The Good Business Festival
Delivering a mini-series of events strategically aligned with the Building Back Better Plan
Services
- Live event coordination
- Event promotion
- Community building and activism
Their Impact
- Supporting purpose-driven business across the city region
- Giving a platform to local voices
- Showing the social awareness of the Liverpool City Region (LCR)
Meet The Client
The Good Business Festival 2022 was a three-day series of events that took place across the LCR. Bringing together the region’s local community and socially-driven organisations. The series set out to help create a long-lasting impact on people, place, and business. The festival created the opportunity for like-minded people to come together to hear from influential leaders in the region, and start important conversations about how we can do business better in our region.
The Challenge At Hand
It was the challenge of Firestarters to coordinate three engaging events that encouraged inclusive conversations around core strategic LCR themes across three days. We set out to think of a unique and engaging way to bring local and global partners together in order to take action and spark change for people, place and businesses in the region.
Our response
We delivered three events over three days through a collaborative approach between Firestarters and The Good Business Festival team. Our aim was to host events that felt relevant to the wider strategy of the LCR. We took influence from the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority’s (LCRCA) Build Back Better Report when deciding on the event themes.
The report highlighted a region-wide goal that the LCR had to become the most progressive, values-led economy in Europe. So, we aligned our events themes to this central idea, our themes were:
- Powering Communities
- Green Revolution
- Cultural Inclusion
Powering Communities
The first event aimed to encourage the region to come together to explore ways that we can collaborate in empowering communities. It set out to help the LCR’s business clusters and communities to become more connected, more resourceful, and more influential.
Green Revolution
The second event set out to help the region to reach its ambitions of becoming “recognised as a pioneer in sustainable approaches to living, travel and doing business”. It focused on helping organisations place themselves in the context of the revolution by outlining perceived opportunities and threats to business. The aim of the event was to provide participants with the skills, knowledge and resources required to better track and measure their own environmental impact.
Cultural Inclusion
The final event explored how local cultural organisations and The Good Business Festival could come together to create a more vibrant, more connected City Region. It aimed to build on Firestarters’ experience of working with cultural organisations and combine that with The Good Business Festival’s global partners. The desired outcome was to launch a collaborative network of inclusive cultural organisations.
Event promotion
A significant part of our work in partnership with The Good Business Festival was the promotion of the events across our social channels. As the series aimed to raise awareness of how we can do more good business in the LCR, our goal was to promote the series to as many like-minded people and businesses across Liverpool and get all the right people in the room for the events.
Our team put together a multi-channel campaign that increased awareness of the events amongst the purpose-driven business community in the LCR. By framing our promotion around the advantages of attending the events, the unique format of the series and how we planned to take action post-event, we were able to attract over 20k post impressions on social media and 50 engaged attendees across the event series.
The live events
Each of the events showcased our unique Firestarters approach to community engagement, highlighting inspiring business leaders across the region and starting important conversations about how we can make a real difference.
Guest speakers and panellists
The signature Firestarters format prioritises open conversations between expert business leaders and attendees. At The Good Business Festival, we hosted 12 inspiring speakers who led the conversations around Green Revolution, Powering Communities and Cultural Inclusion. We asked our panellists to share their thoughts on the challenges and opportunities facing their sector, as well as any tips and best practices to take on board in the future.
Breakout rooms
Following the panel discussions, we hosted smaller group discussions between panellists and attendees. These groups enabled everyone to have the space to share their thoughts and have more in-depth discussions with experts in a relaxed and conversational environment. During these sessions, our Firestarters team took note of key findings to ensure that all points were documented for future reference.
Outcomes
- 50 engaged attendees across three events, connecting with like-minded peers in their vision to create positive change across the region
- The Spark Change report, providing invaluable insights for our partners into our region’s changemakers
- 12 inspiring speakers, including Emy Onuora and Hannah Cox, raising their profiles about causes they care about
- 20k post impressions across Twitter and Instagram, helping build the Firestarters community and raise awareness of the Good Business Festival
