Organising a meaningful event at Jaarbeurs? This is how Momentus did it.

Momentus, the global software company providing solutions for event and venue management, has as its mission helping customers create special moments. To reinforce that mission, the company organised a conference at Jaarbeurs that made an impact. Op its customers and the environment. 

Momentus has a global customer base and organises regularly several conferences in Europe. Now it was time for a new congress: Illuminate. A user congress to teach its customers more about the software, connect with them and better understand their needs. They exchanged ideas and thought together to better shape the future of Momentus solutions. Momentus decided to host Illuminate at Jaarbeurs. Because, according to Chief of Staff Melora Cybul: 'Jaarbeurs is perfectly accessible for our customers. It is located in the middle of the Netherlands, next to Utrecht Central station and surrounded by hotels. Besides, they also use our software, so that makes it extra nice to organise an event here.' 

Donate to charity
While organising Illuminate, Momentus decided to change the traditional 'swag' for their attendees. Swag is known as 'stuff we all get'. In other words, free promotional material you get at an event. Melora: 'This was our first big conference since the pandemic. We wanted to give something, but we certainly didn't want it to end up in the trash - which is something that happens quickly with traditional swag. We therefore opted for a power bank, which we feel is immediately useful. We also wanted to do something for the community, so we chose to donate our swag budget of 10,000 euros to charity. We started playing with the words a bit and stuff we all get was stuff we all give.' 

Inspire visitors to think with us
The idea of donating money to charity actually came about because of something in Jaarbeurs 's contract. Namely, the donation to Trees for All. Melora: 'A great initiative! It inspired us to do something like that too. Yet we also wanted to give our visitors a choice. In consultation with Jaarbeurs, we chose three local charities. They became JINC, Academie Spelderholt and the Prinses Máxima Centre. Upon entering Illuminate, each visitor was given five tokens. One token symbolised a 10 euro donation. There were large vases with information about the charity and visitors could then donate the tokens in one or more vases of their choice.'

Making conscious choices
You can make an impact on several levels. For example, by carefully weighing up your choices. For example, says Melora: 'We think it's important to look at every investment while organising an event: how can we make our CO-2 footprint minimise? And is it possible to be more sustainable or give something back to the community?' Here, too, they enlisted the help of Jaarbeurs. For example, with the fresh flowers, as these were not thrown away after the event. Melora: 'Employees of Jaarbeurs helped us coordinate the distribution of these beautiful flower arrangements. Some bouquets went to hospices, refugee families or people who were struggling. The rest were distributed to our guests to take home.' 

Achieving success together
Melora looks back on the event and the cooperation with Jaarbeurs with satisfaction. 'The team thinks along very well, on any subject you need help with. About sustainable catering, for example. We don't like wasting food and Jaarbeurs has great solutions for that. And the space was also top: plug-and-play facilities made it easy to organise the event - from the other side of the world. Our goal was to create a connection between our customers and to give something back to the community. Thanks to Jaarbeurs, we certainly succeeded. 

Interesting to know: 

Number of visitors/participants: 100 visitors, 40 staff
Visitors/participants come from Europe, Middle East, Africa and Australia
Location used + session rooms: Media Plaza (Auditorium and Polar)
Purpose of the meeting: Connecting with customers, learning from each other and understanding their needs better.
Special element to name extra? Visitors were given 'swag budget' to donate to charity themselves.