KCG UnCONVENTION 2014
Role: Event Manager, Project Manager, On-site Coordinator
with: ThinkSo | W Hotels | Smithsonian | Crowely & Co. | Capital City Events | Cvent
Client: KCG Holding Inc.
KCG Institutional Sales business had a client conference for their direct market maker businesses. A relatively new company, KCG wanted this event to be a reintroduction to their clients to show their clients what the new KCG business model was all about.
It was imperative that this event align with the KCG brand tone, and have an innovative, fun, unexpected, cool and tech savvy feel to it. To achieve this, we had to be meticulous in our development of the concept and in our execution. We first decided on the name KCG UnConvention and from there we based all of our decisions based on being something uncommon.
We worked with Cvent and our creative agency ThinkSo to develop a conference micro-site and conference app. We wanted to engage the conference participants and we did this by giving everyone at the conference a Google Nexus 7 with the conference app loaded on the device. Throughout the conference, we pushed survey questions to the app and streamed live poll updates on a monitor in the front of the conference room.
Along with embracing technology, we also had a graphic recorder, Greg Gersch, illustrate each session and create beautiful murals to help recap each agenda item. We broadcasted him recording these sessions live on a large screen next to the stage so that participants could see the evolution of the conversation.
Creating an atmosphere that was unlike a typical convention was extremely important. We had bespoke cocktails that were accompanied by coasters with the recipes on them. We hired real baristas to craft custom espresso drinks so that conference goers would have good coffee to drink. Our lunch was a beer tasting of four Washington D.C. local microbreweries, paired with food to highlight each beer.
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KCG UnConvention logo
