‘Doing more with less’ is a mantra that fills memos flying around organisations large and small, private and public. People are under pressure to deliver increasingly complex projects with fewer resources. This has led to more requests from clients for diverse secretariat assistance, which means contracting out the running of campaigns, events, projects, etc. It’s a leap of faith for clients, but with goodwill, teamwork and 100% commitment it can pay off.

1. Issue # 12 - 2015
The secretariat!
‘Doing more with less’ is a mantra that fills memos flying around organisations large and small,
private and public. People are under pressure to deliver increasingly complex projects with fewer
resources. This has led to more requests from clients for diverse secretariat assistance, which
means contracting out the running of campaigns, events, projects, etc. It’s a leap of faith for
clients, but with goodwill, teamwork and 100% commitment it can pay off.
A recent example of this full-service approach is ESN’s handling of the 10th
anniversary
edition of the European Sustainable Energy Week (EUSEW). We took over the contract to
help run the secretariat, which included tasks raging from event logistics and setup to
managing speakers, registrations and the website, and included social media campaigns, press
actions, mailings, and just about every aspect of modern communications.
What’s unusual or special about that? Apart from having to
hit the ground running after a brief handover from the
previous contractor just a few months before D-Day – the
start of the flagship conference in Brussels – this job
involved all departments and a large portion of the
production team.
As such, several valuable lessons could be drawn from the experience of such a multifaceted,
multimedia project:
1. Work as a team: in the EUSEW case the secretariat role involved several partner
companies and the client, so an ‘us’ and ‘them’ attitude would have been
unproductive as the final result reflects on everyone (‘we’ are in this together!)
2. Accept that some things don’t work first time: a store of goodwill is needed to allow
for things to be put right in the end (but the store is not infinite… it needs to be
replenished with positive results!)
3. It will be alright on the day: this is cliché, sure, but if you have the right team, enough
resources, and everyone is rowing in the same direction, nine times out of ten it will
work out well… (but the hiccups can eat away at trust, so learn fast!)
4. Set realistic targets: saying you will aim for this many delegates and that many
journalists and oh so many Twitter mentions or people using the networking tools or
commenting on the website is a standard business practice but the success of the
project is sometimes also measured in intangibles like whether delegates learned
something in sessions or how much of the stuff in the conference bag they kept
(feedback, both informally and formally collected, is worth its weight in gold!)
5. Use collaboration tools: despite common practice, email is not that helpful when it
comes to large, multisite projects; it can lead to silo working and thinking (use an
European Service Network
Galerie Ravenstein 4
B-1000 Brussels – Belgium
Phone: +32 (0)2 646 40 20
INSIGHTS
GOODWILL, TEAMWORK AND
100% COMMITMENT

2. extranet or reliable web-based project management tool – even Google Drive is better
than stand-alone excel sheets bouncing from mailbox to mailbox!)
Having said that metrics and numbers are not the only yardstick to measure a project’s
success, it still behoves us to mention that, despite the challenges faced with EUSEW, ESN
and its partners delivered the goods (the tangibles and the intangibles).
Here are a few numbers just for the boasting…
At a critical juncture in climate change negotiations and as energy policy matures, the
importance of developing sustainable alternatives is increasingly clear to all. With this in
mind, the EUSEW Policy Conference programme in Brussels (15-19 June) featured a range
of debates tackling key issues, such as energy efficiency, investments in renewables, smart
cities, decentralised energy and smart-energy solutions, and Energy Day events took place
across the EU throughout June.
Over 2700 people attended the conference, including delegates, the press and leading
politicians. There were 74 side-events around Brussels and nearly 700 Energy Day activities
Europe-wide. Over 2300 people followed the three days of the conference via web streaming.
ESN oversaw the first-ever Networking Village in EUSEW’s ten-year history, which
attracted significant attention (around 550 people signed up to use the match-making tool,
over 500 likes and 1500 profile views were recorded in the system, and there were some
37,000 page views using the match-making platform).
On social media, EUSEW Policy Conference exceeded our expectations:
 Around 10,000 twitter mentions (some 6500 as retweets)
 A potential reach of nearly 8 million Twitter accounts
 Top tweeting countries: Belgium, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Spain
 Most covered session: opening session on ‘Energy Efficiency First’ with
Commissioner Arias Cañete: 975 tweets
Take a look at the Twitter word cloud generated in the opening days of the event when
#EUSEW15 was trending:
Interested in these insights? If you would like to discuss how to improve your communications
efforts, ESN would be glad to help. Drop us a line! www.esn.eu/contact