ROYAL ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING
Pathways to Inclusive Innovation
November 30, 2023
The Event
Seamless event delivery focused on inclusion, accessibility and speaker and stakeholder management. Brightspace took the reins to ease pressure on an overstretched internal events team with multiple organisations involved and careful balancing of different objectives.
The Royal Academy of Engineering is taking dramatic steps to improve inclusion in engineering and to ensure that engineers and relevant organisations are considering everyone when creating new products or when recruiting.
In collaboration with The Honeycomb Works they built and wanted to launch new software aimed at raising awareness of EDI practices across an organisation and encourage their members to adopt it.
They wanted to:
- Create challenging and informative content around EDI to add value to attendees
- Inform them of the platform, how it works and the benefits it could bring to them
- Drive discussions around inclusion in engineering in a wider context, to start to change the landscape in the industry
Client Testimonials
Thank you again for all your support with this event. It was great working with you once again.
Head of Events & Marketing
The Challenges
Delivered in partnership with a government agency, a lot of the content and timings were out of our hands – and even the client struggled to get answers due to every changing diary and priority at the agency.
The focus on inclusion meant we had to consider many and varied accessibility challenges from wheelchair access, disabled parking spaces in central London, providing captioning and ensuring all digital content was accessible by design.
We arrived at the project very late and with a lot of different moving parts to manage.
The Solutions
We provided a structured project management plan and timeline; even though we were updating it daily as deadlines were pushed back; there was a completely transparent process to monitor and communicate the impact of changes.
We joined the Clients’ Teams account both technically and then metaphorically became a part of their team! This allowed seamless updates, sharing of documents and running orders and, again, complete transparency between us and them which meant everything was so much more efficient.
Our team had 2 key players; 1 Producer who could keep focused on speakers, content and the smooth running of the show and workshops then a separate Event Manager to concentrate on the guest experience and assist the Client with the venue management.
On the day, the Brightspace team handled the venues and technical aspects completely as well as providing registration staff – allowing the client team to host their attendees and the stakeholders and to enjoy the fruits of their labour as the product enjoyed a successful launch.
Results
A noteworthy 54% of participants indicated that they had never previously attended a RAE event, suggesting a considerable influx of new attendees. This influx signifies a promising expansion of the event’s reach and engagement within its target audience.
Furthermore a remarkable 100% of respondents expressed a likelihood to recommend the RAE event to others. Such unanimous positive sentiment underscores the event’s value and indicates a high level of satisfaction among attendees.
Additionally, participants’ agreed with the seven stated event objectives. Impressively, 87% of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed with these objectives, indicating alignment between attendees’ expectations and the event’s intended outcomes. This high level of agreement suggests that the event successfully fulfilled its objectives and effectively catered to attendee needs and interests.
The Stats
3
Event Stakeholders
200
Delegates
15
Speakers & Panellists
