recognizing 10 years of YA books from hockey what better way to celebrate than a party [Applause]
manager Molly Holt was the glue for this event being a success yeah so going backwards in time
talking about the planning when did you actually start planning this so we started talking about
it Loosely in the spring and then I think over the summer was when we had a task force that
was organized across the teams specifically with editorial and PR and marketing and then we pushed
that out based on what we needed sales came along but yeah I'd say the Summers when it really kicked
off started organizing August into September we had to think of dates what we wanted to do ahead
of Christmas why we were doing it who would we invite how many people did we want to invite
how much budget did we have did we want to feed people drinks location wise London was the best
because a lot of Agents work in London we all work in London Easy Transport links in this did mean
that some people didn't come but a lot of people did my contribution was in a few ways I helped
Molly decide on the venue we checked out a few in the local area and we decided on the final place I
was also responsible for the decoration we had the yalk the young adult literature convention in the
summer as an extended hockey 10 birthday all year round we made sure that the yalk stand celebrated
this too this meant that the decorations were used for yalk could then be repurposed and used for the
hockey 10 party the theme was black and gold and this was used throughout we had gold balloons we
had gold bunting we had gold napkins we had gold centerpieces one of the other things that we had
at the Yacht stand was a huge Banner hockey branded with all of our authors from the last
10 years at Yelp we invited some of our authors to come up with a gold Sharpie and sign their
name on the banner we again use this Banner for the hockey 10 party having it in the corner of
the room so the authors that were there to join us to celebrate hockey 10 were there could sign
their name on the hockey Banner those some of the decorations that we use for Yale could be
reused some of them were only single use so I did end up spending a little bit more money to
get some decorations specifically for hockey 10. some of this just included more balloons because
obviously once you blow them up once you can't reuse them and similarly to this we had to get
some more helium as well and helium is a lot more expensive than I thought I was helping General
Logistics sending out some invitations then on the night my job of course was content Duty I
have my cameras with me and I was taking some videos and some photos This Not only was able
to capture our event but it gave me something to do while mingling with all of the guests there the
party itself was very good it was very busy and there were a couple of hiccups but by the time the
guests got there it was all sorted it's a bit cold we had to sort out the air con but that was fine
figured that out so an agents authors there staff were there loads of influencers we had a photo
setup food drink everyone's mingling it was good event management undoubtedly always comes with
problem solving whether it's train strikes or no mac and cheese it all works out in the end we had
a few issues to deal with we had rail strikes on our initial date which meant that we have
cancel it because not only would guests not be able to come but a lot of Staff wouldn't have been
able to come into the party and you don't want to party where nobody turns up or any few people
turn up we had to reschedule that get in touch with the venue try and find a new day to be ended
up moving it but the costs had changed because we were then in the festive period as they called it
so the food was more expensive we then had to call the day off to say one of our food choices was low
or it was supposed to be vegan mac and cheese and they said it's not actually vegan so we ended up
splitting it and having mac and cheese and then I think Thai green curry was the second option which
was still very good so we had to think about that to get timings in we had to reschedule it late
enough so that people still had time to arrange to come book trains child care all of those things it
also meant we have more time to chase people and be like come if you couldn't come before you could
come now for the setup we had to pick a venue that was on brand with hotkey it means needed to feel
young and cool but also professional because hockey is Young and cool but it is a professional
event we were largely there to celebrate the successes of hockey with authors influencers
and agents but also build on those relationships kind of invite authors back and say thank you we
love working with you the same with the agents and also getting the influences in so they can have a
look at what we've done over the years because they might not have necessarily followed us for
the past 10 years hotkey has evolved a lot since it began so those were the key aims which then
fed into guest list Etc so when we did the guest list we got all of the different teams across the
company to submit names for the guest list we hadn't kind of a b and c based on the capacity
of the venue which ended up we started with saying we'd only go for 150 and the venue ended
up being able to have 250 people each team then invited their own guests but the publicity team
handled the RSVP and the guest list the publicity marketing team handled viewing venues booking the
venue sorting out the spend so the drinks the food decorations which was largely left over from Yelp
with a few extras we wanted to keep the brand and theme of the hockey 10 going from yeah because we
wanted to use very similar things so it would be the same and then the day of it was a all hands
on deck from PR remarketing on the day we checked on any last minute RSVPs we created the name tags
many a time because we had to ensure that the font was big enough for everybody to be able to see it
whether they had their glasses on or not and we had them in very fancy cards which Elena made
which is very good we had to pack everything up load it up take it downstairs put it into a taxi
send it round the rest of the team kind of waited there unload it we turned up and the venue was
not quite as clear clean as um it perhaps should have been and they the event manager was had an
audit so we didn't actually get hold of him for about an hour so we had to kind of set up blind
um and just move things I think in those situations you've just got to get on with
it and just do what you want to do better to apologize and ask for forgiveness than to just
wait around so we started organizing we blew up balloons we decorated tables we put books
out on display we had the name tags ready we had a table set up we'd ordered a birthday cake with
some sprinklers we sorted out the cloak room we had a Prosecco on arrival and then we kind
of delegated amongst the team who would be on what side of decoration and then also who would
be doing what on arrival Emma had made a playlist for us and then as guests arrived Emma and myself
were on the welcome table giving out name badges and then the rest of the team and other stuff who
were derived greeted everybody and we'd planned a little speech as well um so Emma and Helen did
that and they coordinated that by themselves and that was it everyone had a great time