Business and Travel

Original, creative, and  launched on a shoe-string, special events headline news to broaden public awareness, change behavior, and achieve the most challenging goals.

Nobody knows this more than Sue Blanchard, who is in the throes of wrapping up an educational conference, an event staged to create interest, awareness, and behavior-change.

Last summer she assembled outdoor safety experts from hiking and climbing groups across the province to discuss accidents and safety in the Rocky Mountains.  The event headlined newscasts across Alberta.

TV stations involved their viewers for a day with images of injuries caught on video and advice from outdoor recreation groups for making hiking and climbing safer.

All the media attention scored successful ratings for Blanchard who says the club leaders were thrilled to see their safety knowledge in the spotlight and thankful for her talents in the events arena.  

Of her talents, Blanchard says she tapped her marketing skills to rescue the club leaders' reputations after alpine rescuers cited a lack of safe hikes and climbs in the province.

Blanchard explains that she owes the event’s success to the strategic planning process. 

“Some news stories happen.  Others grow from events,” notes Blanchard. “The entire conference, including media coverage of it, unfolded according plan.”

Blanchard wrote an event plan to avert further accidents in the Rockies. Her objective focused on hiking and climbing safety.

Like a blueprint, a plan for a special event, like a plan for any marketing activity, outlines what objectives will be reached and how to reach it. them strategically and tactically.

Research book-ends the planning process. Up-front research tackles what the event can achieve. Measurement gauges what has been achieved—whether the event did or didn't meet the objectives set for it.  

In Blanchard’s view, the important part of planning lies in measuring and evaluating an event's success.

“The conference generated media exposure, affirms Blanchard,“But I want to measure this
exposure. I want to know how much top-of-mind awareness it created, and if this awareness led to action or behavior change, such as more Albertans hiking with a first-aid kit."

Blanchard knows roughly the number of Albertans who heard and saw the safety message. Next, she’ll deploy social media and digital communication tactics to push the safety message through to mountain bicyclists. She wants to see behavior change in cross-country skiers and snowshoers too.

As if to punctuate her respect for the evaluation process, Blanchard will record the results of the conference, outlining what worked, what didn’t work, and what communication she would disseminate next time.

All this reflection goes into Blanchard's lessons-learned database—an archive in which she tracks and analyzes past campaigns to influence future events.