Published by isobel.regan@dontpanicprojects.com
Published Date 05.08.2024 
First Event is a UK leading corporate events management agency headquartered in Yorkshire, with a 22-year-long history of delivering exceptional events across the world. Our passionate team, made up of more than 70 dedicated professionals, has orchestrated and executed thousands of events, including physical, virtual, and hybrid experiences on a global scale.
Our full service approach is what sets us apart as a creative agency. We go beyond organising events, instead focusing on bringing creativity to solve client problems and create tangible results. We start with understanding our client’s pain points and goals, translating this into a core event message, planning an experience that accurately reflects these messages, flawlessly delivering a valuable experience, before measuring the impact of the experience into valuable insights. These insights go on to inform the next iteration of understanding, translating and planning for future event strategies.
We were delighted to apply our unique event approach to our partnership with the Cardano Foundation, to design and execute a strategy for their annual Summit event.
From the outset of our collaboration, The Cardano Foundation had a simple goal: to be the number one Blockchain event in the world, where attendees leave with more business opportunities than they started with, and feel culturally enriched from the overall experience.
Dubai is seen as the beating heart of Blockchain, and as the city sharpens its focus on blockchain technology, our client wanted to play an active role in shaping this trajectory. We wanted this to be the event that brings a growing and varied community together, and our research uncovered that this location was perfect for our audience.
With a clear understanding of our target audience, we then translated this into an event format that would reflect the FOMO-inducing, industry leading and community focused vision for this event. To do this, we created an agenda of 40 sessions, featuring a total of 163 hand-picked industry leading experts and innovative voices to inspire and educate attendees.
Beyond the speakers and the event content, we wanted the experiences themselves to feel exclusive, elevated, and focused on enabling lasting points of connection. Across the 3 days, we created a series of community events in breathtaking locations. We coordinated a seamless desert dining experience, complete with camel rides and night-time entertainment. We even secured the iconic Burj Khalifa as the venue for the summit’s Gala Dinner.
The attendee feedback and relevant metrics we measured were overwhelmingly positive. 85% of attendees said they learnt something that will help them achieve their goals within the Cardano ecosystem. The same percentage also said that they’d made valuable connections at the conference, with 92% saying that they found the content to be of value.
The event garnered 376,733 social media impressions, 52k website views, 53k on-demand YouTube views, and 8k virtual viewers. Using the Faces of Cardano interactive mural, we tracked a 34% increase in engagement compared to the previous years’ Cardano Summit, reflecting how this was the biggest and best conference to date across the board.
The app saw 3,422 unique users and garnered 88,495 views with an average engagement time of 25m 35s. The networking and interactive functionalities were heavily utilised by the audience, and the app saw 1,362 networking connections made, 578 messages sent, and 868 live stream messages sent.
As a large-scale event with 900 attendees, the design and execution of The Summit encompassed all aspects of First Event’s offering as a full service event partner. Using a bespoke and fully customisable event app, elevated branding and design, a FOMO-stirring marketing strategy, and exhaustive operations and logistics management, First Event were successful in creating the best Cardano Summit to date. The event was completely sold out, and we had waiting lists in place for each component of the multi-day, multi-location experience.
First Event’s strategic approach to the brief created an event that smashed client expectations and created a tangible impact on attendees. We made significant progress in achieving our client’s long term goals of creating an event that is seen as the ultimate event in the blockchain industry calendar.
“From the very first kick-off meeting, to our final post-event debriefs, it can be easy to get lost in the details of bringing an event like this together. As event professionals, we often need a reminder to take a step back, and see these experiences for what they are: an incredible achievement, made possible by the hard work of every single member of our team.
To have this achievement recognised by the likes of the UK Agency Awards for Best Event, and to be showcased against other incredible events, is such an honour. We’d like to say a huge thank you to the UK Agency Awards team for creating this platform to spotlight amazing achievements across our industry.” – Steph Cawood – Brand Marketing Manager at First Event
“The First Event team felt like a true extension of our own. Their collaborative approach, proactive problem-solving, attention to detail, and logistical expertise made the Cardano Summit 2023 planning process both efficient and enjoyable. Their unwavering focus on our vision helped us realize a truly successful event.” – Client
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