The event and experiential industry has a huge part to play in furthering this empowering global movement.

International Women’s Day (recognized this year on March 8) represents an annual opportunity to celebrate the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. The movement, which began in 1911, is built on three key pillars of action and social change: celebrating women’s achievements, raising awareness against bias, and taking action for equality.

Event attendees, internal employees, and consumers as a whole want to see their own values reflected in the brands they support. As an event agency primarily supporting clients in the technology industry, we share the values and goals of International Women’s Day and are proud to highlight a few of our projects that do the same. Events are a vital tool in furthering those goals, and we help our clients use events of all types to contribute to the mission.

Dedicate Your Event to Manifesting Brand Values 

Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) is a conference for women in technology, produced by AnitaB.org. With a recent attendance of more than 25,000 people from 94 countries, this event is the largest gathering of women in tech in the world. Women are a minority in the tech industry, and GHC is designed to celebrate, motivate, and connect, which closely mirrors the goals of International Women’s Day. Dedicated sessions create a platform for discussing bias, mentoring circles inspire women to work toward equality in their communities, and ceremonies such as the Abie Awards honor women’s achievements. GHC is a tangible manifestation of these values for AnitaB.org and a valuable avenue to accomplishing their goals.

One of our Opus collective clients, a large, Bay Area-based social media company, held an internal event specifically to foster leadership among its female employees. This event included a distributed keynote and multi-site livestream, which created simultaneous experiences across different locations. Our agency worked with a union to make sure we took action for equality by staffing the event with as many women and underrepresented groups as possible.

Create Space to Cater to Your Communities 

Another way to celebrate women’s achievements is by building a smaller, more focused event within a larger conference. At Dreamforce 2019 (a large event with 171,000+ attendees), Salesforce held an invite-only Sales Cloud Trailblazing Women event to inspire and empower attendees and to call for equality. This summit extended the main conference’s theme, trailblazing, to a takeover of an offsite restaurant. The Trailblazing Women event included a high-profile female motivational speaker who addressed issues of equality, success habits, leadership, and sales mastery.

Microsoft is helping encourage progress in the tech space by creating women-focused events as part of a comprehensive event strategy. These range in size from a Women in Tech luncheon during Microsoft Inspire to their dedicated Global Women’s Conference, both of which Opus proudly supports .

Adding group-specific content to your events helps contribute to overall event success, as well as generate goodwill for your brand. Women-focused content can range from full conferences to intimate breakouts within larger events, and everything in between.

International Women’s Day is still going strong after more than a hundred years, and its mission of taking action for equality continues to be important. Our attendees want to see tailored programs and content, and we in the event industry can further the International Women’s Day mission as part of a comprehensive event strategy.

Contact us to help you create opportunities to express your brand values and celebrate the achievements of women in your events .