Advantage West Midlands Annual Conference

Sector Marketing was appointed as event management supplier for the Advantage West Midlands Annual Conference in September 2009.

Brief:

Advantage West Midlands required the services of an event management supplier to manage its Annual Conference on Friday 6^th November 2009 at the ICC, Birmingham.  

The event was to be attended by 500 invited delegates including;  

• Regional – Government bodies and agencies, regional partner bodies (Chamber of Commerce, business representatives)
• Internal – A select number of AWM staff

  The chosen supplier was responsible for: 

• Managing the venue and confirming all arrangements, ensuring maximum cost efficiencies were made
• Managing the response process, including confirmation of places and logging of any special requirements
• Management of set build and overseeing the build of exhibition areas and marketing the region stand
• Stage management and development of panel debate discussion
• Production of delegate badges and management of registration
• Production of delegate list and print
• Arranging filming of the event and production of an event podcast

Delivery:

Managing the venue:

We worked closely with the client and venue events team at the ICC to ensure that every aspect of the brief was covered. We conducted a full site visit to assess Health & Safety issues, disabled access, and any additional implications for staging and access etc.  We worked with the catering team to develop a regionally sourced and British themed menu in line with the agency’s internal policies. We also worked with the technical team to develop a package for the event which meant that external contractors were kept to a minimum.

Management of the invitation and response process:

Advantage West Midlands had an existing conference website from 2008, which was re-used for the 2009 event. We worked with Advantage West Midlands web agency to modify the content and ensure that the registration form captured all required information including dietary and assess requirements. Automatic emails were forwarded to a dedicated mailbox set up for the event at Sector Marketing which was monitored by the account team daily.The data was transferred into Excel and provided to the client on demand and weekly.

Audience recruitment:

Two weeks after initial invitation email was sent out by the client it became apparent that the response levels were not as high as expected. We merged and cleansed a number of invitation databases provided by the client to form a master database which was used for all other invitation mail outs and set up an audience recruitment programme. Priority contacts were established and a script was devised for the recruitment team. The calling highlighted a problem with the initial invitation which had not been received by a number of delegates due to spam filters and/or could not be read properly. We recommended that a plain text invitation was developed and a new invitation was sent out. This combined with the calling, raised registrations from around 200 to 378.

Set design and build:

It can be difficult for delegates seated beyond the first few rows from the front to view the speaker and/or read the presentation notes in large venues such as the ICC. We advised the use of a larger 20ft by 15ft screen and a live feed of the speakers with the aim of enabling delegates to feel more engaged with the speakers.  We deliberately moved away from designing a standard set and backdrop, to reflect a more dynamic and ‘open’ event. By keeping the set simple and using creative lighting we were able to keep the cost down and the impact high.   We commissioned a curved panel desk and matching lectern for the set. The stage banners were designed by Advantage West Midland’s design agency and we managed the print and production via ICC Graphics.

Stage Management: