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As we close out the year, we wanted to take a moment and reflect on the past 12 months.

2020 has been a challenging year for all. And it is usually in these difficult times that we see who the real heroes are, and we have. Many are those who on a daily basis are facing the direct effects of the crisis, and for their contribution we will be forever grateful, and many are also those who rose to the occasion in a more indirect way and broke known patterns to save their businesses and jobs to assist in other people’s well being.

The events industry itself, built on the foundation of face to face networking, has been hit severely.  Most events during the course of the year, across the globe, have been postponed or canceled due to restrictions. We know that all professionals within the events industry have worked tirelessly to pivot to digital.  We also, unfortunately, know that many have lost their jobs.  We wanted to express our solidarity to an industry which we are a proud member of.

On March 4th & 5th of this year, we at Copperberg were planning on hosting our community of enterprise asset management professionals for a two-day conference in Bonn, Germany.  However, the pandemic hit and, less than two working days before the event was due to take place the city of Bonn suffered a cluster outbreak, and with the amazing support of our partners, speakers, and delegates, we successfully pivoted the event to a digital one.  Our first ever virtual conference.  It was the start of a challenging, exciting, tiring, enlightening, hair-pulling, inspiring, and emotional journey.

2020 was supposed to be a year of ambition for Copperberg.  We had just gone through an exciting year of growth in 2019, and had plans of launching events in the US and growing our digital footprint, a leg of income that did well and where we saw extreme growth potential and in all honesty, did not get the attention it deserved. The pandemic became a challenge as our world of events was turned upside down, but we saw the challenge as an opportunity.  Just as we preach it to our community of service leaders at every event, we became agents of change and digitally transformed.

We had to. What else could we do? The infrastructure was in place, the products were there they just needed to be modified for a larger scale, the community was still the community and most importantly we wanted to make sure that all the cut downs and all the hardship we had to face was worth it. 

We made mistakes along the way, we took a few hits, but here we are, still standing.  We closed out our fiscal year in September with one of the best months Copperberg’s 11+ year history.  And just recently, we finally launched our first US event. Three, in fact, back to back, welcoming 330+ participants.  And we close out the year having hosted 9 virtual events and countless webinars.  

So as we reflect back, we’re proud to see that through adversity, we matched our ambition set out at the beginning of the year.  We just took a different route to reach it.  And we want to thank everyone who embarked on this journey with us and supported us this year.

We don’t know what the world holds for 2021, but we do know that, again, this will be a year full of ambition for Copperberg.  And we look forward to it, hoping that we can meet again in a physical, digital, hybrid world, pandemic-free.

Until then, stay safe!

Lisa Hellqvist and Thomas Igou

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