We started by giving you five easy and practical tips for hosting better
events, and here’s our super sequel: five more ways to host spectacular events that are better for your customers and the environment.
Our ANZ offices have been busy bees the last six months putting on a stream of epic live events, one of which was for Woolworths at the Royal Easter Show, the biggest ticketed event post Covid. As a global agency, it’s put us in a very fortunate position as we’ve had the privilege of learning plenty of lessons from their experiences while our other markets have been concentrating on all things online. One of the biggest focuses has been on sustainability. Our new mantra: offer high-impact events that are low impact on the environment. We shared five of those lessons with you in our first article, and we got plenty of positive feedback (thanks to our readers for this!). So, we had to follow up with this sequel. But this isn’t a typical Hollywood-style let-down – this follow-up is more Godfather II than Fast and Furious 376...
Before we start sharing our second set of top tips, we must give props to our Sustainability Champion Team. Everyone at Because is on board to tackle climate change, and we’re all working together to reduce our global carbon footprint. Our champs shared the first five starter tips for anyone wanting to host more sustainable events, and they’re behind this super-sequel too. OK, here goes…
1.Rethink your event (or office) transport.
The options are wide and varied: public transport, car-pooling and taxi-share, shuttle services, park-and-ride solutions and even VIP pick-ups. For Big Gay Out, one of our recent live events in ANZ with 17,000 attendees, we created a bus service: the Big Gay Bus option. To make this work for events, you’ll need to partner closely with city planning departments and transport providers.
2. Location, location, location
Here’s where you need to hold your partners and other organisers to account: you need to keep asking how the event can be more sustainable, and the venue choice is crucial as it affects most of the factors: on-site waste management, catering options (including plant-based offerings), in-house recycling, technology signage, public transport access, and even energy-efficient systems. A fitting example of the last point: Coachella’s Energy Playground where festival-goers could charge their phones generating their own power via ‘Energy SeeSaws.’ The result: a smart and practical energy-saver that earned PR benefits too.
3. offset your carbon footprint
There are plenty of creative ways to do this: planting trees or creating your own green space that grows as you deliver more events. You can partner with an accredited carbon offsetter like Treecreds, or use a monthly carbon offsetting subscription like Generation Now. You can even use a credit card partner like Doconomy, which lets users track and measure their CO2 emissions through their credit card purchases and then allows them to offset it through partner projects.
4. offset your carbon footprint
It’s not always easy, but there are slick digital options to create tickets, schedules, GPS routes and maps, and even flyers and event posters. This goes for your office, too – you don’t need to print out every contract version, project brief, and the latest bit of agency news. If you absolutely need to use paper, both for your event or in the office, then opt for the recycled option, and then recycle it after use. And investigate Shred-it bins – it makes recycling way easier.
5. start off small with daily steps
While most of these tips are about hosting events, we’ve found that we can make big sustainable changes with small office tweaks as an agency. Case in point: the Because coffee habit. Whether you’re an instant, pod, or a local-coffee-shop type, we can all do little things to make a difference. We started a few years back with reusable coffee cups in the office, and of course, we recycle all our coffee pods. We’re also trying to ration one of our directors who loves their pods a little too much (ahem, Joss…). Bottom line: have a quick weekly brainstorm to share ideas about the small, daily changes you can make, and then start making them.
5. so, wrapping up…
We’re really fortunate to have been able to learn from our ANZ counterparts. Not just about making live events more sustainable, but also about making them safer given the times we live in. These learnings have translated into action: it has, and will continue to, help us craft unforgettable sustainable and safe live, digital, and virtual experiences for our partners and clients globally.
As we’ve said before, these 5 tips are just a start, but there’s truth in the saying, ‘every little bit counts’, and we’re doing our best to do our bit. We hope you’ll join us on this journey.
Ready to crush your next event? We’d love to partner up to make it a showcase of success with a side benefit of sustainability. Start by giving us a shout here.
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