Babson Connect: Worldwide
Babson College operates Babson Connect: Worldwide (BCW), an annual global entrepreneurship summit for the Babson community and global business leaders. BCW is a large, high-stakes event that plays a key role in Babson’s efforts to foster loyalty and engagement with their global alumni, encourage philanthropy, and build relationships with key stakeholders. Babson worked with ATA in 2017 as event planners and travel partners and asked us to operate the 2018 conference in Madrid, Spain.
An event of this size and importance requires a full throttled, top-to-bottom delivery of services. With 400+ attendees, we managed a pre-conference Babson trustee trip to Portugal, configured and implemented the conference tech platform and app, coordinated two hotel room blocks, supported keynote speakers and panel sessions, hired and managed a production company for lighting and staging, rented venues (like the Madrid Casino), planned and implemented off-site excursions, and created both print and digital marketing materials.
“Very well organized event. From an attendee’s perspective, the logistics, the content, the location, the social elements, were all perfect!”
But most importantly, we proactively and regularly communicated and worked with the many personnel at Babson who had skin in the conference organizing game. In this way, we were able to appropriately set and manage expectations across multiple in-house decision-makers, thereby alleviating much of the stress that managing an event of this magnitude can cause.
The event was seamless. In the words of one participant, “Very well organized event. From an attendee’s perspective, the logistics, the content, the location, the social elements, were all perfect!” We also earned kudos from CVENT, the makers of the technology application we employed for the conference. CVENT instructed us that we needed 10 weeks of lead time to launch the application. We were able expedite the process in record time (6 weeks!), matching Babson’s schedule.
Relying on us to manage these logistics gave Babson exactly what it needed: the chance to focus their energy on building relationships with key attendees and donors, and laying the foundation for the 2019 conference that would celebrate the college’s centennial.
