Cuckoo Wins 3 Times At International Festival & Events Association Awards

The recent IFEA Convention, Expo and Retreat in Arizona in the States saw Cuckoo recognised 3 times, winning 2 GOLD and 1 SILVER award.

Mags and Elaine from here travelled to the annual IFEA Convention, Expo and Retreat. We've been IFEA members for a while now but this was our first opportunity to attend their big annual event. We've had some great feedback from them during the conference and they seem to have made some great connections over there. We'll have a blog post on the conference experience end of things in due time.

One element of the event annually is a huge awards show with entries from all over the world. 

Award

We were delighted to win 3 awards.

We were delighted with 2 of them in particular as they recognised our efforts and excellence in the mailers we produce, both for event management students as well as in marketing ourselves and what we do. 

We won GOLD for 'Best Organisational Website'.

Our website has won many awards. We're very proud of it. It works really well for us in attracting new business, which is considerably more important than it being award-winning. That said, we do love when it wins awards too.

This is the first time it's been awarded internationally and, considering the IFEA awards receive entries from all around the world, it's quite an achievement to have won GOLD in this category. 

We won GOLD and SILVER for 'Best Event / Organisation E-Newsletter' for two different email newsletters that we produce. 

Like I said, we are chuffed with these ones.

We've been producing bi-weekly mailers for event management students and people into events for almost 2 years now. Each one contains links to about 20 items of event management news. We've almost 700 subscribers for these mailers.

If you're an event management student you can sign up here. If you're working in the industry already then you can sign up here. 

We also produce a mailer every 6 - 8 weeks for people interested in what we're doing here in Cuckoo. That one has around 440 subscribers. It's a really strong marketing tool for us and has resulted in a lot of new business for us along the way. 

Basically, we've been recognised for the quality of our marketing platforms (website and mailer) as well as the effort we put into producing a regular mailer for event management students and people into events. There's no immediate payoff to the mailer. We started it because we felt there was a demand and it helps us keep up to speed on what's going on in the industry around the world. It's gone from strength to strength and we enjoy doing it. 

The industry worldwide

Having staff attend conferences and events like the IFEA one in Arizona isn't cheap. It also puts pressure on those of us left here in the office to keep all live projects going in the absence of 2 of the Team. It's an investment both in ourselves and in our industry though.

There's HUGE value in meeting people that do what we do from other countries and sharing experiences. It's something that doesn't really happen in a market as small as Ireland as we're all competition for one another. In countries like the US, for instance, it's decidedly different.

We're looking forward to being briefed by Mags and Elaine about all they learned and the people they met. 

We already know they enjoyed accepting the awards for us . .