The breakfast network events have been running on the final Thursday of every month for two years at Inox, one of the University of Sheffield’s dining & event venues on the central campus.
The breakfast events have been a platform for informal & effective networking along with a different guest speaker every month. This network event has been rare in the Sheffield business environment for offering complimentary networking inclusive of a full English breakfast & has consistently been well attended, delegate numbers usually achieving an average of thirty guests per month.
The rationale for the events was to fundamentally offer a venue for networking to businesses & entrepreneurs within Sheffield City Region but more especially for withUS to showcase the facilities on offer at Inox – & across our venues – to the networking guests so as to engage with them & for these guests in turn to bring their conference, dinner, lunch & event enquiries to us. Although we maintained regular monthly footfall visitors it was only by reviewing our strategy did we start to gain from actual conference & event enquiries.
By re-focussing on the variety of & subject matters delivered by our guest speakers, ensuring they offered diversity, interest, engagement, information, business insight & contemporary & relevant presentations have we been able to increase the average number of monthly network attendees to fifty per month.
By additionally being very pro-active in presenting exactly what facilities are available both at Inox & across the University of Sheffield venues & highlighting our appetite to work pro-actively with our networking guests’ we have seen a growth in event enquiries from guests which have included dinners, additional client breakfast events, Christmas parties & themed Dinners etc.
In addition to the content of each event we have also decided that a minimum of three months of event detail – inclusive of guest speaker profiles – will be available to view & register to attend on the Inox website at all times.