Cameron Roberts chats to Gaby Mendes, founder and director, Talk Twenties, about how community pulled her event through adversity.
Launching an event is never easy, but for TwentiesFest, which took place on 1 October 2023 at Camp and Furnace, Liverpool, there was an added twist of fate.
I spoke to Gaby Mendes, founder and director, Talk Twenties, about the ace up her sleeve when it came to navigating these debut event challenges.
Derailed
The key challenge facing TwentiesFest was the train strikes taking place on the weekend of the event, meaning many attendees, speakers and sponsors were suddenly unable to travel to Liverpool.
Speaking about the strikes, Mendes said: “The event had to battle through train strikes that weekend, which for any first-time organiser is the words that you don’t want to hear. Immediately that wiped out quite a lot of our speaker line up, we had to make a lot of last-minute arrangements.”
However, the organisers had an ace up their collective sleeves, TwentiesFest is an event that was built on the back of Talk Twenties, a long-running podcast series with a large community. Many of the attendees were part of this community, so pulled together to make it onsite.
Mendes said: “We had people driving from all over the UK, from Glasgow and Watford to London and Birmingham. We had people carpooling with people that they had only met online. It really added to that community feel.”
All aboard
The strength of the community is what helped pull people together onsite despite adversity, but how did Mendes forge with community?
She said: “I think a lot of people look at podcasting as something that you can just launch overnight and you’ll get fans who will then come to an event. That’s not how it works in terms of building a community. You must remember I’m talking in someone’s ears, it’s a very intimate situation. My audience has probably listened from when I started the podcast three years ago. So, they’ve built that real connection from listening and me showing up and being consistent with the content that we provide.
“We’ve been releasing content consistently for three and a half years before launching the event. I think a lot of people think, ‘we’ll launch 10 episodes of a podcast and it’ll be done.’ They then wonder why the community aren’t showing up. Well, you haven’t built a community, you’ve built a series that people can kind of tune into.”
The content consistency leading to real-world benefits is something event organisers can learn from, creating community is not a tokenistic gesture, it takes real hard work and a dedication to providing value to your members.
