Cameron Roberts uncovers how events can be built with a purpose, by reporting on-site at Anthropy.
Something that is becoming more prevalent for event organisers is the purpose of an event, what will the audience take away from the content sessions or networking opportunities? Ideally, an event is more than just a moment in time, a conference should, in many cases, be a springboard for businesses partnerships, new connections and real-world change.
I was fortunate enough to attend an event that put the purpose first, Anthropy was a three-day conference taking place at Eden Project (yes that one) in Cornwall. With the intention of shaping the future of Britain, the event brought together over 1,000 attendees from varying backgrounds and industries.
While onsite, I not only got to talk to some inspiring people, but also the team at TRO, the agency responsible for pulling the event together. I found out what it takes to put together an event with purpose.
Seeds of change
Even the biggest ideas start somewhere, for Anthropy it was in a ‘virtual pub’ between Anthropy founder John O’Brien and Sir Tim Smit, director, Eden Project. From there, TRO were brought on board to deliver an event with the lofty goal of changing the future of Britain.
O’Brien said: “I was thinking about the Davos World Economic Forum, I thought there is an attractive and remote location, which means that people have to decide very carefully to commit to do it. Because if you do something in a city like London, your visitors will dip in and dip out, and they’ll just come to tick the box and not engage with the event. It’s too easy.”
This semi-remoteness meant many attendees (myself included) travelled upwards of five hours to the event, but the logic tracks, you don’t travel that far and then not pay attention to the content and engage with fellow attendees.
But Eden Project’s remoteness was not the only factor in its selection for the event. “I thought, where is there an attractive place, a place of consequence, not just convenience. I thought instantly of Eden Project in Cornwall, which is the most extraordinary illustration of a redundant industrial hole in the ground turned into a beautiful, inspiring, sustainable, environmental educational initiative that’s also had a great economic impact in the area,” said O’Brien.
It’s not just the message from the top that made Eden Project the place to be, the people responsible for delivering the event had to be bought in. Lucy Knill, client partner, TRO, said: “I can’t honestly imagine a better place to host the event, because it’s so integral to what we are trying to achieve with the event. Our vision was to put people in a place where they are going to be able to think out of the box and think creatively.”
But having an event in a ‘non-traditional’ conferencing location is not without its challenges, as we learned with the G7, bringing in suppliers, conference equipment and the delegates themselves can be a challenge, but one worth overcoming.
Knill said: “It was an interesting challenge as Eden Project is not a conference venue per say, so we have had to bring a lot of the event essentials in, but that’s part of what makes it exciting. Eden Project has not previously closed its doors for three days for a private event of this nature, so we’ve been working very closely with them and we are really thrilled as this is such a fabulous place to work at.”
Best foot forward
Broadly, the event has touchpoints in sustainability, social impact and government policy, but the overarching theme of the conference was about facilitating conversations between exhibitors, delegates and speakers.
Smit said: “What we’re hoping to achieve is a bunch of people realising that some of the things we believe in collectively should not be allowed to be political, they should not be left wing or right wing, they should be about being humans. Things like trying to save our water and make it clean or make our air breathable and make our soil fertile. Those things should be rights for future generations.”
“A lot of the conversations that have taken place have been pretty cool, it’s been about how do you create an agenda in which you take a run up at spending a lot of money, but as if you were borrowing it from the future with their permission, what would you do?”
Creating this environment was a core tenant of the organiser’s work in putting together the conference itself. Michael Wyrley-Birch, CEO, TRO, said: “We don’t want to control that narrative. What we do want is our audience’s future vision. But how do we get there? We wanted to make sure that this was audience-sourced. So, on a very practical level, we then looked at getting in the most diverse audience. We have got local councillors, union leaders, journalists, young people from the local university, young people from the local community and everything in between. But they can still have a voice. Everybody is represented.”
This extended beyond the audience however, creating this platform meant that sessions where the narrative is a joint one between speakers and delegates, required some inherent trust in the community onsite. Wyrley-Birch continued, saying: “Inherently in both business and the events industry, we like to control things, we want certainty outcomes. I think in the world we live in now we realise, all successful content and social media output is crowdsourced stunts. The most entertaining thing you’ll ever see on TikTok is not highly polished and produced, it’s the 15-year-old who’s just created, in their bedroom, this amazing piece of content.
“If we take that philosophy and run with it, we need to create the right environment, the right atmosphere, to generate that content, rather than trying to be prescriptive in the direction of sessions prior to the event.”
Building for tomorrow
Talking about building the platform for the conversations is one thing, but what are the practical benefits of an event that aims to change the future of a nation in such turmoil. For O’Brien, it’s the impact of the sessions themselves
and the onsite connections being made, he said: “I want people to have an enriching experience whilst they’re here. I had a young person say to me yesterday, after a session that it had changed their lives, I’ve had the CEOs of a non-profit organisations come in and say that somebody in the audience has donated money directly and come up with another business initiative.
“People are going away with an individual impact. But also, what’s more important is that they are going away with new contacts, new ideas for partnerships, new innovations, as well as looking at things in a different perspective.”
From an event perspective, hosting a large-scale event, debuting at Eden Project, with leaders from the Labour Party, EY, B-LABS, One Young World and many other impactful organisations, is an encouraging start. But for Wyrley-Birch, it’s only the beginning of something much bigger, he said: “I’m going to echo the words of Nelson Mandela here; you feel it’s impossible until it’s done. I don’t think Anthropy will ever be done. But if it is something that a year ago felt impossible, hopefully I’ll be looking back in three- or four-years’ time and say ‘Wow, what a movement have we created here’.”
I hope that it’s something that, in a few years’ time, has built enough energy that it’s there for the next 20 or 30 years, not just something that was a moment in time post Covid-19.”
Having been onsite, Anthropy was an event that stuck out in the mind for me, as someone who goes to a lot (and I mean a lot) of conferences, the noticeable difference in audience engagement, the passion of speakers and the feeling at Eden Project, really was something special. I wouldn’t be surprised if this event was just the start of a beautiful thing.
