A successful away day held between Diabetes UK and the National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) has allowed both organisations the chance to tackle shared challenges and potential opportunities within the events industry.
The collaboration day was hosted by two former ABPCO co-chairs, Therese Dolan and Nicole Leida, who’s shared link to the association helped facilitate and plan the day. Since coming together, both teams have seen substantial value brought back into their separate organisations and applied to their work.
Topics discussed during the day included the challenges and opportunities with:
- Marketing events
- Programme setting
- The use of technology and innovation
- Sponsorship and exhibiting
- Budgeting events and running events on-the-day
The two organisations also share the more specific challenge of operating exclusively in the healthcare and medical sector, which is notorious for strict regulations – a topic covered earlier in the year at an ABPCO round table entitled ‘UK Healthcare Regulatory Compliance: the implications for the Medical Society meeting’.
Nicole Leida, current ABPCO member and head of conference and events at NCRI shared her experience, “It was reassuring to see we are often facing similar challenges. The chance to talk them through was helpful and allowed us to find solutions across the board. We also identified that the issues we face are often cyclical and therefore something we are dealing with now has been an issue for others in the past. Recognising this meant we could revisit previous successes rather than starting from scratch. Overall, I think everyone came away feeling they had learnt something new – and there was certainly a lot of discussion back at the office.”
