AHUA Conference Success for Conference Aston Event Management Launch
July 2010
A leading Midlands conference centre has launched its complete event management service with a flagship conference for senior university managers.
Conference Aston hosted its first fully managed conference, for the Association of Heads of University Administration (AHUA) in April. The team at Conference Aston handled every aspect of the event, from creating the web pages for the conference and managing the online bookings to handling accommodation and catering for the 120 delegates. Staff also supported the conference on the day, handling delegate registration and providing delegate packs as well as offering technical support for speakers.
Conference Aston General Manager Kerstin Taylor said the launch of the event management support was a natural progression for the centre. "We have had more and more requests from clients for support in running and managing conferences and events, especially as budgets are tight and companies often don't have the resource for a full time event organiser," she said.
"The event management service helps our clients in a wide variety of ways, as our team have expert knowledge of conferences and events as well as an insight into how the venue can be best used.
"We work with our clients from the very beginning to plan every aspect of the event and liaise with them throughout to ensure their needs and those of their delegates are met.
"We can also deliver savings through using Conference Aston resources which clients may not know are available and through procuring the best supplier deals for our clients.
"In the case of AHUA we were able to make recommendations to help the flow of the conference as well as giving a seamless service throughout the day and into the night for the delegates who stayed with us."
Catherine Webb, Executive secretary for AHUA, said the feedback from delegates from the conference had been very good. "We played host to heads of university administration from across the UK and they were very pleased with the standard of the facilities on site - from the quality of the bedrooms to the variety of food on offer," she said.
"We are a small team and handle a number of conferences every year so it was a great help that Conference Aston could work in partnership with us to ensure the conference ran smoothly from the outset."
Conference Aston welcomes more than 54,000 people a year to Birmingham for training, residential conferences, for weddings and to stay in its high quality hotel facilities and on site campus accommodation.
It sits at the heart of Aston University, which is a long established research-led university known for its world-class teaching quality and strong links to industry, government and commerce.
