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And I thought, Oh, we've got this wrong. We've really, really got this wrong. Are you going to bring your Olympic medals along with you?
And he said:
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“Yes, Why?” And I was like, Would you mind if we stole them? Welcome, everyone, to the first episode of the Event Effect, today I'm joined by Vanessa Lovatt, global director of Customer Engagement at Notified, and Simon Howard, founder and Director of Introducing Events. I'm looking very much forward today to talk about event experience and engagement and to get started. Vanessa, can you tell us a little bit more of how you got started in the event industry? Yes, I can. And firstly, thank you so much for having me here today. It's really great to be joining you on this podcast and to see Simon again, too. And when I thought about this, I realized the first event that I really got involved in was when I was 16 years old, which was a charity fashion show, was probably not what you were expecting me to say, but it definitely gave me a taste for that kind of buzz that you get when something really comes together. But my first event job was in 2005, and it was running commercial conferences. So all business to business stuff and very much focused on researching the programs and the briefing and project teams around them. So the sales guys on how to sell them and the marketing team on how to market those events. And it was it was awesome. It was a real experience quite soon after my university days and that's what got me the the hunger for the event sector I guess. And it's been really hard to, to look back I think since then. That is a long time ago now. I think we can all relate to not wanting to look back in that sense, yeah. SIMON How did you actually get started in the event industry? Well, like many people I work with over the years, I kind of sort of fell into it, which a lot of people seem to do. You know, you get a taste for it, like Vanessa said, and then you experience the joy of it. So straight out of uni, I graduated with a degree in information management, which is like business IT. Didn't really know where I wanted to take that, and what sort of career I wanted. So I got one of the best graduate management schemes in the UK at the time, which was actually for Gala Bingo, one of the biggest bingo companies in the UK, which gave me my first poncho, put me on stage there. Some people, you know, entertain them, call the numbers, manage the team. And that was where at the age of 21, I have the responsibility of organizing my first event for over four hundred people. We got different clubs coming in. We had to organize the transport, the food, and that was my first opportunity to take what was a fairly standard format for the industry and actually put a bit more fun into it. So we created unique games, we gave it a theme and just make it a little bit more of an experience. So that was my first taste. And then I did that for three or four years, decided bingo, maybe wasn't the career for me. So I retrained in project management, but while I was retrained in the sort of 2008, 2009 recession hit, there were no jobs. So I decided to try and get a bit of experience found a local event management company. They very quickly realized that I could host things. I was confident, funny out there, so I went full time with them as an event manager and that's when I got into full time corporate events, conferences, team building, interactive eating and entertainment. And basically about seven years ago I became freelance. And then this year I've launched my own event management company that we deliver experiences, people all over the UK in person and all over the world virtually as well. Awesome. So good to hear kind of the background story of how we all more or less stumbled into this industry. But it felt so good and we never, never looked back. I really love that since then. Obviously since the beginning, a lot has happened. And I was curious to hear from your point of view, what are the trends or what is the current state of events and more specifically, event engagement and experience? Vanessa, would you like to answer that? Yeah, sure, sure. So very much thinking about the business event world because that's certainly my my wheelhouse and so mean. I love that you came from such a different background as well. I think it's fascinating that we probably have very different experiences to share. But what I love about it is that you're now in the corporate events sector and the reality is that everybody coming to these events are human beings and that doesn't matter what the content of the event is. You are still trying to engage human beings. And the reason I say that sounds very obvious is because I think this is a really important piece that needs to be considered when it comes to current trends, because people have changed their perspectives significantly over the last two and a half years. And I'm not going to say the P word. We all know why, but perceptions of what is good and bad have changed quite a little bit. I think there's a lot less acceptance for mediocre than there used to be when joining events, but there's also a hugely increased appetite for humanity at any events that people go to, whether that's online or in person. And people just want to engage and interact with other people in a very easy manner. It doesn't always have to be formal, it doesn't always have to be corporate. And I think this is a trend that we need to really embrace right now across all sectors that my experiences in both in-person events and virtual events since 2012, just quite a long time ago, and they were very, very average back then. I will be honest and say that they're a lot better now that this concept of humanizing and bringing elements to events that delight people during the experience are here, and I think we have this amazing opportunity to be quite experimental with the experiences that we're trying to create for people. And I think there's more appetite for that than there has ever been. So I feel quite excited about this moment in time that we have and this opportunity to be quite creative. And I've seen some amazing examples of this over even just the last three months, I would say with both online and in-person events and those that cross over both, which I'm sure we're probably going to come to in a minute. But Simon, Does that sort of match your thoughts as well on that kind of bringing the human aspect to the events and the experiences we're trying to create now? Absolutely. And just sort of people's background, over the past couple of years, I've been delivering installations. I've written about my head virtual experiences as opposed to virtual events because I very much look at what the P word happened. So I'm not going to mention it, but although it happened, you know, people became restricted, they couldn't do things a lot. People were putting on virtual events and it was just something that you sort of had on in the background. Whereas very much as Vanessa's you said about humanizing it, we gave people a chance. We put this the human back into virtual events. So the sort of activities and the entertainment we did, we made it all about the audience. I know a lot of event fun is went into sort of this you know meltdown mode. We can't, we can't, we can't. And I just sat there and went, what can we do? What can we get these people to do? You know, you're all sat at home. I want you to be part of the event. I want you to experience things. I want you to get emotional excitement, a bit of panic, that energy. And it was that that the reason we had so much success over the past couple of years on the virtual stage is because we really focused on what we could get the audience to do, whereas everyone else was just focused in on let's put a nice webinar on, which is great, but you know, take it or leave it. Whereas if you're on one of our experience, it was just, yeah, let's get that human element out. Lets give people opportunity to get involved, get excited, put in what they want and really get sort of emotionally involved. And I think on the virtual side of things, that was a massive shift for us in the site. Why, why we were so successful. And I think, again, just echoing what Vanessa said, now it's coming back to the live events in terms of the activities we've been rolling. There's been a real change in what people are looking for and what they're thinking about when they're putting in events on rather than just having a we get together once a year, we have a finance day, we have a few drinks and that's it. I think there's so much demand now for activities where there's either the one team, one goal focus. So we've been doing like a big samba drumming event with about 300 people. We put them in a room, we transform them into one harmonious samba band. And, and activities like that are in high demand because it's just bringing those people back together. And another thing Vanessa touched on that networking side of things, just bringing out the opportunity rather than just putting people into a room and hoping, you know, this magic will appear. You know, we've all been locked away for so long and a lot of people have lost those social skills. So we've seen a real trend in people looking for activities where people are sort of slowly encouraged to interact and we build on that. And it's just having there a fun activity, a shared positive experience just to get that conversation started. And that's where I say that the trends seem to be going this year rather than rather just a get together. It's what can we get out of it? How can we reconnect these teams or how can we introduce teams to each other? They may be working together for 18 months. They've never met and have that share positive experience. That's the way we've we've seen it coming from the introduction events perspective. I love just chuck a T a couple little thoughts in there on that piece he said about people have so lightly lost the social skills and I'm broad brushing that obviously but I recall being at an event not long ago and a guy he also runs a podcast. He's so effervescent, he's like complete life and soul of the podcast and anything he doesn't mind. And I happened to be at the event with him. It was his first in-person event and he said to me, I don't know what to do. I completely out of my comfort zone right now and I haven't done this in so long. I just feel quite overwhelmed. And I think that coming from someone who hosts effectively online experiences events on a regular basis to feel like that going back in person, you know, I'm sure the second, third, fourth events, he probably didn't just suddenly feel back to his normal self either. I think we were on a real journey with attendees who are looking to probably enjoy themselves as much as they can and aren't 100% sure quite how to do that. And I love what you said about what can we do, what can we get these attendees to do? And I have a perception, I think this is a bit of a trend as well, actually, which is why sort of rebutting in, to say is that there's this real concern about how will we look if we try and orchestrate some sort of experience or engagement activity and how will it be perceived and will it be perceived badly? And we sort of minimize the event experience sometimes for worrying about how it might be perceived and received. And I mean, I've done some stuff in the past that I was terrified about doing before we actually did it during a live event. So remember doing speed networking for the first time in probably about 2008 or something, and genuinely for the half an hour before I was like, This is going to be a disaster. This is going to be a disaster, but we're going to do it. And I remember some of the team members looked at me and said, Really not sure you’re gonna pull this off. So but we did it. And the attendee said it was one of the best bits of the entire event because we took the leap of faith and we did something pretty wacky. It was totally organized chaos, but it was organized and the chaos works. If we hadn't had the courage to do it, it just would have been another regular networking break that would have been entirely forgettable. So I just think this point of what can we get attendees to do for that benefit, I think that's really important. Not for the sake of it is really is quite an overwhelming concept at the moment, especially when event organizers are pretty exhausted after the last period of time. So I think there's a lot more we can do that we've just got to focus on doing one or two things and doing them really, really well. I think, sorry to jump in again, I think just to touch on what Vanessa has just said, that thing that people are like, you know, you're nervous about it. It's something new. It's something exciting. That for me is what creates an experience. That is the difference between an event and an experience. It's the nerves, it's the excitement. It's the, anticipation, exactly that anticipation and just that moment of almost a bit of dread. You know, you say, well, what are the most amazing things that anybody's done as an experience in the life? I jumped out an airplane. It's not I went to the shops and bought some food. So, you know, I it's the ones that are initially you're sort of terrified of just for that split second. But then when it happens, that's when, you know, that's the experience, that's the emotion. You're going to be left with. And I think that's going to be the power of events and that's what's going to get people talking as opposed to just, you know, you go, you get the email, you get your finance update, you go home. So it really believes that you're pushing exciting things out of it totally. And very rarely do amazing things happen by accident or by doing the same thing you did before, right? Usually amazing things happen after a massive amount of effort and that sort of fear factor and anticipation and nervousness on the way. And so I think if you're not feeling enough of that in the preparation for your engagement and experiences, you might not be pushing yourself quite far enough. That's my thoughts. I love those thoughts and I completely agree. First of all, so many amazing insights here. I think we touched on experience, humanizing, really pushing yourself to the boundaries. And I feel like the past two years not mentioning the P-word, obviously, but kind of pushed a lot of event organizers that were very much pushing from their comfort zone to feel that fear, feel that anxiousness, and actually think of ways outside of the box that they used before. And I feel like that's happening a lot. Is that something you also noticed? Simon I think so, yeah. And I think there's a big push for, you know, now, virtual is is such a big part of the event spectrum as well. It's also just thinking about and again, going back to what Vanessa said as well as of what is, you know, the purpose of the event, what's the outcome of it, what's the significance of it? And whether we do do things live or whether we do do things virtual. Now, I think there's a real positive, you know, thought around sort of what's the why? Why do we want to actually get together in person virtually? And I think that will be a big thing moving forward of of this year. I know we discussed there's this big push to get us all back together. But then, you know, I said of another podcast a few months ago that I kind of feel this year will be, you know, they get back together year and then next year. I feel as sad as it is, the accountants might pull the purse strings a bit, go look and watch these live in-person events costs us. And, you know, I it's like, you know, rather getting together six times a year like we've always historically done. Do we split that down to three three you got three virtual three in person or did we just do one huge one in person and do the rest? And again, I don't know it from the delegate perspective as well. Do people want to come to live and in-person events anymore? You know that that whole losing the social skills you've also got the stress of travel. You know, you've got to you've got to find shoes to put on. You know, you can't just send your laptop anymore. And and often, you know, 50% dresses that many people have been in. So that whole emotional thing of how many events do people actually want to go to so it’s, Yeah, it's it's interesting times for events at the moment and event planners and yeah there's there's a lot of thoughts on getting the right strategy. I think it's quite a lot of pressure on that moving forward. Yeah, great, great. Sorry. Absolutely agree. No, no problem. I love it actually that you have such a lively conversation and makes my job easier as well. But really, I love it. I Massively agree with what Simon said about the costs of these events. And and I think it's great like let's get back together right now, right? We need it. We need to reconnect. But what I think it's also going to teach us when I say we need it, I think it's also going to teach us or enlighten us, perhaps at the moment on what we genuinely should be doing in person. And what we actually, I'm going to say can do, should do online as well. And, you know, what's the blend of in between, too? Because I think we're still was being quite black and white. Is it online or is it in person? And actually, there are there are grays in between that. But the other piece I think is quite an important not today, part of the piece of the puzzle. Piece of the puzzle, but is going to become more important in coming years is the carbon cost as well as the financial costs of going to these events. So there was some research published in Nature magazine, sorry, Nature Journal this week, and the carbon footprint of the event industry in this research piece was attributed for being 10% of the global carbon footprint from the events industry. Now that blew my mind, and I don't think we're going to be able to ignore that too much longer, to be honest. So when it comes back to engagement and experiences, I think that's where we have to really test ourselves to. Can I deliver the outcome of whatever it is I'm trying to achieve and can I engage people and give them a great experience in whatever this particular when you use the word event for ease or meeting in the in-person experience in the in a virtual experience. And I think there's going to be an increasing amount of questions about that from probably Q1 next year when the financials for 2022 get closed down and costs start to be analyzed, I think it'll be very cost driven to financial cost driven to start with. And I also think there is a huge push to go back in-person from the event organizers, not always from the attendees. So some more research more recently. I love stats and facts, by the way. I sort of feel like when things are crazy, which let's be honest, they are pretty crazy in the event sector the last couple of years stats give you something solid to work with. And we also have had a period of time where we haven't had much in the way of trends because we've just been on this rollercoaster of changeability. It's a freeman publishing data that shows that in-person event attendance at the moment about 64% compared to, oh my goodness, I'm going to say 2019 and before still avoiding the p-word, and Skift meetings have also published similar sorts of findings they sit around about I think they said 60 to 65%. Sorry, If I haven’t got that exactly right. So that's a big old chunk. You know, we're talking 35, 30, 35%. What's happening to those attendees and how we creating awesome experiences for them to keep them engaged in different ways. And I'm really fascinated to see over the next two years what we do to keep pushing this experience level because no one wants to stand so right. We always want to keep moving forwards and learning and growing in both in-person and online, bring the two together. And that's I'm excited to see where we end up because it's not going to be a straight path. I'm sure. I'm sure there'll be all sorts of zigzags to get there. Absolutely. It's going to be a bumpy ride. But I think the the main trends are still going to be up. So in that sense, a future to looking forward to. I hear a lot of these trends and I was wondering like, can you share some real life examples of what your currently doing, like an experience you've gotten to or gotten to organize for your attendees? How are you currently? For instance, the first topic was humanizing that aspect. Like can you give a real life example of that, Vanessa? Oh, I've got loads. I'll try to keep it really short. So about a year ago I was involved in a hybrid event, Multi Hub and one of the audiences was, was in New York and one was in London and then a big load of people online as well. And the we did something for each of those audiences independently that was shared with all of the other audience too. So for example, the New York crew had Breakfast at Tiffany's underneath all their chairs was a little blue box, and in one of them there was a Tiffany's necklace. So we live streaming in both directions. All of the New York attendees were like looking under their chairs one of them won. And it was all livestreamed to both those in London. Who could see this happening and were like, Oh, this is cool, Yes, I want this. And the London crew at the end of the day got like a champagne giveaway because the time zones meant that champagne for breakfast probably wasn't quite the business effect we were going for. But it was at the end of the day for London. Great. Some other cool things I've seen in person money 2020. I loved what they did here. They had every attendee arrived on the stage and they didn't know that before they arriving. So the entrance registration then fed them through where they walked into the conference room via the stage and with photos of them standing on the stage. That looked awesome. Pulse is a really quite significant customer success event, which is very US centric. They've been online obviously for the last couple of years. They had an in-person and virtual element this year. They did it so well together and the most attended session that they had was called Puppies of Pulse, where they literally invited all of the attendees to share their photographs of their dogs or something like that. And I having spoken to the Pulse organizers, she said. Last year it flew, so this year they put it on their home page for the event because it was such a success last year and this is a business event, right? Times have changed and I just think they're such, such great examples that bring to life that you can make these experiences even when they are. The content might be pretty serious and might be all about compliance or something, but you can still bring the human element to this experience. Both In-person and online. Sorry I'm going to stop talking for a bit. That no problem. I really love those examples. I think they're very good examples. SIMON Can you share some of your real life experiences? Well, first of all, I'm going to say having the delegates arrive on stage, I will be stealing that. It’s so good isn’t it? Because I love that as a concept. It's a simple thing about but bang. You are the star of the show, you know what I mean? And that's what we really sort of aspire to do with all of our experience is we make it about the delegates. Exactly that. You are the people that matters. This is for you. It's all about you. And now, love that so I’ll be stealing that and write down for later but other sort of examples of things we've been doing. We had there just seem to be that we find a lot of teams at the moment who are very new or as I say, they've been working together for the past few months. They've never actually met in person or there's been company restructure is you know, people work differently from home a lot of the time and that there's a real importance at the minute of when people do get together in a room that we get, you know, we give them that shared positive experience. And we did an event a few weeks ago for a company and they've had about six or seven brand new teams. They just put them all together and they really want them to focus on company values, but they wanted it to be fun. So rather than just say in like 2 hours, sit around a table, meet your team for the first time, have that discussion and then tell us about what you're going to do as a team. We said, right, come on, we want something fun, so what can we do? So we went in and we I brief them as if they had to come up with an entire new marketing campaign. Were we’re gonna ment to have some advertising industry awards for the advertising and movie industry. We're going to show you some adverts. We've lost all the footage, so they are 2 hours to recreate and a team of eight. So we gave them a fancy dress, we got a budget, we gave them props. We're in some beautiful hotel with that random layout fully sort of theme rooms, every room is completely different. So the venue worked perfectly, but it was, you know, we give them about an hour and a half of just having fun together. And because they were having fun, we felt a lot more relaxed and so many ideas came out and then we brought them all back into the room at the end. We put the films up, they made the adverts up on the big screen. They came, we did a little presentation about what they were going to do rather than just standing there going, We commit to making X percentage. By Q4, they were dressed as superman, you know, a giant chicken. Now I want to steal this idea And I look at it, we do this stuff. I seriously I got to ask you that Book us then. For more details, it’s so good It is it. But just as an experience for them it became memorable. You know, they got and they just got excited about it. And rather than, as I say, just going in, having that business conversation and having a very sensible thing is very cool for a company. Well, all of a sudden there was big smiles on the faces and, you know, we had a little ceremony. We gave out Oscars for the best performances. Well, they we also had a judging panel in front of the stage who were all the senior directors of the company. And I thought they were just going to be fun, but they took about 50 minutes properly analyzing everything they done. And it and it really made a difference. And they said they got a lot more from the delegates by doing something fun with it, by taking people out of the norm shift in that having that mental shift from this is a work environment. I, you know, I'm a bit scared to say these things to just go in, you know what? I'm dressed as a chicken, whatever comes out. I mean, it just happens. And that just became a memorable experience. It's certainly something about the unexpected. I feel in both the examples we talked about here, coming out on stage, dressing as a chicken to the both of those are really unexpected and to me, I feel like that's maybe a takeaway for me from this conversation so far. It's actually the unexpected is often what leads to the greatest delight. So think about think about that. How can you surprise your attendees in a positive manner? Obviously, and I bet there are loads of other creative ideas out there. Hundreds of thousands probably. That's it's it's interesting. Sorry to jump in Merijn on that very that but it's interesting you should say just about the surprise that I've been asked because we with all lot virtual experiences the game show that we run for example we very much focused on give people exactly what they expect to happen. When I say gameshow, you're expecting a quiz. So round number one is a quiz. Round number two, bang. Absolutely. Hit them with the most ridiculous off the wall. Just what is going on on this event. And it just totaly takes, you know, they don't have to get involved in it. They can just watch it. Well, we did something. Oh, I’m not telling what it is because it's just so bizarre. It is ridiculous, but it works. You just saw it. You saw this confusion going over people's face. And then afterwards they thought, I can relax. Yeah, we can have fun with this. This isn't just another work conference, you know, this is where the fun happens. And you get so much more by sort of introducing people. They're in the comfort zone. They know what they want, and then all of a sudden, bang, you hit them with something. They just go, Oh, and after that it's very easy that to sort of take people down wherever you want. And I, I found you get a lot more out of people to the point of, you know, people think they're coming online for a virtual quiz and I've got a nice lady in Spane. You know jumping in a swimming pool with all the clothes on for no other reason, other then she thought she gets, you know, and it's just that. But if I just said, right, go and jump in your swimming pool, it would be no. But it's just that thinking about the the psychology of it, building people up, giving them that surprise, giving them the unexpected, and then giving people opportunities to interact and engage. I think that's that that's been our sort of success model, if you like, for a lot of actual experience, I guess is element. You sometimes do have to lead by example a bit as the person delivering the event. So you maybe think we run quarterly we run to the noteworthys we call it where we it is basically an award ceremony, where we make note and share and publicly celebrate is usually around ten or 12 of our employees across the globe. And it's a huge town hall on our platform, which makes it nice and easy for us. And everybody comes together to get going. And at the beginning there are usually a few people whose job is to just get that, get that morale and that camaraderie going. It takes less than a minute, and before you know it, the screen's covered in emojis. And there's amazing chat going on in the chat discussion. And I think when you are doing it for a group of individuals who perhaps don't know so well, I'm talking about all about we're doing this with our peers and our colleagues when it's great, you don't need someone. You might have to be that catalyst at the beginning. You might have to be the fire starter that gets us going, and that's okay. And I think, again, sometimes people will worry, can I do that? Is that allowed? Yes, it absolutely is. All you're doing is just getting things going. So, yeah, go for it. Jump in a pool with your clothes on. That's what is required. Without the fire started, I would never be a fire, right. Well, the amazing takeaways already indeed. I think we kind of already went to the next topic, which is share a funny story or a horror story that you actually experienced. I already heard a love of funny stories here, but, you know, maybe Simon, you can share a funny or a horror story that you experience with experience and engagement in events. So I'm going to stick with the more of the funny rather than the horror, because I try to stay away from the horror where possible. You know it. We've all of those events, there's all the unpredictable things. But I like to stick with the positive. So one one that, you know, I mention when people say tell me about an interesting event or experience you from a few years ago and a client came to the company I was working for and said, we've got a Colin Jackson, which if you've not heard about Colin Jackson, he's a British Olympian, world record breaking hurdler presents on the BBC. Now, he was going to come in and be the motivational speaker, the team, and then they said after he's come on, we want to do some kind of activity for a couple of hours in the afternoon. We've got two or 300 people. What can you do? And rather than just go in motivational speaker, coffee break, then an activity, we said, well, how can we integrate your speaker into the activity? So what we did is we came up with a murder mystery concept, but we actually did rather than a murder, we did a theft. So the plot was to steal a Sir Colin Jackson’s Seabees Olympic medals. So I had never met the guy before. I had to jump on a conference call before the event with two very professional ladies who seemed to turn into giggling schoolgirls on the phone.
Calling Jackson and I had to go:
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Colin Are you going to bring your Olympic medals along with you? And he said, Yes Why?. And I was like, Would you mind if we stole them? Q Silence and tumbleweed moment. And then I explained what was going on. He got very much into it. So the plan became actually on the event he did his 45 minutes to an hour and a couple of Q and A's. And then just during his last question, I went on dressed as head of security and I said, I'm sorry, Mr. Jackson, we're going to have to cut this short. I'm afraid your Olympic medals have just been stolen. He looked mortified. Walked to the audience and said, I'm afraid I'm going to have to go. I've just found out my Olympic medals have been stolen. 200 people just dashed through. There was just this. I marched him out the room. There was devastation in the room. We got out into the corridor, burst into fits of laughter, high fived all the way out to the corridor. And then people came out the room. We sat like somebody else went on and said, We're going to a coffee break now. Make your way out the room. We're going to have to see what’s happened with Colin. They went out. There was blue lights, flashing sirens going on place everywhere. And then they went and that just invested people into what became an experience. So rather just having it as a structured day and splitting everything up, just really sort of bringing everything together and giving people, but when we got that children out, people just go ahead all at the same time. We knew that was going to be an experience for them rather than just an activity. I feel like, or an event. I can imagine. You must have had a good laugh behind the scenes with that. I have to say, if anyone's thinking about booking Colin Jackson is brilliant rather than a lot of speakers who say, Look, I've done 20 minutes, 20 minutes, the phone goes off, they walk out the room, get in a car and go on to the next round. Collins said. Can I stay around and see if you get my medals back? He was fingerprinting with people. He was watching CCTV evidence. You know, taking selfies with was brilliant, but absolutely just as a bit of a surreal experience for the people because, you know, a he got involved with it as well. Yeah, brilliant. I love it out. How is that for you, Vanessa? Can you share a funny or maybe a horror story that you experience? To a certain extent Segways in actually. So I also this was thinking I was that I am head of customer engagement here at Notified, and I'm obsessed with making customers happy and actually with events. You have got attendees, possibly sponsors as well, but your speakers, I think you should think about your speakers as customers. So Simon what you did there for a Sir Colin was you gave him an experience, right? You made his job as a speaker way more fun that day. And he probably told his friends and family, I had this really great gig the other day, and I think that is a really nice way to think about thinking of speakers as customers to make sure they have an amazing experience and they get it and give your attendees an amazing experience My mine is a bit of a horror story actually about the Speaker, which is why I that is a nice Segway and this is what happens when you don't take real ownership of your agenda. This is a personal experience quite a long time ago now over ten years, 12, 13. And there was a period of time where the events, the conferences that I was running, we were receiving a huge amount of sponsorship from mostly technology companies to pay to stand on the stage and speak. And in our, I guess, eagerness to satisfy those customers who were paying pretty big dollar to have the privilege to speak on the stage that we we didn't take enough ownership over the agenda and we didn't basically instruct them clearly enough on what to do or particularly not to do on stage. And it damaged the quality of the agenda because they were just being a bit too pitchy. And long story short, the thing what I really realized, oh, this is not an engaging experience. And we then took huge steps to resolve this was clearing some of the tables after the main keynote speaker who was a bank sponsor. And there was one note that one delegate had written to another delegate that said, I have no idea what he's talking about. Do you question mark? And someone had replied, No idea. And I thought, Oh, we've got this wrong. We've really, really got this wrong. And we obviously got pretty fair feedback from some of the attendees, but it was the rest of the sessions were great, but those sponsored sessions were disappointing. So the next year we didn't let a single sponsor go on the stage. It caused, frankly, riot. We took a hit of revenue that year, but the following year we had completely regained control. We earned back respect of the attendees who felt a little bit violated, I think that the year where they got pitched a lot so we earned back their respect, we also earned back the respected of the sponsors and it gave us that like total reset to totally retake control of that agenda and what was happening on the stage so that it was engaging. And so it was a horror story at the time as it its it was a two year recovery window but it was hundred percent paid off and then it actually turned out to be far more lucrative after that but seeing that note that one hurt that really hurt when you have that realization that you got it wrong. And I think it's important to share a little bit of horror, especially when it's lived horror as well as as well as the positivity. But yeah, thinking of speakers is as customers and he probably that particular presenter, had we given him way more guidance, he probably actually would have really appreciated it because it would have helped make his session more successful. So it's that thing again, don't worry about what people think of you making your event a success. Just do it. Absolutely a horror story about with a beautiful learning, I think. And you only got out stronger. So that's still a positive thing. I would love to hear like last point, your takeaway maybe from the session or maybe in general, like what is for you the most important thing to keep in mind for event professionals right now. I this was quite an easy one actually. Make sure that you are giving your attendees the options that they are truly asking you for right now. So what I mean by that is don't be clouded by, I think, SIMON You said sort of rush back to in-person, think about what you're trying to achieve, think about the goals, think about your attendees goals as well, then deliver accordingly. And if that's the combination of in-person online, if it's all in-person, if it's all online, whatever is the right delivery mechanism. I think right now is incredibly important. And then you build your engagement and your experience design around those overall goals of both the attendees and yourself and that's my just my my fear at the moment is that we, the event organizers, are pushing too much, but not too much, perhaps more than the attendees are pushing. Just based on thos stats that attendees aren’t going back so much. So think about it from your attendees perspective as well as your own and then provide the right delivery mechanism. Love it, such a great two key takeaway and how is that for you, Simon? I very much agree with Vanessa, a very similar you know, that one key message to take away. Like Vanessa said, there's this this huge push, you know, a must get back together. People are desperate to get back together. And I fully understand that. But I've seen a lot of people over the years do in-person events, quite badly, very dull, very boring people don't enjoy them, advising them, switch to virtual. They've taken the exact same format and put it on the Internet, which makes it about ten times worse, even more boring. And I don't rush to get people back together and then give them a terrible experience, you know, keep it light, as I mentioned about, you know, people sort of social skills, if we can slightly don't just throw people back into 8 hours death by PowerPoint, you know, well, we're all excited. We get into a room, we turn the lights down. And I was the presentations. You go home, you know, make it a shared, positive experience. And I think that for me has been, you know, a mantra through lockdown, an online is, you know, keep everything positive. Make sure when you do bring people together, give it real purpose, make it fun and make people want to come back together. You know, we've there's a lot of companies at the minute. You've got teams that they just feel distanced. They haven't got the trust. They work with people online, but they don't have, you know, solid, real sort of bonds with them. Give them an opportunity to create those bonds, make real relationships, make real connections in person. And make it, you know, that people want to actually be part of that team. So really have a think about what you're going to do, your strategy, what activities are you going to do to make it an enjoyable and positive experience? I couldn't agree more such great takeaways. I think our listeners have gotten a lot of value out of this episode. I want to thank you, Simon and Vanessa both so much for being here. It was really a pleasure to have you as guests on the Event Effect. For all the listeners looking forward to seeing you in the second episode for now, I wish you a very pleasant day and looking forward to the next one. Thank you. Thank you.
And I thought, Oh, we've got this wrong. We've really, really got this wrong. Are you going to bring your Olympic medals along with you?
And he said:
0:06
“Yes, Why?” And I was like, Would you mind if we stole them? Welcome, everyone, to the first episode of the Event Effect, today I'm joined by Vanessa Lovatt, global director of Customer Engagement at Notified, and Simon Howard, founder and Director of Introducing Events. I'm looking very much forward today to talk about event experience and engagement and to get started. Vanessa, can you tell us a little bit more of how you got started in the event industry? Yes, I can. And firstly, thank you so much for having me here today. It's really great to be joining you on this podcast and to see Simon again, too. And when I thought about this, I realized the first event that I really got involved in was when I was 16 years old, which was a charity fashion show, was probably not what you were expecting me to say, but it definitely gave me a taste for that kind of buzz that you get when something really comes together. But my first event job was in 2005, and it was running commercial conferences. So all business to business stuff and very much focused on researching the programs and the briefing and project teams around them. So the sales guys on how to sell them and the marketing team on how to market those events. And it was it was awesome. It was a real experience quite soon after my university days and that's what got me the the hunger for the event sector I guess. And it's been really hard to, to look back I think since then. That is a long time ago now. I think we can all relate to not wanting to look back in that sense, yeah. SIMON How did you actually get started in the event industry? Well, like many people I work with over the years, I kind of sort of fell into it, which a lot of people seem to do. You know, you get a taste for it, like Vanessa said, and then you experience the joy of it. So straight out of uni, I graduated with a degree in information management, which is like business IT. Didn't really know where I wanted to take that, and what sort of career I wanted. So I got one of the best graduate management schemes in the UK at the time, which was actually for Gala Bingo, one of the biggest bingo companies in the UK, which gave me my first poncho, put me on stage there. Some people, you know, entertain them, call the numbers, manage the team. And that was where at the age of 21, I have the responsibility of organizing my first event for over four hundred people. We got different clubs coming in. We had to organize the transport, the food, and that was my first opportunity to take what was a fairly standard format for the industry and actually put a bit more fun into it. So we created unique games, we gave it a theme and just make it a little bit more of an experience. So that was my first taste. And then I did that for three or four years, decided bingo, maybe wasn't the career for me. So I retrained in project management, but while I was retrained in the sort of 2008, 2009 recession hit, there were no jobs. So I decided to try and get a bit of experience found a local event management company. They very quickly realized that I could host things. I was confident, funny out there, so I went full time with them as an event manager and that's when I got into full time corporate events, conferences, team building, interactive eating and entertainment. And basically about seven years ago I became freelance. And then this year I've launched my own event management company that we deliver experiences, people all over the UK in person and all over the world virtually as well. Awesome. So good to hear kind of the background story of how we all more or less stumbled into this industry. But it felt so good and we never, never looked back. I really love that since then. Obviously since the beginning, a lot has happened. And I was curious to hear from your point of view, what are the trends or what is the current state of events and more specifically, event engagement and experience? Vanessa, would you like to answer that? Yeah, sure, sure. So very much thinking about the business event world because that's certainly my my wheelhouse and so mean. I love that you came from such a different background as well. I think it's fascinating that we probably have very different experiences to share. But what I love about it is that you're now in the corporate events sector and the reality is that everybody coming to these events are human beings and that doesn't matter what the content of the event is. You are still trying to engage human beings. And the reason I say that sounds very obvious is because I think this is a really important piece that needs to be considered when it comes to current trends, because people have changed their perspectives significantly over the last two and a half years. And I'm not going to say the P word. We all know why, but perceptions of what is good and bad have changed quite a little bit. I think there's a lot less acceptance for mediocre than there used to be when joining events, but there's also a hugely increased appetite for humanity at any events that people go to, whether that's online or in person. And people just want to engage and interact with other people in a very easy manner. It doesn't always have to be formal, it doesn't always have to be corporate. And I think this is a trend that we need to really embrace right now across all sectors that my experiences in both in-person events and virtual events since 2012, just quite a long time ago, and they were very, very average back then. I will be honest and say that they're a lot better now that this concept of humanizing and bringing elements to events that delight people during the experience are here, and I think we have this amazing opportunity to be quite experimental with the experiences that we're trying to create for people. And I think there's more appetite for that than there has ever been. So I feel quite excited about this moment in time that we have and this opportunity to be quite creative. And I've seen some amazing examples of this over even just the last three months, I would say with both online and in-person events and those that cross over both, which I'm sure we're probably going to come to in a minute. But Simon, Does that sort of match your thoughts as well on that kind of bringing the human aspect to the events and the experiences we're trying to create now? Absolutely. And just sort of people's background, over the past couple of years, I've been delivering installations. I've written about my head virtual experiences as opposed to virtual events because I very much look at what the P word happened. So I'm not going to mention it, but although it happened, you know, people became restricted, they couldn't do things a lot. People were putting on virtual events and it was just something that you sort of had on in the background. Whereas very much as Vanessa's you said about humanizing it, we gave people a chance. We put this the human back into virtual events. So the sort of activities and the entertainment we did, we made it all about the audience. I know a lot of event fun is went into sort of this you know meltdown mode. We can't, we can't, we can't. And I just sat there and went, what can we do? What can we get these people to do? You know, you're all sat at home. I want you to be part of the event. I want you to experience things. I want you to get emotional excitement, a bit of panic, that energy. And it was that that the reason we had so much success over the past couple of years on the virtual stage is because we really focused on what we could get the audience to do, whereas everyone else was just focused in on let's put a nice webinar on, which is great, but you know, take it or leave it. Whereas if you're on one of our experience, it was just, yeah, let's get that human element out. Lets give people opportunity to get involved, get excited, put in what they want and really get sort of emotionally involved. And I think on the virtual side of things, that was a massive shift for us in the site. Why, why we were so successful. And I think, again, just echoing what Vanessa said, now it's coming back to the live events in terms of the activities we've been rolling. There's been a real change in what people are looking for and what they're thinking about when they're putting in events on rather than just having a we get together once a year, we have a finance day, we have a few drinks and that's it. I think there's so much demand now for activities where there's either the one team, one goal focus. So we've been doing like a big samba drumming event with about 300 people. We put them in a room, we transform them into one harmonious samba band. And, and activities like that are in high demand because it's just bringing those people back together. And another thing Vanessa touched on that networking side of things, just bringing out the opportunity rather than just putting people into a room and hoping, you know, this magic will appear. You know, we've all been locked away for so long and a lot of people have lost those social skills. So we've seen a real trend in people looking for activities where people are sort of slowly encouraged to interact and we build on that. And it's just having there a fun activity, a shared positive experience just to get that conversation started. And that's where I say that the trends seem to be going this year rather than rather just a get together. It's what can we get out of it? How can we reconnect these teams or how can we introduce teams to each other? They may be working together for 18 months. They've never met and have that share positive experience. That's the way we've we've seen it coming from the introduction events perspective. I love just chuck a T a couple little thoughts in there on that piece he said about people have so lightly lost the social skills and I'm broad brushing that obviously but I recall being at an event not long ago and a guy he also runs a podcast. He's so effervescent, he's like complete life and soul of the podcast and anything he doesn't mind. And I happened to be at the event with him. It was his first in-person event and he said to me, I don't know what to do. I completely out of my comfort zone right now and I haven't done this in so long. I just feel quite overwhelmed. And I think that coming from someone who hosts effectively online experiences events on a regular basis to feel like that going back in person, you know, I'm sure the second, third, fourth events, he probably didn't just suddenly feel back to his normal self either. I think we were on a real journey with attendees who are looking to probably enjoy themselves as much as they can and aren't 100% sure quite how to do that. And I love what you said about what can we do, what can we get these attendees to do? And I have a perception, I think this is a bit of a trend as well, actually, which is why sort of rebutting in, to say is that there's this real concern about how will we look if we try and orchestrate some sort of experience or engagement activity and how will it be perceived and will it be perceived badly? And we sort of minimize the event experience sometimes for worrying about how it might be perceived and received. And I mean, I've done some stuff in the past that I was terrified about doing before we actually did it during a live event. So remember doing speed networking for the first time in probably about 2008 or something, and genuinely for the half an hour before I was like, This is going to be a disaster. This is going to be a disaster, but we're going to do it. And I remember some of the team members looked at me and said, Really not sure you’re gonna pull this off. So but we did it. And the attendee said it was one of the best bits of the entire event because we took the leap of faith and we did something pretty wacky. It was totally organized chaos, but it was organized and the chaos works. If we hadn't had the courage to do it, it just would have been another regular networking break that would have been entirely forgettable. So I just think this point of what can we get attendees to do for that benefit, I think that's really important. Not for the sake of it is really is quite an overwhelming concept at the moment, especially when event organizers are pretty exhausted after the last period of time. So I think there's a lot more we can do that we've just got to focus on doing one or two things and doing them really, really well. I think, sorry to jump in again, I think just to touch on what Vanessa has just said, that thing that people are like, you know, you're nervous about it. It's something new. It's something exciting. That for me is what creates an experience. That is the difference between an event and an experience. It's the nerves, it's the excitement. It's the, anticipation, exactly that anticipation and just that moment of almost a bit of dread. You know, you say, well, what are the most amazing things that anybody's done as an experience in the life? I jumped out an airplane. It's not I went to the shops and bought some food. So, you know, I it's the ones that are initially you're sort of terrified of just for that split second. But then when it happens, that's when, you know, that's the experience, that's the emotion. You're going to be left with. And I think that's going to be the power of events and that's what's going to get people talking as opposed to just, you know, you go, you get the email, you get your finance update, you go home. So it really believes that you're pushing exciting things out of it totally. And very rarely do amazing things happen by accident or by doing the same thing you did before, right? Usually amazing things happen after a massive amount of effort and that sort of fear factor and anticipation and nervousness on the way. And so I think if you're not feeling enough of that in the preparation for your engagement and experiences, you might not be pushing yourself quite far enough. That's my thoughts. I love those thoughts and I completely agree. First of all, so many amazing insights here. I think we touched on experience, humanizing, really pushing yourself to the boundaries. And I feel like the past two years not mentioning the P-word, obviously, but kind of pushed a lot of event organizers that were very much pushing from their comfort zone to feel that fear, feel that anxiousness, and actually think of ways outside of the box that they used before. And I feel like that's happening a lot. Is that something you also noticed? Simon I think so, yeah. And I think there's a big push for, you know, now, virtual is is such a big part of the event spectrum as well. It's also just thinking about and again, going back to what Vanessa said as well as of what is, you know, the purpose of the event, what's the outcome of it, what's the significance of it? And whether we do do things live or whether we do do things virtual. Now, I think there's a real positive, you know, thought around sort of what's the why? Why do we want to actually get together in person virtually? And I think that will be a big thing moving forward of of this year. I know we discussed there's this big push to get us all back together. But then, you know, I said of another podcast a few months ago that I kind of feel this year will be, you know, they get back together year and then next year. I feel as sad as it is, the accountants might pull the purse strings a bit, go look and watch these live in-person events costs us. And, you know, I it's like, you know, rather getting together six times a year like we've always historically done. Do we split that down to three three you got three virtual three in person or did we just do one huge one in person and do the rest? And again, I don't know it from the delegate perspective as well. Do people want to come to live and in-person events anymore? You know that that whole losing the social skills you've also got the stress of travel. You know, you've got to you've got to find shoes to put on. You know, you can't just send your laptop anymore. And and often, you know, 50% dresses that many people have been in. So that whole emotional thing of how many events do people actually want to go to so it’s, Yeah, it's it's interesting times for events at the moment and event planners and yeah there's there's a lot of thoughts on getting the right strategy. I think it's quite a lot of pressure on that moving forward. Yeah, great, great. Sorry. Absolutely agree. No, no problem. I love it actually that you have such a lively conversation and makes my job easier as well. But really, I love it. I Massively agree with what Simon said about the costs of these events. And and I think it's great like let's get back together right now, right? We need it. We need to reconnect. But what I think it's also going to teach us when I say we need it, I think it's also going to teach us or enlighten us, perhaps at the moment on what we genuinely should be doing in person. And what we actually, I'm going to say can do, should do online as well. And, you know, what's the blend of in between, too? Because I think we're still was being quite black and white. Is it online or is it in person? And actually, there are there are grays in between that. But the other piece I think is quite an important not today, part of the piece of the puzzle. Piece of the puzzle, but is going to become more important in coming years is the carbon cost as well as the financial costs of going to these events. So there was some research published in Nature magazine, sorry, Nature Journal this week, and the carbon footprint of the event industry in this research piece was attributed for being 10% of the global carbon footprint from the events industry. Now that blew my mind, and I don't think we're going to be able to ignore that too much longer, to be honest. So when it comes back to engagement and experiences, I think that's where we have to really test ourselves to. Can I deliver the outcome of whatever it is I'm trying to achieve and can I engage people and give them a great experience in whatever this particular when you use the word event for ease or meeting in the in-person experience in the in a virtual experience. And I think there's going to be an increasing amount of questions about that from probably Q1 next year when the financials for 2022 get closed down and costs start to be analyzed, I think it'll be very cost driven to financial cost driven to start with. And I also think there is a huge push to go back in-person from the event organizers, not always from the attendees. So some more research more recently. I love stats and facts, by the way. I sort of feel like when things are crazy, which let's be honest, they are pretty crazy in the event sector the last couple of years stats give you something solid to work with. And we also have had a period of time where we haven't had much in the way of trends because we've just been on this rollercoaster of changeability. It's a freeman publishing data that shows that in-person event attendance at the moment about 64% compared to, oh my goodness, I'm going to say 2019 and before still avoiding the p-word, and Skift meetings have also published similar sorts of findings they sit around about I think they said 60 to 65%. Sorry, If I haven’t got that exactly right. So that's a big old chunk. You know, we're talking 35, 30, 35%. What's happening to those attendees and how we creating awesome experiences for them to keep them engaged in different ways. And I'm really fascinated to see over the next two years what we do to keep pushing this experience level because no one wants to stand so right. We always want to keep moving forwards and learning and growing in both in-person and online, bring the two together. And that's I'm excited to see where we end up because it's not going to be a straight path. I'm sure. I'm sure there'll be all sorts of zigzags to get there. Absolutely. It's going to be a bumpy ride. But I think the the main trends are still going to be up. So in that sense, a future to looking forward to. I hear a lot of these trends and I was wondering like, can you share some real life examples of what your currently doing, like an experience you've gotten to or gotten to organize for your attendees? How are you currently? For instance, the first topic was humanizing that aspect. Like can you give a real life example of that, Vanessa? Oh, I've got loads. I'll try to keep it really short. So about a year ago I was involved in a hybrid event, Multi Hub and one of the audiences was, was in New York and one was in London and then a big load of people online as well. And the we did something for each of those audiences independently that was shared with all of the other audience too. So for example, the New York crew had Breakfast at Tiffany's underneath all their chairs was a little blue box, and in one of them there was a Tiffany's necklace. So we live streaming in both directions. All of the New York attendees were like looking under their chairs one of them won. And it was all livestreamed to both those in London. Who could see this happening and were like, Oh, this is cool, Yes, I want this. And the London crew at the end of the day got like a champagne giveaway because the time zones meant that champagne for breakfast probably wasn't quite the business effect we were going for. But it was at the end of the day for London. Great. Some other cool things I've seen in person money 2020. I loved what they did here. They had every attendee arrived on the stage and they didn't know that before they arriving. So the entrance registration then fed them through where they walked into the conference room via the stage and with photos of them standing on the stage. That looked awesome. Pulse is a really quite significant customer success event, which is very US centric. They've been online obviously for the last couple of years. They had an in-person and virtual element this year. They did it so well together and the most attended session that they had was called Puppies of Pulse, where they literally invited all of the attendees to share their photographs of their dogs or something like that. And I having spoken to the Pulse organizers, she said. Last year it flew, so this year they put it on their home page for the event because it was such a success last year and this is a business event, right? Times have changed and I just think they're such, such great examples that bring to life that you can make these experiences even when they are. The content might be pretty serious and might be all about compliance or something, but you can still bring the human element to this experience. Both In-person and online. Sorry I'm going to stop talking for a bit. That no problem. I really love those examples. I think they're very good examples. SIMON Can you share some of your real life experiences? Well, first of all, I'm going to say having the delegates arrive on stage, I will be stealing that. It’s so good isn’t it? Because I love that as a concept. It's a simple thing about but bang. You are the star of the show, you know what I mean? And that's what we really sort of aspire to do with all of our experience is we make it about the delegates. Exactly that. You are the people that matters. This is for you. It's all about you. And now, love that so I’ll be stealing that and write down for later but other sort of examples of things we've been doing. We had there just seem to be that we find a lot of teams at the moment who are very new or as I say, they've been working together for the past few months. They've never actually met in person or there's been company restructure is you know, people work differently from home a lot of the time and that there's a real importance at the minute of when people do get together in a room that we get, you know, we give them that shared positive experience. And we did an event a few weeks ago for a company and they've had about six or seven brand new teams. They just put them all together and they really want them to focus on company values, but they wanted it to be fun. So rather than just say in like 2 hours, sit around a table, meet your team for the first time, have that discussion and then tell us about what you're going to do as a team. We said, right, come on, we want something fun, so what can we do? So we went in and we I brief them as if they had to come up with an entire new marketing campaign. Were we’re gonna ment to have some advertising industry awards for the advertising and movie industry. We're going to show you some adverts. We've lost all the footage, so they are 2 hours to recreate and a team of eight. So we gave them a fancy dress, we got a budget, we gave them props. We're in some beautiful hotel with that random layout fully sort of theme rooms, every room is completely different. So the venue worked perfectly, but it was, you know, we give them about an hour and a half of just having fun together. And because they were having fun, we felt a lot more relaxed and so many ideas came out and then we brought them all back into the room at the end. We put the films up, they made the adverts up on the big screen. They came, we did a little presentation about what they were going to do rather than just standing there going, We commit to making X percentage. By Q4, they were dressed as superman, you know, a giant chicken. Now I want to steal this idea And I look at it, we do this stuff. I seriously I got to ask you that Book us then. For more details, it’s so good It is it. But just as an experience for them it became memorable. You know, they got and they just got excited about it. And rather than, as I say, just going in, having that business conversation and having a very sensible thing is very cool for a company. Well, all of a sudden there was big smiles on the faces and, you know, we had a little ceremony. We gave out Oscars for the best performances. Well, they we also had a judging panel in front of the stage who were all the senior directors of the company. And I thought they were just going to be fun, but they took about 50 minutes properly analyzing everything they done. And it and it really made a difference. And they said they got a lot more from the delegates by doing something fun with it, by taking people out of the norm shift in that having that mental shift from this is a work environment. I, you know, I'm a bit scared to say these things to just go in, you know what? I'm dressed as a chicken, whatever comes out. I mean, it just happens. And that just became a memorable experience. It's certainly something about the unexpected. I feel in both the examples we talked about here, coming out on stage, dressing as a chicken to the both of those are really unexpected and to me, I feel like that's maybe a takeaway for me from this conversation so far. It's actually the unexpected is often what leads to the greatest delight. So think about think about that. How can you surprise your attendees in a positive manner? Obviously, and I bet there are loads of other creative ideas out there. Hundreds of thousands probably. That's it's it's interesting. Sorry to jump in Merijn on that very that but it's interesting you should say just about the surprise that I've been asked because we with all lot virtual experiences the game show that we run for example we very much focused on give people exactly what they expect to happen. When I say gameshow, you're expecting a quiz. So round number one is a quiz. Round number two, bang. Absolutely. Hit them with the most ridiculous off the wall. Just what is going on on this event. And it just totaly takes, you know, they don't have to get involved in it. They can just watch it. Well, we did something. Oh, I’m not telling what it is because it's just so bizarre. It is ridiculous, but it works. You just saw it. You saw this confusion going over people's face. And then afterwards they thought, I can relax. Yeah, we can have fun with this. This isn't just another work conference, you know, this is where the fun happens. And you get so much more by sort of introducing people. They're in the comfort zone. They know what they want, and then all of a sudden, bang, you hit them with something. They just go, Oh, and after that it's very easy that to sort of take people down wherever you want. And I, I found you get a lot more out of people to the point of, you know, people think they're coming online for a virtual quiz and I've got a nice lady in Spane. You know jumping in a swimming pool with all the clothes on for no other reason, other then she thought she gets, you know, and it's just that. But if I just said, right, go and jump in your swimming pool, it would be no. But it's just that thinking about the the psychology of it, building people up, giving them that surprise, giving them the unexpected, and then giving people opportunities to interact and engage. I think that's that that's been our sort of success model, if you like, for a lot of actual experience, I guess is element. You sometimes do have to lead by example a bit as the person delivering the event. So you maybe think we run quarterly we run to the noteworthys we call it where we it is basically an award ceremony, where we make note and share and publicly celebrate is usually around ten or 12 of our employees across the globe. And it's a huge town hall on our platform, which makes it nice and easy for us. And everybody comes together to get going. And at the beginning there are usually a few people whose job is to just get that, get that morale and that camaraderie going. It takes less than a minute, and before you know it, the screen's covered in emojis. And there's amazing chat going on in the chat discussion. And I think when you are doing it for a group of individuals who perhaps don't know so well, I'm talking about all about we're doing this with our peers and our colleagues when it's great, you don't need someone. You might have to be that catalyst at the beginning. You might have to be the fire starter that gets us going, and that's okay. And I think, again, sometimes people will worry, can I do that? Is that allowed? Yes, it absolutely is. All you're doing is just getting things going. So, yeah, go for it. Jump in a pool with your clothes on. That's what is required. Without the fire started, I would never be a fire, right. Well, the amazing takeaways already indeed. I think we kind of already went to the next topic, which is share a funny story or a horror story that you actually experienced. I already heard a love of funny stories here, but, you know, maybe Simon, you can share a funny or a horror story that you experience with experience and engagement in events. So I'm going to stick with the more of the funny rather than the horror, because I try to stay away from the horror where possible. You know it. We've all of those events, there's all the unpredictable things. But I like to stick with the positive. So one one that, you know, I mention when people say tell me about an interesting event or experience you from a few years ago and a client came to the company I was working for and said, we've got a Colin Jackson, which if you've not heard about Colin Jackson, he's a British Olympian, world record breaking hurdler presents on the BBC. Now, he was going to come in and be the motivational speaker, the team, and then they said after he's come on, we want to do some kind of activity for a couple of hours in the afternoon. We've got two or 300 people. What can you do? And rather than just go in motivational speaker, coffee break, then an activity, we said, well, how can we integrate your speaker into the activity? So what we did is we came up with a murder mystery concept, but we actually did rather than a murder, we did a theft. So the plot was to steal a Sir Colin Jackson’s Seabees Olympic medals. So I had never met the guy before. I had to jump on a conference call before the event with two very professional ladies who seemed to turn into giggling schoolgirls on the phone.
Calling Jackson and I had to go:
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Colin Are you going to bring your Olympic medals along with you? And he said, Yes Why?. And I was like, Would you mind if we stole them? Q Silence and tumbleweed moment. And then I explained what was going on. He got very much into it. So the plan became actually on the event he did his 45 minutes to an hour and a couple of Q and A's. And then just during his last question, I went on dressed as head of security and I said, I'm sorry, Mr. Jackson, we're going to have to cut this short. I'm afraid your Olympic medals have just been stolen. He looked mortified. Walked to the audience and said, I'm afraid I'm going to have to go. I've just found out my Olympic medals have been stolen. 200 people just dashed through. There was just this. I marched him out the room. There was devastation in the room. We got out into the corridor, burst into fits of laughter, high fived all the way out to the corridor. And then people came out the room. We sat like somebody else went on and said, We're going to a coffee break now. Make your way out the room. We're going to have to see what’s happened with Colin. They went out. There was blue lights, flashing sirens going on place everywhere. And then they went and that just invested people into what became an experience. So rather just having it as a structured day and splitting everything up, just really sort of bringing everything together and giving people, but when we got that children out, people just go ahead all at the same time. We knew that was going to be an experience for them rather than just an activity. I feel like, or an event. I can imagine. You must have had a good laugh behind the scenes with that. I have to say, if anyone's thinking about booking Colin Jackson is brilliant rather than a lot of speakers who say, Look, I've done 20 minutes, 20 minutes, the phone goes off, they walk out the room, get in a car and go on to the next round. Collins said. Can I stay around and see if you get my medals back? He was fingerprinting with people. He was watching CCTV evidence. You know, taking selfies with was brilliant, but absolutely just as a bit of a surreal experience for the people because, you know, a he got involved with it as well. Yeah, brilliant. I love it out. How is that for you, Vanessa? Can you share a funny or maybe a horror story that you experience? To a certain extent Segways in actually. So I also this was thinking I was that I am head of customer engagement here at Notified, and I'm obsessed with making customers happy and actually with events. You have got attendees, possibly sponsors as well, but your speakers, I think you should think about your speakers as customers. So Simon what you did there for a Sir Colin was you gave him an experience, right? You made his job as a speaker way more fun that day. And he probably told his friends and family, I had this really great gig the other day, and I think that is a really nice way to think about thinking of speakers as customers to make sure they have an amazing experience and they get it and give your attendees an amazing experience My mine is a bit of a horror story actually about the Speaker, which is why I that is a nice Segway and this is what happens when you don't take real ownership of your agenda. This is a personal experience quite a long time ago now over ten years, 12, 13. And there was a period of time where the events, the conferences that I was running, we were receiving a huge amount of sponsorship from mostly technology companies to pay to stand on the stage and speak. And in our, I guess, eagerness to satisfy those customers who were paying pretty big dollar to have the privilege to speak on the stage that we we didn't take enough ownership over the agenda and we didn't basically instruct them clearly enough on what to do or particularly not to do on stage. And it damaged the quality of the agenda because they were just being a bit too pitchy. And long story short, the thing what I really realized, oh, this is not an engaging experience. And we then took huge steps to resolve this was clearing some of the tables after the main keynote speaker who was a bank sponsor. And there was one note that one delegate had written to another delegate that said, I have no idea what he's talking about. Do you question mark? And someone had replied, No idea. And I thought, Oh, we've got this wrong. We've really, really got this wrong. And we obviously got pretty fair feedback from some of the attendees, but it was the rest of the sessions were great, but those sponsored sessions were disappointing. So the next year we didn't let a single sponsor go on the stage. It caused, frankly, riot. We took a hit of revenue that year, but the following year we had completely regained control. We earned back respect of the attendees who felt a little bit violated, I think that the year where they got pitched a lot so we earned back their respect, we also earned back the respected of the sponsors and it gave us that like total reset to totally retake control of that agenda and what was happening on the stage so that it was engaging. And so it was a horror story at the time as it its it was a two year recovery window but it was hundred percent paid off and then it actually turned out to be far more lucrative after that but seeing that note that one hurt that really hurt when you have that realization that you got it wrong. And I think it's important to share a little bit of horror, especially when it's lived horror as well as as well as the positivity. But yeah, thinking of speakers is as customers and he probably that particular presenter, had we given him way more guidance, he probably actually would have really appreciated it because it would have helped make his session more successful. So it's that thing again, don't worry about what people think of you making your event a success. Just do it. Absolutely a horror story about with a beautiful learning, I think. And you only got out stronger. So that's still a positive thing. I would love to hear like last point, your takeaway maybe from the session or maybe in general, like what is for you the most important thing to keep in mind for event professionals right now. I this was quite an easy one actually. Make sure that you are giving your attendees the options that they are truly asking you for right now. So what I mean by that is don't be clouded by, I think, SIMON You said sort of rush back to in-person, think about what you're trying to achieve, think about the goals, think about your attendees goals as well, then deliver accordingly. And if that's the combination of in-person online, if it's all in-person, if it's all online, whatever is the right delivery mechanism. I think right now is incredibly important. And then you build your engagement and your experience design around those overall goals of both the attendees and yourself and that's my just my my fear at the moment is that we, the event organizers, are pushing too much, but not too much, perhaps more than the attendees are pushing. Just based on thos stats that attendees aren’t going back so much. So think about it from your attendees perspective as well as your own and then provide the right delivery mechanism. Love it, such a great two key takeaway and how is that for you, Simon? I very much agree with Vanessa, a very similar you know, that one key message to take away. Like Vanessa said, there's this this huge push, you know, a must get back together. People are desperate to get back together. And I fully understand that. But I've seen a lot of people over the years do in-person events, quite badly, very dull, very boring people don't enjoy them, advising them, switch to virtual. They've taken the exact same format and put it on the Internet, which makes it about ten times worse, even more boring. And I don't rush to get people back together and then give them a terrible experience, you know, keep it light, as I mentioned about, you know, people sort of social skills, if we can slightly don't just throw people back into 8 hours death by PowerPoint, you know, well, we're all excited. We get into a room, we turn the lights down. And I was the presentations. You go home, you know, make it a shared, positive experience. And I think that for me has been, you know, a mantra through lockdown, an online is, you know, keep everything positive. Make sure when you do bring people together, give it real purpose, make it fun and make people want to come back together. You know, we've there's a lot of companies at the minute. You've got teams that they just feel distanced. They haven't got the trust. They work with people online, but they don't have, you know, solid, real sort of bonds with them. Give them an opportunity to create those bonds, make real relationships, make real connections in person. And make it, you know, that people want to actually be part of that team. So really have a think about what you're going to do, your strategy, what activities are you going to do to make it an enjoyable and positive experience? I couldn't agree more such great takeaways. I think our listeners have gotten a lot of value out of this episode. I want to thank you, Simon and Vanessa both so much for being here. It was really a pleasure to have you as guests on the Event Effect. For all the listeners looking forward to seeing you in the second episode for now, I wish you a very pleasant day and looking forward to the next one. Thank you. Thank you.
