Four event planners discuss the benefits and challenges of staging their events outside of London:
Sarah Thackray, founder and director of BeaconHouse Events
Around 80% of our client’s events take place in the Northeast of England. The main reason is that corporate headquarters are based there.
With ESG now a priority, events must still be held in central, accessible locations. People don’t want to have to drive into the middle of nowhere, so we’ll always push easy-to-reach cities outside of London such as Birmingham, Manchester or Newcastle. But we first look at where the audience is based. If the audience is outside of London, we’ll opt for the most sustainable destination options from a travel perspective.
Post-Covid, a lot of people decided to move away from the Capital, which has driven the trend for remote workforces. Events are important to keep disparate employees connected but organisations have realised that asking staff to always travel to London to attend events in person is neither viable nor sustainable.
Some people who work and live in cities such as Leeds or Newcastle may also be intimidated by the thought of having to attend events in London. They may be more comfortable networking with more local businesses and not having to spend a night away from their families.
Staging events outside of London also provides access to a more diverse range of speakers and different voices. At the same time, you may find that northern audiences want to hear from London speakers so there’s the opportunity to take knowledge and inspiration from the UK capital to other parts of the country as well.
But if you’re asking a London-based audience to travel to an event in Birmingham for example, you’ll need to factor in a later start or a reason for them to come up the night before such as a dinner. Otherwise, everyone will opt for off-peak travel and arrive late to your conference.
You certainly have to be more strategic about where you stage events these days so that you’re more inclusive while providing attendees with unique experiences and more reasons to attend.
Satellite events are growing in popularity whereby you might have a main conference in London and then smaller events held in other parts of the UK. This not only helps audience inclusivity, but it can also provide more opportunities and reach for sponsors.
Finally, there’s also a potential ‘Bleisiure’ angle. Combining leisure activities with business travel is a growing trend so adding on a visit to Hardrian’s Wall when staging a conference in Newcastle for example gives delegates the chance to expand their horizons and visit UK attractions they may not have been to before.
Michaela Reaney, co-founder of Opportunity Global
I’m a TEDx organiser for the Northeast of England by night and by day, I also run a learning and development company. We organise L&D events but my main involvement with event planning is as a licence holder for TEDx Teeside.
The beauty of organising TEDx talks in this part of the country is being able to spread the ideas, inspiration and insights that come from our speakers to more diverse audiences outside of London and the South. I’ve found that only the privileged can afford to attend TEDx talks in London but we’re able to tap into more regional communities and engage local cultures and groups.
Since the pandemic, the desire for human connection has increased but so too has our consciousness of how we impact climate change. People are considered about how they travel and look much closer to home for engaging experiences. People also want to be part of larger communities and engage with year-round content. Attending a TEDx event in the Northeast of England and then becoming part of a global community, as a result, is incredibly powerful.
Those opportunities don’t always exist in the Northeast so when we staged our first event, the groundswell of local interaction and engagement was incredible. We outperformed TEDx London, which was unbelievable to me but I guess in London, you’re competing with every other event for people’s attention.
Another reason to stage events outside of London in more regional, often deprived communities is to provide greater reach and diversity for sponsors and stakeholders. The challenge is converting that interest into actual investment. The way to navigate it is to engage local business owners and ensure that your events add value and align with their values and objectives.
Those businesses that were brave enough to support our first TEDx Women talk in Middlesborough had such a positive experience and have seen plenty of opportunities off the back of getting involved. You just need to work harder on creating that connection to the local area. That may involve working with someone who is deeply embedded in the community or someone who has a strong connection to the area. Only then can you think about how to serve that community more authentically and add the biggest value. Also, be aware of limited venue choices in certain parts of the country. You may not find a venue with the required capacity so you may need to spread your event out over a larger number of days. Remember though, more engaged local audiences sell out events quicker in smaller towns and cities.
Marina Lunn, senior project manager at TRO
I run a three-day summit at the Eden Project in Cornwall called Anthropy. It brings leaders together from across the worlds of business, politics and charity to collectively focus on creating a new, longer-term positive vision for Britain.
It’s a great event to work on because it breaks the norm and pushes boundaries – from the choice of venue to the event format itself. We continuously look for new ways to make Anthropy more inspiring, fresh and exciting for the audience.
It’s important to us that Anthropy takes place each year in Cornwall during a period of low seasonality so that we contribute to the local economy, local services and staffing.
That can be anything from filling hotel rooms and local restaurants to employing local catering staff or working with a local production agency. We even worked with local transport partners to put on shuttle buses to and from the Eden Project to local towns and villages.
The more sponsors we attract, the more branding and print work is required so as the event grows, so too does our contribution to local Cornwall businesses. We worked with four new local suppliers for 2023 and collaborated with them to reuse, recycle, and upcycle bits and pieces from the 2022 event.
We also worked with the event management course at Falmouth University to recruit volunteers, which is another way to ensure a positive impact when staging events in more regional parts of the country.
By giving people the opportunity to work on a full-scale, professionally run event, you’re giving them a workplace experience they may only have otherwise been able to get by going to London. We had 230 sessions and workshops across three days and 18 stages, featuring over 600 speakers so it’s a huge event.
I also find that a venue like the Eden Project is such an inspiration and somewhere that people may have never had the chance to visit before. Taking people out of their day-to-day and placing them in a unique environment, ensures they remain present throughout the event and commit to the content and conversations. So for us, even though Cornwall is far from London, the fact that you can’t just pop in for an hour was a big positive.
Steve Keith (pictured), equity, diversity and inclusion consultant, Curious Consulting
In 2021, I founded the UK’s first annual student celebration – The Queer Student Awards (QSAs) – focused on celebrating the talented young LGBTQ+ people who are proudly leading in their lives, and the communities around them. The awards also recognise the work that individual allies, schools, colleges, universities and employers are doing to create inclusive spaces that support young LGBTQ+ people, many of whom worry about whether sharing their sexuality and gender identity will act as a barrier to their future success in the career of their choice. The awards are judged by a panel of student recruitment industry experts, queer influencers and young LGBTQ+ people from schools, colleges and universities.
When I launched the QSAs, they took place on Zoom due to the ongoing restrictions of the pandemic. For the last two years, they have been hosted by venues in Manchester – Whitworth Locke and Victoria Warehouse. In 2024 they will be taking place in Birmingham and we are announcing the venue very soon.
I intentionally chose not to host the event in London because I believe there are far too many events in general that take place in London. I am a very passionate Northerner, and feel very strongly that areas outside of London are heavily neglected when it comes to hosting events, in particular within student recruitment where most awards and events celebrating students and employers take place in the capital. I’ve often felt that some event organisers are distracted by the perceived prestige of hosting their event in the capital – I understand having lived there for 14 years that it is a wonderful city, but it isn’t the only place in the U.K. that can and should be hosting events. You can choose a different focal point and still host a memorable event for your guests.
I chose Manchester to bring the event to life away from Zoom, once Covid restrictions were lifted because it’s the nearest city to where I‘m currently based in the Lake District. That made it much easier for me to visit potential venues and to host on the day. However, I also chose Manchester because it has a rich history of support for the LGBTQ+ community and a large vibrant scene on Canal Street. Since first hosting there in 2022, the results of the latest UK census which collected information on sexuality and gender identity for the first time have been shared, clearly showing the extent to which the LGBTQ+ community is present across the UK. With that in mind from this point forward I’ve decided to host the awards in a different city each year so that we can collaborate with local LGBTQ+ communities to ensure we are representing Queer people on a national scale.
London has some fantastic venues but in all honesty, the ones that I have visited in Manchester and Birmingham over the last couple of years have had a lot more personality and wow factor.
In my experience, a lot of awards hosted in London end up in the same hotels and it can get incredibly repetitive. You go along knowing what to expect (or not expect) every time – who wants their event to be predictable or to serve up yet another dry chicken breast wrapped in bacon?
By choosing a different city and venue each year for the QSAs I plan to make the event something exciting in the student recruitment calendar that students, employers and educators look forward to because they never quite know what to expect.
