Many of you might remember that back in the dim, distant, pre-covid, past, we (and then Liverpool) ran an annual event aimed at the bigger city BIDs—based on the notion that cities faced quite different challenges, but also had many greater opportunities, than our smaller market-town or suburban peers.
So we’d like to bring this conference back. We’ve been working with the Association of Town & City Management, so apologies if you’ve already been contacted. We have a venue booked for October 8th here in Manchester. It’ll run 10 till 4, and we’ll be organizing some discount hotel rooms and possibly a meet-up the night before. However, I’m determined to keep things free so more than one member of staff can attend (so we will be covering all the costs bar the hotels)—and we have capacity for multiple attendees.
I realize there are a number of other conferences and seminars on the way, but am hoping not to step on too many toes. We really want to focus on new and hopefully interesting projects, strategies and campaigns that BIDs have underway. My thinking is to focus on areas such as—
Dealing with climate change (recycling, waste, etc)
Safety (particularly around campaigns on womens’ safety and in the NTE)
Having fun (place marketing and events)
Social issues (charities, rough sleeping, crime)
Delivering services (cleaning, police, etc)
Breaking the BID model (ABID, levy collection)
So if you’re doing something, *anything* that you think would be of interest to your peers, please get in touch. I’ll be approaching many of you individually (or already have), but clearly I know very little of what’s going on.