Editor’s note: The Fix is running a series of articles on different jobs in the media industry. We ask leading news media professionals about their job positions – what they actually do, how they make decisions, what excites them about their work, and what they can advise newcomers in their fields. In this episode, we describe the Events Manager position based on our interview with Tamara Novel from EURACTIV. 

An Events Manager is a person who plans, produces, and manages events organised by the organisation. Depending on a team structure, their role may include drafting the concept note, researching a topic, communicating with partners and other departments within the organisation, selecting the speakers, setting the time and place of an event, and promoting it. 

EURACTIV is an independent pan-European media network based in Brussels. It focuses on EU affairs, covers policy processes, and has eight main topics: Energy and Environment, Agrifood, Economy, Politics, Health, Technology, Transport, and Global Europe. The publisher also organises policy debates among stakeholders, including high-profile EU parliamentarians. 

What Events Manager in EURACTIV does

Tamara Novel is the Events Manager in the outlet. She joined the team in 2020 as Policy Events Assistant and has been promoted to Events Manager. She manages a group of three assistants and the Events Executive. They meet weekly with the Events Director, who oversees their work. At these meetings, the team checks how the events went overall: how big the audience was, social media activity, questions on the chat etc. These are the main indicators.

The Events Manager checks the status of all the events daily. She assigns tasks between the assistants and looks into issues that need more focus at the moment, such as speaker acquisitions. 

Team structure of EURACTIV events team

On the day of an event, she focuses solely on its implementation: welcoming the speakers, checking if everything works, briefing the participants, and communicating with other teams, such as the multimedia one, which livestreams the discussion, or the communication or editorial ones, which live-tweet the event and publish an article afterwards. 

Two months to produce a 75-to-90-minute discussion: how the events are organised

The events team produces around 100 events in a year, most of them online or hybrid, when both the speakers and the audience can come in person or connect online.

Novel explains that she divides these events between her and the Events Executive — they become project managers for each event. Every discussion they organise is linked to one of the “policy hubs”, as they call it, or the main topics of EURACTIV. 

Events are sponsor-driven, it’s the key business model for EURACTIV’s events. The sponsor, which can be an industry stakeholder, civil society organisation, or an institution, can propose the topic, and the team checks if it falls into one of these hubs. Journalists of EURACTIV may also participate in the process. “We contact our agrifood journalists team, and they can suggest an angle that could be interesting for the topic. Or, for example, if we are a bit stuck with speakers and we don’t know who the main actor in the topic is, we can always reach out to the editorial team who has the contacts and the knowledge on who is doing something specific on a file,” explains Tamara Novel. 

The next steps are drafting a concept note, checking it with the sponsors, selecting speakers, and communicating with them. It is quite a challenge. “Reaching out to everyone and asking for their availability would be a bit of a mess,” says Novel. So instead, the team works the other way around: they check if any significant events, like EU Green Week or European Parliament committee meetings, are planned soon. Then, they avoid overlap with these events and set an activity for another time. 

Novel notes that EURACTIV has a reputation in Brussels, and stakeholders know them well, which makes it much easier to secure high-level speakers. “It’s not as difficult as it probably is for others,” she shares. 

Every event takes about two months of preparation, resulting in a 75-to-90-minute discussion. After securing the speakers, the team focuses on promotion: another strong side of EURACTIV is an extensive contacts database, which helps the events team send invitations to many stakeholders. It takes a few weeks and goes parallel to social media promotion. 

In the last weeks before an event, they focus on briefing a moderator, who is usually a journalist of the outlet and then briefs the speakers. The events team also works with the multimedia and communication teams and does a run-of-show to ensure everything will go smoothly. 

Run-of-show example – excerpt from the document prepared for the event
“Media Partnership – Winter is coming: How to shield the most vulnerable and preserve the consensus on the war”

Most of the events occur in the office of EURACTIV, where the studio is set up. The publisher also has offices in Paris and Berlin, and the events team is slowly starting to produce events there as well, tells Novel.  

Most exciting and challenging parts of the job

Maintaining a balance is one of the main challenges for the Events Manager. Tamara Novel explains that it means keeping the discussion balanced between different sides, and it is also about editorial independence. “We don’t want to be perceived as biassed towards the supporting organisation. It’s really important to maintain editorial independence for us in this sense,” she says.

Another challenge is gender balance. Some sectors are still male-dominated. The events team, predominantly female, believes in the importance of female voices on the panel, so they are trying to involve more women in their events.

The most exciting part of the job for Novel is seeing the event taking place: “It’s a lot of work and seeing it actually happen, seeing the discussion happen, is really rewarding. Also seeing people after the event discussing the topic, being engaged from what they hear,” she says. 

Advice for those who want to work in Events Management

Novel advises being mentally flexible and ready to perform a series of very different tasks — from writing a concept note to moving chairs in the room. “And to be passionate about organising and to be very good at time management, I think it takes a specific type of person to do this job,” she adds.

Another benefit would be to know several languages. Though EURACTIV organises mostly English-language events, they regularly communicate with offices from different countries, and it can be more effective to solve issues in partners’ native language. Novel herself speaks Italian, Croatian, Spanish, English, and some French.

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