Behind the scenes at CREME – Planning the Annual Ethnic Minority Business Conference

The Annual Ethnic Minority Business Conference is one of the main highlights in the CREME calendar each year. It is an opportunity for all of our stakeholders to meet up and hear about current developments in business support for ethnic minority businesses, new policy initiatives as well as CREME’s research projects.

It is now 14 years since the conference began and I have been involved in its organisation for 9 of those years. My first experience of this event was in 2000, when planning stages consisted of inviting a few speakers and sending out a mail shot by post. The planning, organisation and marketing activities have become far more detailed and sophisticated since then and each year we aim to continue to make the programme relevant for the conference audience.

The planning of the conference this year began in January with a search for a suitable venue and following an assessment of a number of options, the Ricoh Arena in Coventry was chosen. This year the conference will be showcasing the work of the Minority Ethnic Enterprise Centre of Expertise (MEECOE), a project led by CREME to develop strategic and innovative approaches to supporting ethnic minority businesses in the West Midlands. We therefore wanted to host the event in this region.

We then invited some of CREME’s key stakeholders (who have also been actively involved in the MEECOE project) to attend a series of meetings to plan the sessions at the event focussing on Business Support, Access to Finance and Access to Markets. We have been engaging with Dr Richard Roberts, SME Research Director at Barclays, Simon Leggett, Sales & Marketing Director at The Consortium and David Darlaston, Regional Director West Midlands at Business in the Community on a regular basis to develop the programme further. In particular, we have been focussing on moving away from a traditional format of presentations to give participants the opportunity to interact and contribute to debates via Q&As and panel discussions.

Over the next 12 weeks, activity in the CREME office will increase dramatically as I work with my colleague, Liv, on a whole host of activities such as publicising the event, dealing with bookings, liaising with sponsors, creating packs for the participants and making arrangements for the Gala Dinner (being held after the conference).

We will be looking forward to meeting the numerous people that we will be in contact with over the next few months at the reception desk on the morning of Thursday 14th October 2010.

For more details about the conference, please contact us at: creme@dmu.ac.uk

Liz Frost