Her Story
About Becca
I've been in the event planning field for 12 years, and I currently serve as the Associate Event Director at HumanX, an AI conference where I lead the sponsorships department. My role encompasses a little bit of everything - I handle all the logistics for our sponsors, manage all the F&B and catering menus, oversee room sets and allocations, and work directly with our creative team on signage, including giant creative pieces on the outside of buildings. My career journey started at WSWA, a large conference where I worked for 2 years, then I transitioned to the smaller conference world with events of about 500 attendees, where I spent 10 years, before coming back to large-scale events with HumanX's 6,500-person conference. One of my proudest achievements was being part of building HumanX from the ground up - we hadn't done any event yet, so I was involved in bringing it from nothing to reality, working with renderings and our general contractor, and convincing speakers, sponsors, and attendees that our conference would be very successful. Seeing everything we envisioned on a computer come to life in person, with all the show management activations, exhibit booths, and seeing our sponsors be super happy with the product, traffic, and connections they made on-site - that was incredibly gratifying. I went to school for psychology, and I use that education every single day when working with customers and in the customer service aspect, understanding the best way to communicate with different people. I've always tried to get my CMP certification, but I've found that the education I get from my different roles - sometimes being more sponsorship heavy, sometimes doing more budget work - has been invaluable. I learn on the job and take on challenges, like when I became the head of signage at HumanX despite never having done signage before. It's been 12 years of taking chances and becoming an expert through experience.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Becca
01What do you attribute your success to?
I've had very, very great bosses, and I think that everyone that I've worked with has definitely helped shape who I've become. You gotta ask the right questions, and then people are invested in people that are interested. So if you are like, I don't know anything about this, I want to learn more, and then you have a really good boss or mentor or teacher, I think it's very important to take advantage of that. If somebody wants to teach you how to do something, and maybe it's in marketing, and you're not in marketing, and you want to learn it, take advantage of somebody who wants to teach you those kind of things.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
If you're scared of it, do it.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
It's not just wedding planning. It is very rewarding to see something go from an idea to in-person, and you also get to work with a lot of people that you wouldn't think that you would work with, just even on the sponsor side, the attendee side, just customer experience. It's very fulfilling, seeing something that you plan come to life, and there's a lot of cool people that you get to meet on the way.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I feel anyone in the event planning space is impacted a lot by the pandemic, and just going from virtual to back to in-person, trying to see what kind of that challenge would look like if people even wanted to go back in person, since virtual is so convenient. Something that I learned is people do crave being in person. I noticed that post-pandemic, a lot of the sponsorship opportunities and things that people want to do at events is networking. So, content is amazing, impactful, you can learn so much, but people crave the networking side of things, which I think is a lot different than what it was, kind of, pre-pandemic. You still kind of do have to do the recordings of sessions, the live streaming of sessions, for people who don't still feel comfortable traveling or can't travel. So I think the accessibility of events has become a lot better for people who don't necessarily have the budget to travel or don't want to travel. Yeah, I think the challenge then became kind of a greater output for events as a whole.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
I think integrity to making sure that what you're executing matches the vision. It's not going in against anything that you don't believe in. I mean, AI is definitely a funny topic about it, because sometimes it's a little bit spooky, but I think AI can be very beneficial to people if you use it properly. So kind of educating people to make sure that they're not scared that robots are going to take over the world or anything, but making sure so that what you're doing is true to yourself. Remembering that everyone that you speak to is also a person, being kind to everyone. Sometimes people have bad days, and maybe their email seems a little frustrated, but just making sure that everyone is heard, understood, gets the information that they need, everyone has a great experience. Conflict resolution, just make sure if there's an issue on site or leading up to an event, it's handled respectfully, politely, and make sure everyone that's invested is happy with the product.
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