FEATURE
Making the
right call
Nicole Cooper, managing
director of Fitz All Media, talks
EN through the decision to
cancel DogFest South in
summer 2018 amid rocketing
temperatures
I
n the summer of 2018 Nicola Cooper
of Fitz All Media was confronted with
a decision no event organiser wants to
make: whether or not to cancel her event.
DogFest, a festival for dog-owners and their
canine companions, which had enjoyed several
successful editions over the course of the
summer, was due to end its run at Knebworth
House with DogFest South. But there was a
potential issue on the horizon.
“We started getting concerned that maybe
a heatwave was going to happen,” Cooper
tells EN. The DogFest team liaised with
animal welfare and the Met Office, which was
predicting temperatures of 25 degrees Celsius.
As the event drew closer, it became clear that
even higher temperatures were likely.
“What you don’t want to do is cancel and
then suddenly on the day the weather isn’t that
bad,” continues Cooper. “The press are really
bad; they always hype up the weather and
then there isn’t a cold spell or hot spell. But we
understood the situation as it was going to be
that weekend and knew we needed to cancel.”
The decision was made easier by the format
of the event, which encourages visitors to be on
the move and do activities with their dogs.
“We made a call that the weather had gone
higher and that we couldn’t do these activities
and that it was the right thing to cancel,”
says Cooper. “At that point we spoke to our
insurance company to see what the options
were. You go through a process making sure
that you’re doing everything and getting
everything in writing to confirm that you do
the right thing. One of our major sponsors
– the RSPCA – pulled out because of the
weather; they didn’t want any issues, it would
be really bad for us if dogs died onsite from
heatstroke.”
Having made the decision to cancel, the
DogFest team began to prepare for making the
decision public.
“We started getting processes into place
before announcing that we were going to
cancel,” explains Cooper. “What you don’t
want to do is cancel and then have loads of
people saying, ‘why and what and how?’ We
got everything into place so that when we did
release it would be everything at the same time.
“We were very clear to exhibitors
straightaway and visitors that they would
be refunded, because otherwise people
individually come back, and we gave them a
timeline. It was quite a slick operation.
“You never know when you do something
like this what the reaction is going to be, but it
ended up being incredibly positive. People were
getting onto social saying we’d made the right
decision and that it was great that we were
thinking of the animals and not the money.
“It turned into a really positive PR message
for us. In fact we got a lot more data from
it because people wanted to hear about
next year’s events so they subscribed to the
newsletter. The only sadness was for the team
internally, who had worked incredibly hard.”
DogFest South managed to survive its brush
with cancellation with visitor and exhibitor
goodwill intact, the show has now been moved
from July to May, hopefully avoiding similar
issues in the years to come. EN
event w i f i . com
exhibitionnews.co.uk | February 2019
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