Tips for today’s event managers

The African Business Travel Association and Uber for Business combine their first hand experience with what it means to be an event manager this year. The expert featured takes us through the challenges big organizations have had to push through over the course of last year and gives top advice on how to stay connected and boost engagement with a virtual audience.

With over 40 years experience in the travel industry, Nadine Clarke, Regional Director at the African Business Travel Association, is a source of knowledge for events in the leisure and tourism industry. Nadine started out with other travel giants such as ACTE and is now the African Business Travel Association’s founding partner. The association offers advice and guidance to the travelling public – bringing a personal touch to business travel in Africa.

This write-up is a teaser of the webinar, addressing the inevitable changes for the travel industry and how to adapt to the challenges events and travel managers face today.

After the turn of events this year, event managers have had to think outside the box to adapt to daily challenges the pandemic has brought to business. Offline productions, seminars, summits and speaker events, have all been heavily impacted. Not only have events been redesigned from a production perspective – a new approach to content has been created. Our three takeaways from the webinar on how to achieve the new digital experience:

For travel managers and buyers who work in environments with high levels of social interaction, the balance between work and home has been a huge change. So how do you make your people feel supported? 

Showing up, keeping the conversation going and connecting to each and every one of your membership base or audience adds to that collective feeling most people are missing with virtual events. Sometimes it’s just as simple as picking up the phone and asking for feedback!

Doing your research can be as simple as reaching out to your partners and or asking your community for insight. Not only do you build a rapport with external connections, but you explore whether any of your virtual event ideas are worth taking to the next step. Once you’ve established which content ideas are worth pursuing, you can get creative and combine them with up-to-date information.

Appealing to different audiences with a selection of different events will increase people’s interest in you as a brand. It shows you go above the “one size fits all” approach, by going the extra mile in researching current trends and listening to your communities needs.

Pro tip: keep your team up-to-date on daily news updates to uncover key topics, so their content is extremely relevant to the audience. You’ll notice that you naturally maintain high levels of audience interest.

Thinking about how to create a more engaging experience as a whole? Take a look at our ideas on how to go live with an event your attendees will remember.

Want to hear more from the webinar?