Inemaa
Inemaa (short for innovative event managment) is a start-up that creates innovative event concepts and advises businesses on how to host a socially responsible and environmentally friendly event.
Contributions:
- Target group analysis
- Design Thinking workshops
- Communication strategy
- Webdesign
- Corporate design
1. Research
What does inemaa do?
Inemaa is a start-up where motivated idealists with a lot of experience in the fields of sustainability, management and digitalisation come together.
The team was founded in 2016 and is based in Frankfurt. For an ideas competition of the Department of Energy, Frankfurt, they developed a platform to connect event managers with sustainable service providers.
What is sustainability in the event industry?
There are various definitions of the term ’sustainability‘. One by Forum for the Future describes it as a „dynamic process which enables people to realise and improve their quality of life in ways which simultaneously protect […] the earth’s life support systems“.
When thinking about events, luxury, extensive buffets and freebies come to mind. Nevertheless, there are several measures that can be taken to make an event more sustainable. For instance: choosing a location that is easy to reach by public transport, working with a local and regional catering business and reducing the event’s carbon footprint and waste.
2. Shared Vision
Our starting point was a game plan
We wrote down inemaa’s vision, primary and secondary goals, influences and risks and listed trends in the event industry (like vegetarian/vegan food, e-mobility, digitalisation and new live event formats).
The goal
Defining the problem space, analysing and organising the information about inemaa’s services, unique selling proposition and target audience.
The team voted for event agencies to be the most important target audience at the time and we created Empathy Maps, imagining which pains and gains there might be.
Furthermore, we formulated “How Might We“ questions to get closer to the design challenge and to start thinking in a solution-oriented way. I let inemaa rank the questions in order of importance.
How might we help event agencies …
… to make their customers happy?
… to be linked by a good network?
… to avoid unforeseen incidents?
… to find competent employees?
3. What's the Issue?
To validate the collected assumptions and get first hand information about the needs of event agencies and planners, I interviewed three of inemaa’s former clients to understand what inemaa’s services had looked like and how the clients had come in contact with the team in the first place.
A radical shift in global consumer attitude is underway – the rise of the conscious consumer. Today’s events must evolve with them.
At IMEX Frankfurt – a worldwide exhibition for incentive travel, meetings and events – I talked to event agencies and event locations inemaa hoped to acquire as future customers.
One of the most important findings was: When talking about sustainable solutions for events, only two areas are taken into consideration: catering and waste disposal.
Key findings about event agencies:
- orchestrate all services at events
- don’t want any further players during the implementation
- highest priority is to make their clients happy
- care for sustainability if the client does
- think that sustainability was just a trend
- media-effective events need sustainability
- location/in-house catering defines level of sustainability
4. Strategy
Creating an event that is as sustainable as possible poses a great challenge to event agencies as most of them see it as a past trend. With the shifting mindset of consumers, inemaa can help them prepare for the future challenges.
Based on all these insights, I created the agenda for a second Design Thinking workshop: On the one hand, the team got an update of the new information in detail, including an overview over event agencies in Frankfurt.
On the other hand, we differenciated larger and smaller event agencies from event planners and the team had to rank the target audience’s needs again.
Afterwards, we generated ideas for a catalogue of sustainable measures and assessed the ideas according to client satisfaction and ease of implementation.
We defined next steps for inemaa as well as for me: while they should keep adjusting their offer and identify who is going to be responsible for which area, I would develop a new web design to show how strategy and insights can be communicated visually.
Search Platform
Pictures and key facts help the event agency to get an overview over the location’s qualities. This way, they are able to choose the appropriate destination for their client’s event within a short period of time.
In addition, the criteria for a location’s sustainability has to be transparent and easy to understand. Therefore, icons in different colours show whether the location is meeting the sustainability standards for energy and heating, usage of water, transportation and more.
By clicking on one of the location cards, an overlay window pops up and shows detailed information like a description text, more pictures and facts and numbers.
5. Outcome
The outcome is more than a new design for inemaa’s website and a concept for the search platform. It is a deeper understanding of their target audience, a clear value proposition and a communication strategy for the most important channels.
Web Design
For their new website, this means to highlight the start-up’s expertise in event management and the additional benefit and support for event agencies. Outstanding project examples with former clients help to make the topic more tangible.
6. Lessons Learned
Trust the Process
In conclusion, I can say – even though I felt a bit lost in the process from time to time – the moderation and strategy part of the project worked well and I managed to create value for inemaa which was one of my objectives.
Validate your Assumptions
I realised that every time I got stuck, it simply was a sign that I needed more information, more digging or another process loop.
Learn New Skills
I have familiarised myself with the programme Sketch to create the web design and have learned more about time managment during workshops, project management and communication within a team.
Considering the whole cooperation process, two challenges were constantly relevant:
1. Finding a balance between keeping the team updated and asking for feedback in contrast to bombarding them with questions/information.
2. Choosing between being the expert and telling my partners what to do versus requesting a decision or next move from them.
