Partner: Global Career Company, Talent Agenda Series

Category: Corporate Event Management

Date: September 2019

Stawi Advisory partnered with the Global Career Company, organizers of the Talent Agenda Series offering audio visual equipment, branding and participant engagement.

The Talent Agenda Series was launched in 2009 and is an active thought-leadership and learning community for HR and business leaders across Africa to come together to learn, discuss, debate and develop solutions to unlock and enable the power of Africa’s talent. The two-day conference gives HR Professionals and business leaders a unique opportunity to keep up-to-date with HR trends throughout Africa, network, learn new skills from global experts and expand your local, regional and international contacts.

The 2019 conference was held on the 17^th and 18^th of September. The topics discussed touched on Leadership Development, Capacity Development, Employee Engagement, Talent Mobility, Workplace Culture, and other topics.

Stawi offered a variety of services for the Talent Agenda Series – participant engagement, sound engineering which included lapel mics for each of the panelists, tech support, branding, video and photography coverage.

Participant Engagement. How do you interact with your participants and ensure that they connect with your conference content in a fun, memorable and impactful manner? Most conference will pass around mics in their Q&A sessions – how could we use technology to ask more focused questions and get a true pulse of the room? What ice breakers could we use that ensure that these business leaders – CEO’s, HR Directors and Managers from the largest companies in the East African region could connect with and find to be relevant?

Our participant engagement strategy is based on ensuring connection, impact and application, and fun. This base helps us determine the tools that increase connection with your audience, give the participants tools to apply what they are learning at the conference and finally fun. We chose to use an online tool to capture the participant feedback, something similar we used during the Total Kenya Dealers Convention. Conference participants ask questions on the platform and then upvote or downvote on questions ultimately deciding what will be asked. We used the same platform to run a variety of polls, giving audience members an opportunity to share ideas and opinions. The platform also run different quizzes serving as ice breakers and energizers at different points of the program and awarding the attendees with an assortment of relevant gifts.

Lastly, we run a Knowing Me Knowing you, a lighthearted team building activity which breaks the ice and accelerates networking and relationship building within the group. Knowing Me Knowing You helps teams to build common ground between individuals, smoothing the path for information sharing and best practice that will inevitably lead to improved bottom line results. It was great to have the room sound like a market as business leaders went from person to person competing on who could gather the largest amount of professional information on the group.