The first event that I ever helped to organize was a high school 3-on-3 basketball tournament. It was part of the requirements for my leadership physical education course in grade 12 (or ‘Honours Gym’ as we liked to call it).
Honours gym was an elite group of 20ish students. The curriculum contained all the health promotion and sport science stuff, we had to be a decent athlete in most sports, and we were required to show off our leadership skills by stepping up to help out with various projects in the athletic department at school.
Right away I figured out that I much preferred planning a basketball tournament over memorizing the names of all the bones in the human body and that’s how I swerved into the administration & business side of sport and physical activity.
It’s also how event production and marketing ended up as a core service when I started iSPARK Consulting in 2000.
I love events, even though they are fraught with stress and a brain-numbing number of details and priorities to juggle.
I’ve lost track of how many events that I’ve actually been involved with in my lifetime. There have been major multi-sport games, golf tournaments, so many aquatic competitions, gala dinners, intimate networking events, awards ceremonies, site tours, conferences, webinars, press conferences, a post-Olympic cross-Canada promotional tour, and more.
So, it wasn’t until recently that I realized how valuable all this experience and expertise could be for someone who is a newbie to the events industry, people who do not have the organizational gene as part of their own DNA or to organizations with limited in-house capacity or resources.
For a very long time, I was totally taking it for granted that everyone knew the lingo – f & b, room nights, staging, pageantry, etc. Isn’t it common knowledge that you need a strong ‘call to action’ (and many of them) in your event email marketing campaigns?
Turns out, there are lots of people whose role includes planning events who could benefit from tapping into the combined brains of the iSPARK team now and then. Even a couple of small nuggets of information that seem like a no-brainer to us could save a less-experienced event organizer from making a critical and costly mistake.
This is how the iSPARK event coaching service came to be!
It’s no secret that surrounding yourself with top talent is a sure-fire way to get better results. We love to share our deep experience, knowledge, and connections to bring sport-inspired, business-driven thinking to events, associations, and companies.
We’ll FIRE UP CREATIVITY in your marketing and events teams through mentorship and by transferring sport-inspired thinking and best-practices.
This includes sharing everything that my knowledgeable team and I know about landing lucrative event sponsorship deals, negotiating with event suppliers, increasing an event’s profitability and more. I’m sharing all of these techniques, systems and best practices that I’ve cultivated in the last 25+ years with clients who want to plan and organize their own events using in-house staff and resources but could use some external support to achieve success.
Through our expert coaching and training services we mentor both event and marketing teams and teaching people how to:
- understand the depth of what an event does for your clients and stakeholders and how to leverage it far beyond a single day affair.
- deliver experiences for attendees that keep them talking long after the doors have closed.
- create an event follow-up plan that extends the reach of your event into the following year, engaging event attendees months after the event is over.
- measure the success of the event and debrief/analyze results in an action-oriented way.
- Make your events more profitable.
Our coaching and training services ensure that the client maintains control of their event, but also benefits from having the safety net of an experienced event production and marketing team at their side on speed dial.
Contact us to set-up a complimentary discovery call!