M&IT 09-21 - Eleanor Harding | Meetings & Incentive Travel

Eleanor Harding is the senior events organiser at Age UK. She was a mentee on Fast Forward 15 in 2019-20 and a winner on Tomorrow’s Talent 2021.

I used to work as an usher at the Royal Opera House, that’s how I got into events. I remember thinking, I wish I was part of making this happen, and not just directing people to the loo. I wanted to be the person running around with a clipboard and a headset.

I kind of fell into charity events. I started off doing conferences and was given the opportunity to move across to the special events team. I got to work at Buckingham Palace on Prince Charles’s 70th birthday event, that was a big career highlight.

Weirdly, I quite like it when things go wrong. I like being able to go ‘Ok, I can fix it!’ I do all sorts; coming up with the concept idea, all the logistics, working with venues and suppliers, risk assessments, working with celebrities and agents. That’s what I love about it, I oversee everything from start to finish.

Sometimes I’ve felt like a jack of all trades and master of none. That’s something I struggled with quite a lot in my early career. I’ve always felt, “Do I need to specialise in health and safety, or marketing?” That’s why I went on the Fast Forward 15 scheme.

I wanted to get some advice from people in the wider industry. I had a great mentor in Debra Nightingale, she helped me realise that as an event organiser you’re not necessarily a specialist, you just bring it all together. And that was so helpful for me, because I was feeling really lost.

No one teaches you how to deal with a pandemic.

In charity events, you’re kind of separate from the wider events industry. I’ve felt like I have to make a case a lot of the time for events skills that I have and the fact they are transferable. I didn’t do events at university, so sometimes I have a real crisis of confidence, it’s like, ‘What do I actually do?!’. That can be quite lonely.

The pandemic affected me quite a lot. I was put on furlough for three months and I was asked not to do anything, which was horrible. Especially because Age UK at that time were really helping older people.

Being told, when your charity is at the busiest it’s ever been, that you’re not needed is difficult. But the best thing I could do at that time, for the charity, was not work. And that had quite an effect on me, because everyone in my charity was working so hard, and I wasn’t.

I went to a webinar and it was the flipside, because there were people there who were run off their feet. They were all saying, “We’re so busy, we’re so jealous of you being furloughed”, and I remember feeling so guilty, wondering why I was moaning and complaining. The more people I spoke to I realised it was natural to feel a bit weird about it. It made me feel better, because no one teaches you how to deal with a pandemic.

Early into my furlough I found a charity, the Collective Foundation, that was trying to house homeless people during lockdown. I volunteered with them, as they were looking for someone to put on online events. I’d never done online events before, but I thought I was probably going to need to, so I went straight into that.

I created and delivered an events programme for them. It was really fun, because I got to think outside the box. I was on my own without any restrictions and the team at the Collective Foundation said, “Can you just do it?”. So I did lots of webinars and Zoom events, which felt really exciting and a great way to learn new skills.

On furlough I was busier than I had ever been. It was that feeling that you can’t sit still and you need to be learning. That was what was so interesting about the industry. There were webinars, there were chats, there were wellbeing sessions. I went on LinkedIn and there were webinars I could go to every day.

I threw myself into every opportunity, and it felt like we just all coped together. I got really used to all the online stuff so that when I went back into my job I knew how to do it. I was also part of creating the Fast Forward 15 event The Soaring 20s and we had to adapt this to virtual - I learnt so much from this process.

When I came back to work, we wanted to start connecting people again. Often when we’ve had events before they’ve been in London, and that’s quite hard for people to get to. And we noticed we were getting crazy numbers online. It went from being something that was useful in a pandemic to a new way we can work. And this year it’s going to be online for that reason, it’s nothing to do with the pandemic, it’s because people came.

I’m not tech-savvy at all, but I’ve run virtual events. And that’s awesome because now I can look at other roles that I would have never thought that I could do. And all this confidence I’ve got now as well, I don’t think I was as confident before.

We’re sort of thinking about live events, but I think we’re going to stay virtual for quite a long time. Partly because with Age UK a lot of our events are for people who are a bit older, so we need to be mindful of that. I’ve been doing a lot of research on hybrid style events, just looking at what we could do.

Personally, being furloughed made me realise I want to do a lot more volunteering. I’ve even trained as a vaccination volunteer. It’s not an events skill, but the last year has taught me that I can try different things and see where that can take me.