Festivals & Events Learning Series Winter 2025
We have two more installments in our FREE Festivals & Events Learning Series this winter through our continuing partnership with Festivals & Events Ontario! These 60 minute webinars with industry experts are designed to kick start your planning and get you thinking about your upcoming festival or event by providing some insights on current trends and topics. Whether you are a festival/event manager, organizer, board member or developer, you are welcome to join either or both of these sessions to enhance your learning and generate new ideas. Sessions will also be recorded for future reference or for sharing with your colleagues.
Street Festivals and Urban Events: Working with Local Businesses to form Community Partnerships
Thursday, February 20, 2025 11:00 AM – 12 Noon AST / 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM NST / 10:00 – 11:00 AM EST
When planning street festivals and events, there are plenty of challenges, but there are also plenty of opportunities. Guest speaker Lisa LaRocca will draw on 15+ years of working in the event sector to share information that will help you to encourage local businesses to participate in your event through community partnerships and planning. Whether your event is taking place in a rural or urban setting, there will be some ideas to assist with your own event planning including how to address problems that may arise, such as logistical issues with street closures and other considerations when hosting an event in a location with active businesses.
Lisa LaRocca is Director of Operations at independent record label and events company Sonic Unyon Records in Hamilton, ON. She founded the Fresh Up R&B Fest in 2022 and leads logistics on other Sonic Unyon produced festivals Supercrawl, Because Beer, Why Not Wine, as well as many other third party events including Hamilton Canada Day, Grey Cup Festival (2024/2022), Junofest (2022/2015), and Pan Am Games Hamilton (2015). Lisa is currently chair of Hamilton’s Music Advisory Team, a member of the Hamilton Arts Advisory Commission, serves as a board member of the Hamilton-Halton-Brant Regional Tourism Organization and the Downtown Hamilton Business Improvement Area (BIA). She is a part-time PhD student in the Communication and Culture program at York University with a focus on Popular Music Studies, and holds an M.A. in Communication and New Media from McMaster University.
Registration for this session is now closed. You can listen to the recording HERE.
Unlocking Event Success: Leveraging Mobile Location Data for Audience Insights and Sponsor ROI
Thursday, March 6, 2025 11:00 AM – Noon AST / 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM NST / 10:00 – 11:00 AM EST
Curious about how you can utilize anonymous mobile phone location data to measure attendance at events? Would you like to know how can this data be used to learn about your festival or event visitation patterns in the community and help provide information to your sponsors and partners? Our guest speakers will provide examples from events such as: the Pacific National Exhibition (PNE), Waterfront Toronto Festival, Toronto Santa Claus Parade and others. In addition to sharing some case study examples of measuring ROI on event sponsor visitation, the session will also cover how to use data to evaluate the distance visitors travelled to support your planning and funding proposals. There will also be a discussion about how data can be used to measure economic impact and assist in sponsorship recruitment for future events.
We look forward to welcoming two speakers for this session. Asif Khan is a veteran tech start-up, business-development and marketing entrepreneur with more than 25 years experience. He is currently the founder and CEO of GroundLevel Insights, a movement science company leveraging consumer location data to inform business insights and analytics. He is also the founder and chairman of the Location Based Marketing Association, which he started in 2010. Prior to launching the Location Based Marketing Association, Asif had worked with companies as diverse as Limited Brands, IBM, Baxter Pharmaceuticals, Molson-Coors, Communispace, BestBuy, American Airlines, and ScotiaBank.. You can listen to Asif’s weekly podcast – Location Weekly! every Wednesday.
Victoria Mahoney is the Head of Marketing & Partnerships and Co-Producer of the Toronto Waterfront Festival and Sugar Shack TO. She is a marketing, partnerships, experiential marketing and communications specialist with experience in media relations, event management, social media and government relations. Victoria is the lead on multiple Harmony Marketing clients including the Toronto Waterfront Festival, Sugar Shack TO, the Canadian International Airshow and LifeLabs. Victoria was instrumental in bringing the World’s Largest Rubber Duck throughout Ontario in 2017 which secured over 222M earned PR impressions for Toronto’s event alone. Victoria specializes in festival and event marketing and is the head of public relations and social media for all clients.
Registration for this session is now closed. You can listen to the recording HERE.
** Please note that you can register for one or both webinars. **
You can view our previous Festivals and Events webinars on our Experience GMIST YouTube Page!