Читать книгу Event Success - Alon Alroy - Страница 10

In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic began sweeping across the globe, we watched our internal dashboards as major sponsors started pulling out of events and organizers began postponing and eventually canceling their flagship conferences.

In the ensuing months we heard stories from partners, colleagues, customers, and friends about the internal turmoil that was playing out in event teams around the world. The economic uncertainty of the moment, coupled with the restrictions put in place to limit the spread of the virus, resulted in event budgets getting slashed, team members getting laid off, and widespread uncertainty about the future of events.

Up until that moment, the live events industry felt untouchable. Suddenly, it felt like a hurricane was barreling toward us, and there was nothing we could do but board up the windows and hope for the best.

It was an incredibly painful time for us personally, for our growing events technology platform, and for the industry at large. We, like many others in the industry, had to cut our team by 25 percent, knowing that in the coming months we would either be in a position to hire them back or not have a company at all.

After decades of inertia, the industry was forced to adopt the innovation it had long resisted and seek to reinvent itself. Experimentation and innovation were suddenly no longer a matter of choice, but of survival. As we emerge on the other end of the pandemic, one thing is for sure: the events industry will never be the same. In the coming years, the very definition of the word events will change dramatically, as will the way we measure ROE and event success in the post-COVID-19 era.