After coronavirus: what you can do now

You made the decision. You cancelled or postponed your event. You closed your retail or in-person location.

 

Your staff is super disappointed. You and your team are scrambling to develop a plan to make up that lost income. 

 

You’re cooped up in your house. Every time you read a COVID-19 symptom, you wonder if you have it.  When you go to the store, you return home to a grocery-cleaning routine that makes you feel like you’re in a sci-fi biochemical thriller.

 

Holy moly, this is stressful, right?

 

Ever the optimist, I want to help you think about the time when your event does happen. The time when you reopen your spaces and greet customers again.

 

Let's leverage the time you have now to recover, strengthen, and deepen connections.

You may know that for 20 years in the middle of my career, I produced large scale, multi-stage music festivals.

Image of Philip Bascle's "Rebuild"Events such as Newport Jazz Festival, Newport Folk Festival, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, the Essence Music Festival, and many others.

 

After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005 and half the population moved away, we had a pretty challenging time producing our two festivals there, Jazzfest and Essence.

 

Because we needed to make decisions in the fall for the July event that relied on the tourism infrastructure which we weren’t sure would be ready, for one-year Essence moved to Houston, TX.

Moving an event is essentially starting from scratch, as you adapt to a new space, guidelines, infrastructure, and the teams who run them.

 

Jazzfest in New Orleans functioning with only half of its population presented all sorts of unexpected challenges. For example, I had designed and produced the VIP experiences. For one, we outfitted a special hospitality lounge area with furniture we rented from a local furniture store.

 

After Katrina, we were able to rent the same furniture. However, a week before we needed it, the store added a caveat. They confirmed that we could rent the furniture, but, they told us, we needed to pick it up.

 

Somehow, we found a truck and a driver and a team of guys to haul the furniture to the festival site. When it arrived, however, we had a new surprise. We also had to assemble it.

 

Now I realize this isn’t exactly the end of the world. (Or even close to a pandemic.) But it was one set of complications among hundreds and hundreds of others.

 

Somehow, we got the festival built. We went to sleep the night before we opened, not knowing what to expect. Would people come to the festival the next day?

 

We arrived early the next morning, preparing to open, trusting—well, hoping!—that people would join us.

 

Soon over our walkie-talkies, news from each of the gates poured in. Thousands and thousands of festival fans at each gate waited for us to open. Waited to be together. Waited to celebrate this city, this culture, and this musical and food experience that they loved.

 

We stood in awe—especially my New Orleans colleagues—feeling all the love, tears streaming down our faces. It was one of the most special experiences of my professional life.

 

Your best event and retail customers are waiting to do the same with you.

 

The Jazzfest and Essence teams created once-in-a-lifetime memories for our customers.

 

Now it’s your turn.

While you’re on this leave, imagine how much your audiences are waiting to bust out of their houses and resume life and its new normal.

 

Here are a few thoughts and questions to infuse creativity and meaning into your events, as you design their return. (By the way, you can exchange “event” for retail or office re-opening.)

 

• What will you do to make your postponed or cancelled event extra special when it happens? Even just one action that reunifies your audience and honors what we’re going through now can be enough to engage and connect us as humans.
• How can you begin today to build anticipation for the event? Even better, how can you engage people even more between now and then. One of my clients is converting a massive global in-person event into an online event. The team is sending out little nuggets to engage their global audiences and even to attract new people. And that leads to the next tip.
• How can you leverage this time so that when we all emerge from our homes, like Punxsutawney Phil, we can’t wait for your event or to visit your location?
• How are you initiating conversations with your audiences now? 
• How are you sharing expertise with your audience to help them during this time? Fairmount Park Conservatory, an organization I worked with a few years ago, has been sending wonderful email newsletters encouraging Philadelphians to visit public parks, with stories about our urban wildlife and beautiful images of Philadelphia’s incredible collection of flowering trees. 
• And of course, how can you use technology to bring people together now? On Saturday I attended an afternoon birthday party on Zoom. Everyone’s meetings are online. But how else can you create fun, happiness, and togetherness through the amazing technology we have.

 

As always, if I can be of support to you or answer a question, please reach out to me.

 

Until then, please stay safe, healthy, and hopeful for a happy rebound as soon as we can.