Create & Cultivate 

The event

If you haven’t yet heard of the Create & Cultivate Festival, you soon will. The first large festival for women in business, it’s a two-day celebration where entrepreneurs and professionals from various industries gather to learn, connect, and grow. Think SXSW or Cannes Lions, but designed with women at the center.

For us it was a great example of how “festivalization” is reshaping the B2B event landscape. 

For us it was a great example of how “festivalization” is reshaping the B2B event landscape. 

There were multiple stages, headline speakers and artists, unique f&b options, and immersive sponsor activations replaced the typical booth set up. A standout example: The Chase Ink marketplace with rotating pop-ups from women-founded brands. Every detail - from the iced coffee cups to signage- was designed to be photo-worthy and community-driven.

Brella proudly powered the festival’s app and its Connect program, hosted in the outdoor “Connect Garden” sponsored by LinkedIn. During set times, the garden would fill up for hundreds of meetings at a time. 

Here’s what we can all can learn from C&C’s Success:

1. Get creative with where to put the meeting zone and how it can be designed. Unique spaces can drive engagement. C&C saw an outdoor space at their venue full of plants and twisted paths and transformed it into a centerpiece of the event experience, the “Connect Garden”
2. Meeting zones can double as high-impact sponsorships. The Connect Garden was powered by LinkedIn and they had a Content Studio activation right outside, plus a branded and photo-worthy entrance to the space, where attendees would constantly stop to pose for photos to post on socials, and even branded conversation prompts on each table, making their presence felt in every conversation.
3. Structure the agenda with dedicated networking breaks to keep the energy high. This was a strategy C&C deployed rather than having meetings running constantly in the background. Intentionally designing these breaks ensured the networking area comes alive at set times, creating energy and focus for attendees.
4. Market the meeting program like you would a headline speaker. All we can say is follow Marina Middleton (link to LI) on Social Media to get a masterclass in how to promote a networking program before and during an event to create the buzz, build community, and ensure it becomes a centerpiece of the experience rather than an afterthought.