Millbrook Named Lockdown Heroes in the ABPCO Excellence Awards
On Monday 7th
December, the Association of British Professional Conference Organisers (ABPCO)
hosted their annual Excellence Awards. The ceremony rewards excellence and
professionalism in the world of association events, recognising professional
conference organisers and event industry partners for their contributions to
the industry. As you may expect, this year was a little different than normal
with awards ceremony taking place virtually, allowing the attendees to vote for
category winners and view presentations from nominees and winners.
For 2020, an
additional award category was added, the Lockdown Hero Award, which recognises
the professional conference organisers who have worked against the odds to
create events during the COVID era. Millbrook was presented with this special
award for their work in facilitating the Imperial College COVID-19
Cardiovascular Conference with two other organisations also recognised as Lockdown
Heroes.
The live
webinar was Millbrook’s first virtual event, taking place on 2nd April
2020 with just a 10-day lead time, no budget and the need for a significant
global audience. This was important to ensure this vital information on COVID
presentation in cardiac patients was shared worldwide to implement change and save
lives.
The
programme comprised of four highly-engaging sessions featuring 29 talks from 32
members of faculty. Within 10 days, a global audience was generated of over
5,600 participants across all four continents including delegates from Morroco,
the USA, India, Norway and Sweden. Post-event, the webinar was made available
on-demand and so far has generated a total of 9,300 viewers.
Fiona McDonald
commented “During this extraordinary year, Millbrook, like all professional
conference organisers needed to evolve for the COVID era. We have learnt how to
use multiple virtual event platforms to become self-taught virtual event
specialists in a very short timeframe. I am so proud of the work our team has
undertaken to ensure that medical education can still take place despite being
unable to organise traditional face-to-face conferences. It’s been a huge learning
curve, but we are extremely proud that Millbrook has facilitated the sharing of
important COVID information to physicians worldwide.”
“In a remarkable year we expected
remarkable entries and our membership truly delivered,” comments Barbara
Calderwood, ABPCO co-chair. “ABPCO members demonstrated creativity, flexibility
and tenacity as they organised events under very different circumstance
compared to anything they have done in the past. Thank you to all our members
for submitting their entries and well done to our worthy winners, who were
chosen through a mixture of audience voting and judges’ marks. Through the
addition of the Lockdown Hero awards we were also able to recognise a new breed
of member, those who stepped out of their comfort zone and did something
different for their clients, peers and audiences.”