Hit the North

Northern cities like Northerners themselves have a style and vision often lacking in their Southern counterparts and Leeds, despite its vicious one way system, is no exception.

The city’s enjoyed a great deal of regeneration in recent years and its new focal point Millennium Square provided a magnificent setting for this year’s CIPR Northern Conference. The event took place on the 6th of July at the Carriageworks, a former industrial building which
now houses an impressive state of the art theatre.

The night before our event, many of the speakers and CIPR organising committee got together for the obligatory conference dinner. Many thanks to Carol Arthur who chose extremely well when booking the highly recommended Room restaurant.

The food was excellent and the staff were great especially when they confided that the conversation at our end of the table was so much more interesting than that at the other end. We were sat with CIPR Scotland vice chair Adrian Mahoney and CIPR North East chair Jan Hillary who can certainly hold their own on the subject of Big Brother!

It was also great to finally meet Simon Collister of the excellent Simonsays blog and although Don’t Panic have a very tenuous connection to the world of PR blogging, us ‘saddies and surfers’ have a great sense of fraternity.

In fact one of the recurring themes of this year’s Northern Conference happened to be the so called ‘New PR’. From Stuart Bruce’s packed out blogging session to UKFast’s roving podcaster Jonathan Bowers, the shock of the new was evident in abundance from coffee breaks to keynote speeches.

For an immediate flavour of a great day check out the CG Vision videocast which was beautifully recorded and edited for screening at the conference close. Regionalism is a dreadful thing but what the north does today…

I’m sure there’ll be many other blogs which will focus on the significance of this conferences’ embracing of all things new and I mustn’t forget that primarily we’re the first and therefore foremost event management blog so let’s get on with the review.

Event managers expect venues to play an integral role in ensuring many of the smaller but no less important details of the day run smoothly and seamlessly. Of course, site visits and regular communication ahead of any event are essential but with so much else to organise and co-ordinate we do tend to rely on the venue to deliver certain pre-requisites.

Perhaps we should have seen things coming much earlier when the venue’s catering menus arrived to the unanimous disappointment of everyone involved in organising the event. When we opted to bring in outside catering it was not well received by the venue.

Unfortunately our experience of the Carriageworks on event day got off to an even worse start when their staff failed to materialise for our agreed 6am load in of stage set and production kit. It took a further 30 minutes of unanswered phone calls and unnecessary stress before we finally got access.

Thankfully the LAS event production team took this in their stride and soon made up the lost time with their usual laid back professionalism. The set looked wonderful, particularly with the branding produced by the ever reliable Stockport-based Kingfisher Graphics.

It’s disappointing that our experience of the venue was tarnished as it’s such an ideal conference location. The 350 capacity air conditioned auditorium is especially good as were the catering staff who served refreshments throughout the day.

Most importantly the conference itself ran smoothly due to the professionalism of our speakers and Richard Griffiths, one of the best conference chairs north of Watford Gap. Judging by the delegate feedback, those who attended had a great day and as our motto and mission statement says ‘Don’t Panic - make it happen’. Mission accomplished.

Finally big thanks to our events team of Dino and Kyla who were joined by Wages of Spin blogger and recent PR graduate Alex Pullin. Good staff are invaluable and our tremendous trio were fantastic.