B. Listening: Creating Your Own Industry Event Series

Events can be a powerful tool to foster connections, facilitate the exchange of ideas and find inspiration in your niche. Often there is a gap in an industry where professionals have a need to connect and learn from others. This is what Kim identified when setting up the Legal BD Futures Forum. She joins us on our podcast to share how she founded her own industry event series and grew it from a post on LinkedIn to a network of over 100 members.

“Having a ready-made professional network was a huge privilege that some people had and other people found it really inaccessible to build and it’s not really easy to know where to start”.

With the goal to provide the opportunity for everyone in the Legal BD niche to build a professional network, no matter their background, Kim has successfully grew the Futures Forum from networking gatherings to sponsored content led panels.

In this episode, she shares tips for planning an industry event including:

– Marketing an industry event using LinkedIn

– Working with a limited event budget

– Overcoming the fear of nobody showing up

– Finding speakers for your industry event

– Utilising attendee feedback to grow your event

Listen below or on Spotify.

About the guest

Kim Tolkien is the Business Development lead for the Global Intellectual Property team at Clifford Chance, working with lawyers on their client relationships, promotion and strategy for all things IP.

Outside of her day job, she is also the founder of a network called the Legal BD Futures Forum which arranges free networking events in her industry. The aim of this network is to foster connections among legal marketing and BD professionals, facilitate the exchange of ideas and learn from each other. She has a strong interest in social diversity and ensuring that individuals from all backgrounds have the opportunity to build their own professional networks.

About the host

Broadsword is a global event communications agency specialising in event production that ranges across virtual and live corporate events around the world. Based in London, Hong Kong, and New York, we are a trusted partner to global clients like HSBC and inspirational organisations such as Thomson Reuter’s Foundation.

Highlights from the episode

Q: What strategies do you use to market your events and attract attendees?

A: So most of our marketing is through LinkedIn and through word of mouth in our industry. And so once I had the first event in the diary, I messaged all of my previous colleagues who moved to other firms and current colleagues, anyone I thought would be interested and asking them to pass on to their teams. And I also set up a page where people could sign up to our mailing list so I can email them and promote all of our events through that and then also through LinkedIn posts. And I recently set up a company page for the network on LinkedIn. So posts can be a bit more about the wider group and less about just me posting personally. And from the beginning, I quickly realized there was a huge interest in the market for these sorts of events. And it’s been really great that we’ve really not had that many issues. been trying to fill spaces at our different events that we do, just because it is quite new and people are very interested. You mentioned that it kind of started as networking and moved into having speakers and panelists.

Q: Can you describe the process you followed to ensure the content at your events is relevant and valuable to the participants?

A: So I mentioned we have a committee. So when we decided we were going to do more content at events, I was approached by some really interested members who wanted to put together a committee for the group. I then reached out to the wider membership and see if anyone else was interested. And we’ve now got a really amazing collection of people from across a number of different firms. And we get together and they provide insights and give their opinions on what we think we should cover. And we stay connected over email quite a lot and also meet up in person when we can to discuss future events and decide on topics and share any ideas we’ve seen from our own networks and from our own firms. And we really tried to make sure this covered a wide variety of firms, from the massive Magic Circle multinationals to smaller IP boutiques as well. And we just wanted to get a more of a difference in types of firms is to try and make sure that it covers more of the network that we were trying to target. And I think the way that we try to ensure our content and our events are relevant is just listening to attendees and just being really open to feedback. So this network is meant to add value to them and the industry. So we’re always looking to incorporate their opinions on how to do that.