CEO Stories: Designing Powerful and Engaging Events

FISH OR CUT BAIT

After doing event planning on a part-time basis while working in public relations, Collins decided she needed either to devote herself to the business full time or leave it behind. She chose the former, but her timing was less than auspicious: just two weeks before 9/11. The hospitality and travel industries, which fuel event planning, ground to a halt. Determined to make the business work, she rebuilt it slowly over the next few years, getting her big break when she answered an ad to be a D.C.-based event planner for UC Davis’s Cocoa Symposium, in partnership with candy company Mars.

PEOPLE AND PURPOSE

To Collins, the logistics of event planning aren’t nearly as complex or as interesting as the idea of bringing people together for a shared purpose and the challenge of helping to create change. She learned to think of events in very business-like terms: to be successful they needed a mission statement, measurable goals, and to be able to meet the needs of the various stakeholders. She also developed the

SPARK

model – Sensory; Purpose; Activations; Resources; Know-how – as a reminder of the critical elements for creating connections among people and making an event memorable and impactful.