Respond to Demand, Not to Plan

technique — attributed to Amy Calvert

The Sustainable Event Professional Certificate was not planned. In March 2020, 3,500 people showed up to a webinar on sustainable event practices while borders were still closing. Calvert read the attendance as signal: this is what people need right now. She built the SEPC from that audience. Eighteen hundred completions followed, sixty percent from outside North America. The technique is distinct from opportunism. It requires a real-time capacity to distinguish between noise and demand, and then the institutional agility to build a program in the window when demand is live rather than after the moment has passed. Planning cycles are the wrong tool for this. Listening infrastructure is the right one.

Calvert's account of building the SEPC from a March 2020 pandemic-period webinar that drew 3,500 attendees.

program-development, listening, responsiveness, credentialing