Location

Royal Lancaster Hotel, London

Guests

550

Event Type

Fundraising Events

The Conundrum

Meet Action Medical Research, a UK charity funding medical research for sick and disabled babies, children and young people.

Every year, Action holds Champions of Cyclesport; a black-tie dinner to celebrate cycling and raise money for medical research. It’s their biggest event of the year and growing.

For the past 5 years, the event had been held at a venue where the sound and lighting was included. So we’d been helping out with event video. But, the AV at last year’s event wasn’t up to scratch. The team felt let down so decided to choose their own venue and employ an AV supplier they could trust (that was us by the way).

Part-way through the event, Ellie Wheelhouse (Events Fundraising Manager) took over the event. And can we just take a moment to celebrate Ellie having the perfect name for a cycling event?! Ellie was looking for a flawless sound and lighting as well as ‘live camera relay’ and event video recording.

The Solution

The event was being held at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, London; a venue we know well. We started with a full site visit and recce to work out what equipment Ellie and her team needed to maximise how the space would look and sound.

The event is a sellout every year, and raises seriously impressive amounts for Action’s research. So Ellie needed everything to look impressive and be beautifully lit. The visual tech was hugely important too as the emotional video stories shown on the night have a huge impact on fundraising. To take pressure off Ellie, we liaised directly with the venue to confirm things like access timings and whether they could use haze on the night.

On the morning of the event we arrived extra early to set everything up (we like to be ahead of schedule). We also helped with the all-important rehearsal for the live story speaker and we even had a practice live auction with the auctioneer (didn’t win anything though).

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The Outcome

The event was a huge success and raised a whopping £290,000 in total. Ellie was absolutely delighted (and relieved) that everything went so smoothly. In fact, we’d go as far as saying it went wheelie well!

You and the team just did an incredible job in putting the event together, honestly, just brilliant.

Ellie Wheelhouse, Special Events Fundraising Manager, Action Medical Research

The event went so well, Ellie has already asked us to do next year’s Champions of Cyclesport event. We’re taking that as a compliment. 

We would love to work with you again next year if you will have us.