In early April, Breukelen Strategies was tapped to assist the international advocacy organization Global Citizen with their 2nd annual Global Citizen NOW summit in New York City. The two-day event is an invite-only convening of world leaders, grassroots activists, and pop culture celebrities, showcasing the power of cross-sector collaboration. The program focuses on building definitive next steps for participants, attendees, and citizens to take immediate action on urgent issues such as climate change, the global food crisis, gender inequality, and defending civic spaces.

Building upon the successes of the first year of this event, Global Citizen’s policy team wished to capitalize on so many corporate and world leaders being in the same place at the same time, by planning several intimate side events for even more critical conversations. Set in the off-moments of the event agenda, such as breakfast and lunch, these events took place in private spaces a few steps away from the conference stage and were attended by an even more highly curated list of conference participants. Less than two weeks before this took place, the team realized they needed dedicated event management specialists to help oversee all of the critical details of these side events.

We quickly stepped in, got up-to-speed with the event lead for each of the 5 events, and integrated ourselves as additional internal support team members. While mapping out our action plan, we built an organized repository of information (core event details, links to key documents, meeting notes, and next steps) for ease of reference. This served as a high-level snapshot of where things stood on each event, allowing us to quickly give updates, shift priorities as needed, and stay on top of necessary tasks. Acting on behalf of Global Citizen, we conducted venue walkthroughs, negotiated catering order details, drew up floor plans, designed and emailed invitations to targeted lists of conference attendees, managed guest lists, created brand collateral and directional signage for display, facilitated the acquisition of additional necessary audio equipment for sound amplification, and acted as main points of contact on-site, overseeing final run-of-show logistics and guest check-in at the door.

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