Around a year ago, I took an uncharacteristic break from writing here about market insight to compose a brief travelogue about awful weather, worse trains, strange pizzas, substantial hotel room spiders, disappointing gins and a missing Taylor Swift t-shirt.
This was my attempt at a ‘conference report’ for a successful event at the end of a long journey.
Now, I want to talk about the journey that came next and which ended with a quite spectacular beginning, in Manchester, two weeks ago.
It begins with a name. And the name is too long.
The “FindAUniversity Postgraduate Marketing Conference” has the virtue of describing more or less exactly what it is. But it also has the somewhat more dubious merit of clocking up 17 syllables across a mere four words and abbreviating to something that sounds like someone trying not to sneeze.
And so, I find myself in the FindAUniversity Board Room (a mere 9 syllables) with colleagues from across our Events, Student Engagement and Marketing teams, talking about the future of our conference and making a decision about a name.
As we talk, we become more aware of how much the thing we’re trying to name really matters to all of us.
Anyone can put on the COMPANY-NAME-HERE Postgraduate Marketing Conference. But that’s not what we’re doing now and it isn’t what we’ve been doing for almost a decade before.
We’re in this room because we love this event. Because we love the community it attracts, the space it creates and the conversation that happens there. We put on these events because we love PG and so do the people we put them on for.
Other options are floated, but the name feels obvious as soon as we land on it.
It’s going to be called LovePG.
I’m in a small room in a pub in Stratford Upon Avon on the first day of the HELOA National Conference and I’ve just raised a glass with one of our LovePG speakers.
The agenda isn’t completely finalised yet, but it’s starting to come together. We’ve begun by making a list of all the people we know who care as much about postgrad as we do. Not just people who’ve given great talks before (though all of them fit that bill) but people who give those talks because they want PG to be part of a broader conversation that benefits their colleagues, their peers and the audiences they all support. People who… yep… LovePG.
Ultimately, every invited speaker on our agenda will be someone from that list.
Many project meetings have come and gone, many decisions have been made and almost everything is sorted (most of it for some time now).
We’re running a single October event in Manchester (acknowledging that Central London isn’t all that central to the UK); we’ve confirmed the wonderful Penny Eccles as our inaugural keynote speaker; we’re organising a complimentary meal and drinks reception for all speakers and delegates the night before; and we have two great sponsors in Anything is Possible and HAVAS helping to make all of this happen.
We’ve even decided to try and source promotional socks as part of our delegate packs. Possibly one of my favourite things about the rebranded conference.
We also have most of an agenda. With one small snag. Mine and Maree’s talk doesn’t have a proper name yet.
We know what we want to do: to take the audience and platform data I work with, combine it with her team’s experience engaging and supporting prospective students and pull out some actionable takeaways.
We chat on Teams. We realise that ‘LovePG Actionably’ sounds a bit like ‘Love Actually’. We joke about recording an intro video riffing on Hugh Grant’s ‘Heathrow Arrivals’ voiceover, about holding up flash cards as section titles and about hiding musical instruments under everybody’s seats. We have our title (and two of those things eventually happen).
Here we go then. I’m in a taxi, travelling through the Peaks. This is much better than last year’s armpit-disco train journey, but one member of the team is facing the wrong way and feeling it somewhat. The FAU Events team soldiers on.
Thankfully, we’re soon at the venue, where everything seems to be in order. We drop things off and check over rooms. I am, apparently, not allowed to carry any of the pull-ups, because I left one on a train last year. The FAU Events team have long memories.
After that, it’s a trip to the hotel where, in another improvement from last year, there are no spiders (at least so far as I’m aware). There is, however, a Placebo vinyl resting alongside a fairly incongruous selection of jazz and blues LPs in the foyer. The album in question is ‘Loud Like Love’ – probably their worst, but easily the most appropriate for this trip. I hope it’s the right kind of sign.
The last bits of prep mean I’m running slightly late on the way to the pre-conference meal and drinks reception – eventually arriving after the rest of the team and most delegates.
This addition was one of the changes that mattered most to us as we thought about ways to celebrate the sense of community and make the event feel like, well, more of an event. But we haven’t done it before and, despite all the team’s careful planning, we aren’t quite sure how it’s going to go.
The answer, it seems, is "very well".
I walk in to an atmosphere I can best describe as a kind of Christmas party for the postgrad sector: people arriving from far and wide and everyone happy to see each other. It’s tricky to judge these things, but the conversation the next day really does feel like it flows better.
Things wrap up at a fairly sensible time and a small contingent carry on for a nightcap. I err on the side of ‘you’ve got to compère all day tomorrow Mark’ and head back to the hotel. Where I have a whisky with a couple of colleagues.
Whisky notwithstanding, I’m ready to go along with the Events team and help set things up. They still won’t let me carry any pull-up banners, so I steal one whilst we’re ordering at Pret and pretend to leave it outside.
We’re at the venue and delegates are starting to arrive. Everything is working, in no small part due to the excellent job our AV partners have done in setting up. I head ‘backstage’ to the ‘green room’ (OK, it’s where we’re keeping the coats and bags, but one of the walls is actually green) and go over my slides one last time before we start.
We’re two sessions in and the conversation is continuing over lunch.
I’ve introduced the event and amusingly managed to mispronounce one of our sponsor’s names (Anything is Impossible, anyone?).
Penny has delivered what feels like the platonic ideal of a keynote (almost a ‘love’ joke there), with a clear thread (sorry, hosepipe) through simple, actionable, stories of the opportunities postgraduate marketing specifically misses. It’s a session people will call back to throughout the day and you can’t really ask for more than that from your opening speaker.
Maree and I have made a few people smile with our ‘LovePG Actually’ video and explored some of what our data and our experience is telling us about current postgraduate audiences, with a particular focus on the well-deserved trust prospective students continue to place in universities and the need to inform and support them (policy notwithstanding).
Lunch is pretty decent. If you have a time machine I particularly recommend the filo-spinach things.
The drinks reception is underway, the LovePG photo-frame is doing the rounds and we really couldn’t be much happier with how the day went. There is only one snag. The LovePG socks turn out to be ladies’ size and yours truly has somewhat un-lady-like size 11 feet. You can’t win them all. I could go blow-by-blow across the sessions I was in but this would necessarily miss half of the agenda and, in keeping with the spirit of the event, I’d rather let the community speak for itself. And so many of them have:
Thanks to speakers like Ewan Fairweather, Alice Brereton, Emma Price, Andrew Cooper and Jenni Parsons as well as sponsors like Joe Etchells and attendees like Adam Blackmore, Beverley Reinemann and Julie Vincent (I’m adding ‘data goth’ to my CV) for sharing their highlights of the event.
And if you want to see the ‘LovePG Actually’ video, you can. All in all, it's been exactly what we set out to make it. And we're definitely doing it again next year. Postscript: Friday 3 October around 8.30am