Open Air Business August/September 2017

EVENTS
Fun and Frolics
with Furniture
Make your next event stand out from the crowd with the
help of Helen Lowe’s ‘what if’ approach
Europa
International’s
events and
marketing manager
Helen Lowe is
what one might
call a ‘seasoned
professional’. Seasoned, in the sense that
she’s managed countless events spanning
every single season in the calendar for a
good number of years now (official count
remains strictly confidential, mind).
Weddings in winter, fiestas in fall,
sporting showdowns in summer and
sophisticated soirées in spring… she’s
been there, done that, and loved every
single second of it!
And whilst the outside world may
continue to be kept in the dark about
what happens behind the scenes at
events of all kinds, Helen is undeniably ‘in
the know’ with what can be achieved with
a ‘can-do’ attitude and a clipboard!
But where did such a vast knowledge
and an air of confidence come from,
you may ask? Well that would be from
her rather unique ‘what if’ approach,
apparently... And here she tells us just a
little bit more about it.
FOR THOSE OF you who blinked and
missed it, the British summer – officially
the period between 1 June and 31 August,
according to the meteorological authority
that is the Met Office – is now over.
The festival goers are rinsing off their
wellies; the VIP headline acts are retiring
to their Mediterranean-moored yachts;
the tennis players and cricket enthusiasts
are packing away their balls; and event
organisers across the country are breathing
a sigh of relief as the last of the hay-bale
fueled, allergy-inducing extravaganzas
come to an end.
But as many of us industry stalwarts
take little more than a deep breath and
a weekend off to recoup from everything
that’s been and gone, before looking to the
future and all that the autumn and winter
months have in store, perhaps it is worth
taking a minute to think ‘what if?’.
Now, let me be really absolutely clear
before there is any confusion! I am not a
looking-back-kinda-gal. Oh no! In fact, I
am so much of a look to the future sort of
person that people often have to politely
plead with me to slow down and fill them
in on my thought process in order to get
the general gist of where I am coming from.
In which case, you may well ask, what
on earth am I bleating on about?
Well, the ‘what if’ approach to event
planning is one I like to adopt when
entering any new era. What if, for example,
it had been possible to match the
furniture in the VIP suite with the specific
colour of M&M’s requested by the headline
act (blue, for the record, and no I won’t
name names).
Perhaps said act would have posted out
to their 350k followers and the hashtag
#awesomeeventorganiser would have
been trending!
What if guests had been invited to sit
on plush, cushioned seating instead of
the cold hard ground to watch the annual
village Duck Race? It’s possible that they
would have stayed just a little bit longer,
donating just a little bit more money and
buying just a tiny bit more from the funky
champagne bar that was committed
to giving 10% of its profits back to the
charity!
And what if a little ‘zoning’ at the
famously epic corporate annual knees
up - using cleverly placed furniture items,
perhaps - had encouraged guests to move
throughout the venue as the evening
wore on; resulting in just a little bit more
use of the oh-so-cool props and products
including the photo booth, the inflatable
sumo wrestling ring and the now
infamous lip sync battle area?
You see, it’s really not a case of ‘shoulda
woulda coulda’ (in the words of popular
noughties pop act Beverly Knight)…
After all, the guests had fun, the client
was happy and the atmosphere wasn’t
compromised, right?
But what if next time you could do
things just a little bit differently and
achieve just that little bit more?
Some of my usual tick list ideas include: