Who is Allyson and why did she start this site? 

The above are very valid questions that I hope to answer throughout this page. Enjoy!

Getting Started

While growing up in Southern California I spent my free time as an avid singer and volunteered at any chance I had. At Arizona State University I received a Bachelor’s degree in Business Communication and a Master’s degree in Global Affairs and Management. It was also at Arizona State that I became enthralled with the events held on and around the campus. This is where I began volunteering in the world of events outside of class and a part-time job. Not before long, I also found myself as the president of the academic fraternity, ΣΑΛ (Sigma Alpha Lambda).

First Steps into Events

The first event I ever “worked” was a university-wide volunteer day in which students assist different non-profits all over the greater Phoenix area. I volunteered to be the group leader for the students sent to help a Native American group plant new seeds in their (extensive) garden for the following year’s harvest. Moving forward I began planning toy and clothing drives, mixers, and pre-finals study/help sessions for students in my immediate community all in my free time. While I was doing all of this volunteer work, I wanted to do more and earn a living doing it. 

Event Coordinator 1.0

As I began my graduate studies I made a great connection with the Director of Special Events at the Thunderbird School of Global Management. We quickly hit it off and I was offered an event coordinator position to organize and manage events both sponsored by the university and those that were primarily student-led. Within this position I worked on everything from large-scale university sanctioned events with thousands of attendees to smaller community-like gatherings with a dozen or so students. My focus quickly became to improve the quality of the attendee experience, making a fluid experience across different events despite the size of an individual event. Six months after joining, we did it. Students, faculty, staff, and guests were providing positive feedback about their event experience and we saw a steady increase in repeated attendance across events.

There’s no doubt that such a positive outcome and the overall experience sent me on a serious quest to have an even bigger impact within a company post-graduation, not to mention to live and work abroad. I yearned to continue to explore countries outside of the United States, cultures and cuisines different from my own. It all seemed so fascinating.

A Slight Detour

In post-grad life the first thing I did was move abroad. In my personal life I married a fantastic Italian man and we decided to try our luck in Budapest, Hungary as newlyweds. Unfortunately for me, I did not (and still do not) speak Hungarian so finding a job in events was impossible. Rather than dwelling on what I could not do, I quickly pivoted to another career option (albeit briefly). 

I now found myself teaching at a British preschool to 4, 5, and 6 year olds. As it turns out, teaching pre-school requires a very similar skillset to managing events. Every day is a series of new events for which careful planning and a lot of attendee (student) handholding is needed. To say I felt like I was thriving is a bit of an exaggeration but I always went to work happy and left absolutely exhausted: not too different from planning, organizing, and managing any sort of live event. 

I loved teaching and having a positive impact on my students’ lives but something was still missing. Just about one year after landing in Budapest, my little family unit was off on a new adventure.

Back on Track?

Our next stop was Berlin, Germany at the end of 2019. While I specifically did not move to Berlin with a job offer in hand, I naïvely thought I could easily jump back into the events business being in such a large, international city. OH BOY was I wrong. 

The biggest lesson I can share here is: If you are moving countries and do not speak the local language you need luck, patience, find your support system, and believe in yourself because you are going to need all of it.

If I did not learn the first time around, I quickly learned my lesson not to make assumptions this time. After about a month of countless applications and very few interviews, I was offered a part-time contract to plan and manage events for a non-profit organization developing open source software.  Okay, I admit, I was hoping for a full-time position and had no clue what I was getting into with regards to tech events, but I knew how to host a damn good event and ensure that every attendee can enjoy it.

It must have been just my luck that as soon as I started my venue search for this event and continued to job search, the world came to an absolute standstill with COVID-19. The event now became virtual with a slew of new hurdles to overcome. I won’t go into the struggles of this as we’ve all lived it together. I will say one thing: I truly believe that the pandemic gave me more opportunity despite the event world being turned upside-down.

Despite All Odds

About six months into the pandemic, the open source event was taking place (and doing very well), I was itching to move out of Berlin, and I was offered a full time, remote Event Manager position with a UK-based startup company that hosts events for software professionals. I now really found myself knee deep into the world of tech events. Luckily, I was also starting to learn a thing or two as not to embarrass myself with the incredibly intelligent, technical speakers that I found myself working with. What was even better is that as soon as I started the new role I was able to leverage my previous experience in virtual and hybrid events as well as organization to immediately add value to the company. This was my chance! I could make a great impact with an international company just as I had hoped for during college.

I hit the ground running and was loving it. I asked questions left and right, I was open to sitting in on conversations with the sales and marketing team to learn more, and (likely annoyingly) asked my immediate teammates for feedback any chance I got. Within the first couple of weeks my new colleagues were taking notice of some of the small improvements I managed to make through my learnings from all of the questions, sit-in conversations, and bits of feedback. Not everything was so perfect though. The first conference that I was responsible for was set to take place only six weeks after my start date and it felt a bit daunting. The conference was two full days with about twenty speakers and on a completely new virtual event platform that I was not entirely comfortable using yet.

By the time the event took place it was pretty good. Absolutely not my best work but we got through it with only a few hiccups… Hurray! 🥳

From this event my biggest re-learning was not to get too comfortable during an event. Be aware of what’s going on and always be sure to have a repetitive onboarding process for speakers and sponsors. Without it, they do not have a good experience and they may not want to participate in future iterations of the event. I already carried this lesson with me to the events I managed but it’s now a bit more amplified and always on the top of my mind while working any new event. Soon enough I found myself moving to the beautiful Costa del Sol in Spain to continue to work remotely, settling into a great (busy, hectic, etc.) routine, and managed to host 15 conferences plus dozens of smaller meetup events and training workshops in a single calendar year.

A Project in the Making

During the last few years, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed organizing all of the events that have taken place under my watch and working with such amazing speakers, sponsors, volunteers, colleagues, and attendees during such uncertain times. I have met amazing people with whom I hope to stay in touch with far into the future.

Through all of this wonderful work, I still felt a bit incomplete and toiled with a want to write my own content, putting my expertise out into the world. With all of the experience gained and lessons learned across companies and cultures under my belt, I finally made the leap to bring this website to fruition. 

So with this site my goal is to provide insight for event and operations professionals across sectors based on my lessons learned and to share some successes along the way. I invite you to follow along on this journey and hopefully learn something along the way!