Why the £80bn events sector must bounce back - Bird Lovegod

To say this is problematic for the events sectors is an understatement. They’re having an existential crisis.

Events, in business, are a way to meet people, connect with people, they bring the ecosystem together into one place and everyone can see and understand the industry better as a result.

If you’re a start-up, events are how you meet investors and begin to form relationships with them, they’re how you find new clients and customers, new opportunities and new friends. It’s about networking, literally increasing the number of people you are connected to, and from this increase in connections comes an increase in opportunities.

One of the key functions events provide is synchronicity. Chatting with people, and discovering mutual opportunities. It’s the human aspect of what otherwise can be a very mechanistic and synthetic process.

There really isn’t a viable way of replicating it in two dimensions, which is what a digital experience is. From weddings to tech conferences, events are always about the people in person.

The business event sector itself is fragmented, there’s the big players, but also many smaller events organised by companies as part of their outreach strategy and advertising packages.

Media companies, law firms, technology companies all get involved in creating events as part of a wider business model.

Then there’s the hotels and catering companies, and the conference centres created to serve each other’s clients.

It’s a network ecosystem and it cannot be replicated online. Events bring people and businesses together. Events like Finovate charge thousands of pounds to attend and showcase new banking and financial services technology.

I first saw fingerprint phone log-ins demonstrated at Finovate, now they’re on every banking app. Events like Unbound were a fraction of the cost to attend and provided two full days of start-up innovation.

Without events you literally wouldn’t know what was happening in the start-up scene. You wouldn’t even be part of it.

Everything good about events is problematic in the current situation. And the event sectors feel they’re not being specifically supported. Business events are well structured and formal, they would be easy to make compliant with Covid regulations, low risk compared with a pub for example, or a sporting event.

Yet they are all bundled together in the current framework.

From a survey conducted by the UK’s largest event planning platform, Feast It, 85 per cent of events businesses do not believe they have received adequate support from the Government and only 37 per cent of events businesses think they’ll make it through to March 2021 without further government support.

Hugo Campbell, founder of Feast It, added: “The events sector is a huge part of the British economy, valued at around £80bn.

The entire sector is effectively banned at the moment, it cries out for specific measures and yet it has hardly been mentioned by the Government and this is placing hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk.”

Will the event sector as we know it survive? Many of the companies won’t, and those losses will happen out of sight, the sector has low visibility, there’s no empty shops or shuttered windows.

The entire sector could go the same way. Events of 30 people are permitted but that’s a difficult model to commercialise and scale. Those are meetings, not events.

Hopefully it’s a short-term situation, and when events do come back, next spring, or next summer, there will be some really interesting and innovative companies revealed. And the show will go on.

By Bird Lovegod - Independent Fintech Consultant

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