The challenge in renewing an annual event is to keep you target audience interested and impressed every single year. It becomes even more difficult when certain key elements of the event repeat themselves.
Our secret: our ability to analyse and understand the key ingredients of a successful event and to improve the format year after year.
The European Parliament has organized the Open Doors Day for over 20 years on the Brussels and Strasbourg premises. The ODD takes places in the frame of the Europe Day and has become a cornerstone event in the relationship between the European Institution and its citizens.
When organizing this event in 2013, 2014 and 2017, we paid specific attention to consider each sub-target group interested in ODD. We produced innovative indoor and outdoor activities/visits/debates for each of these groups.
Another powerful input in this event was to create a strong feeling of group spirit between visitors via cultural animations, music, thematic villages and more. We succeeded: 38.000 people joined the Open Doors days in 2014.
The keywords that describe the success of an event of this scope are inevitably innovation; anticipation, organization and coordination.