Summary

SPARK 2019 was the first large-scale carbon neutral convention in the City of Edmonton, it was a sold out event with 600+ participants from across Canada and the United States.

The conference’s purpose was to connect clean-technology innovators, investors and academics from around the world to explore how we can re-imagine carbon - to discover how we can reduce GHG’s, attract investment, and build a more diverse, lower carbon economy.

Our Role

In addition to leading the event’s sustainability initiative, we also facilitated the program development and abstract process, directed the sponsorship campaign, managed registration, coordinated venue and suppliers, invited and managed over 100 speakers, organized an innovation showcase, digital posters, and performed on-site execution.   

Value Add

Carbon Neutrality
Our team took the goal of re-imagining carbon seriously and spearheaded the initiative to host a carbon neutral event, with support of our event hosts and host venue, the Edmonton Convention Centre. We developed a sustainability strategy and policy, engaged with key partners, and ensured sustainable practices and decisions were being made throughout the entirety of the planning and execution process. The result was Edmonton’s first carbon neutral convention, a wow-experience for attendees, and an eye-opener to stakeholders on how to incorporate sustainability without impacting quality or experiences.

Diversity
We also focused our program strategy on showcasing a diverse range of presenters. Diversity targets and metrics were created to ensure our program represented a diverse range of expertise, gender, age, geography, and ethnicity. Sessions were conducted in various formats, some quite non-traditional, to elevate the quality of the learning experience. Some formats we used included a world-café, fishbowl session, hackathon, and skill-building workshops.

Collisions = Opportunities
A key focus of our overarching strategy was to create the opportunities for the right “collisions”, as we like to call them, to take place organically at the event.  These collisions are organic meetings of people, the right people happening to run into each other, and from there collaborations and partnerships forming naturally during the convention.

Through innovative programming, room setups, and technology, we created comfortable spaces for people to connect, learn, collaborate, and inspire. These included lounge areas in non-meeting spaces, interactive session formats (fishbowl, hackathon and world cafe and more), collaborative idea boards, and the use of an event app that enabled direct 1:1 connection and conversation beyond the session rooms.