We are there – the final day of 2020. Whether you sprint, dance, or crawl across the finish line at midnight…we made it!
This year brought a lot of hurt and heartache as the Events Industry came to a halt overnight. During this year we watched helplessly while many talented industry contacts lost their jobs or were forced to close their businesses.
And while we could list off a bunch of things that disappointed us in 2020…we would prefer to end this year focusing on the gifts that 2020 brought to us.
In January we attended Go West 2020 in Edmonton – a conference for the Event Industry. It was an amazing experience and we came back with a ton of great ideas and new industry contacts. As we return to live events in 2021, we look forward to bringing some of these fresh ideas to life.
We coordinated one large, live in person event. On a regular year, just one live event would be concerning…but this year we are grateful that we experienced the thrill and excitement of a buzzing room full of people enjoying a live event.
We overused the words ‘unprecedented’ and ‘pivot’ as we made the jump to virtual events. Our first success of the year was dismantling a corporate award show that was just 2 days from execution before it had to be cancelled. We rebuilt this as an engaging, exciting and extremely successful virtual award show.
This was a really proud moment for our team. And looking back now, we realize how profound that moment was – we realized it was possible to create engaging virtual events that would connect people during a time when they needed it the most.
We began to embrace this new route our industry was taking – we enhanced our graphic design skills, we expanded our knowledge of video editing, we learned Zoom, Teams, and many other platforms inside and out to enable us to provide full service virtual events to our clients.
RA President Sherryl became certified in Pandemic Meeting & Event Design, from the Event Leadership Institute and Meeting Planners International (MPI). When permitted, we executed safe and successful small in person events.
Our clients stood by us. They were remarkably flexible and supportive as we guided them through cancelling or postponing their live events, or transitioning to virtual events. They reached out to our team for support on smaller projects and helped us keep our head above water during this challenging year. We have said it before, and we will say it again – we have the absolute best clients and we are grateful for their loyalty.
We successfully executed several virtual events – from Corporate Award Shows to AGMs to Multi-Day Leadership Conferences and more.
We volunteered our skills to run Virtual Galas to benefit COVID Relief efforts in British Columbia.
We contributed more time to our roles as Board Members for the Fraser Valley Event Planning Association, working with the rest of the dedicated Board to reach out and connect with our members.
Throughout the year – we stayed positive.
We stayed focused. We worked hard. We embraced the challenge.
We did not allow 2020 to hold us back – we have experienced this year as an opportunity to grow as a team, and we are leaping into 2021 even better prepared to execute incredible events for our clients.
Excited to ring in the new year – 2021…watch out. We are ready for you!
