A fruitful break
Providing nutritious and delicious catering to our delegates has always been our mantra and that of Great Food at Leeds, the University of Leeds catering team. A number of our customers are marching to the same beat too, with many asking us to provide healthier catering options, with the snacks on refreshment breaks highlighted as an area we could improve. We now offer fruit as an alternative to pastries and biscuits with refreshments as standard for any event!
Badge of honour
Being sustainable is at the heart of every part of our service – yes, we have won an award for this too – so when we are asked to be more even more sustainable, we can only say yes! We were asked to source a provider that could produce fully recyclable name badges and a pen that was also fully recyclable, which we did, and made them available to every event we host.
Charge!
The European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) conference, as the name suggests, has a particular emphasis on the use of technology. We kept the conference as paper-free as possible by hosting the programme, abstracts and personal conference scheduling system online. As this led to a high number of attendees relying on mobile devices and laptops, we kept everyone up and running by providing a number of charging stations around the various conference venues.
Lighting strikes!
For the last 5 years the Teach First Summer Institute, an event which sees over 3,000 teachers descend on Leeds in the UK’s largest teacher training event, has been hosted by a collaboration between the University of Leeds and Leeds Becket University. On 28 July 2018 – the last day of the event – a lighting strike caused train signals to fail, which led to long delays for the attendees coming from further afield. We worked with our residences and cleaning teams to prepare 250 bedrooms for those affected, meaning they could enjoy another day in our amazing city and avoid the chaos in the train station!
Put big telly on!
The Astbury Conversation is a biennial event in which researchers, academics and organisations share the latest developments from their scientific disciplines and expand their networks. This prestigious event takes place in the Great Hall, the focus for the University’s ceremonial activities. We were asked to provide a large screen with high definition projection, but one did not look out of place in this grand venue. We worked with an external AV company to supply a bespoke screen and mounting that looked almost as grand as the hall itself!
