ or ‘not for me’ in return. Betty was late paying her deposit, so I had to cover her flight costs, and still owes me money to this day for that trip. And a thank you.

Betty was even late for the departure time, and came hurtling down the airport towards our gate just as we were pleading one last time with the cabin crew to give us just two more minutes. Once we landed, she questioned everything. And I mean everything. Why this taxi, why this hotel, surely there were hotels closer to the airport, why weren’t we closer to the centre, surely there were hotels closer to the centre, why this train at this time, why didn’t we go to this place, why were we eating out there.

The critical commentary when on and on and on. So by the time we found ourselves at the top of San Marino and Betty deigned to ask why we had gone there (the answer to which had, incidentally, been discussed at length a few months earlier in our WhatsApp group, as a couple of us were trying to tick of European countries that we’d visited and the tiny town of San Marino counted as it’s own country), I’d had enough.

I think it was a good year before I offered to organise anything else for that group of friends again. Not even a takeaway order. I was officially on strike.

*Betty is not her real name - no friendships were harmed in the making of this blog.

Share your story here! We can’t wait to hear from you 😊

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Since 2019 Collctiv has helped over 200,000 people from 83 countries come together by making it simple for Organisers to collect money from groups. Whether it's group gifts, retirement presents or sports teams - download our free app today and start bringing people together!