Behind the Scenes: ASAE Summit Awards

To start, we held a LAI Live Event Design Workshop, a custom experience curated around a client’s specific event needs. For this client, we gathered key event contributors including the ASAE meetings team, their third-party meeting planners, and our LAI Live Producers and Creative Directors. Through a series of facilitated activities, the team developed three key benchmarks to build ideas from.

• The event should be “cool,” creating anticipation and a desire to come back
• Attendees should feel a sense of “belonging”
• The vibe should be “fresh”

Following the event design, the team presented a list of ideas for a cool, fresh event with a sense of belonging, everything from attendee flow to programming.

Inspired by the final chosen graphic design, the LAI Live Producers created three concepts, each paying tribute to the fresh, cool, forward-thinking undertone of the angled texture. Since the awards stage carried a small footprint, allowing for more tables in the center court, the scenic stage design challenge was to create a large ‘Wow’ in a small area.

Each concept was created using individual panels that could be tiered on the stage or ground, creating a mesmerizing three-dimensional look for the audience, while providing enough usable space for the presenters. The tiered elements provided the opportunity for a backstage, hidden entrance, creating a better experience for presenters and award winners to exit and enter the stage without being exposed to the audience.

In year’s past, it started with the Anthem, then a video open, followed by an emcee thanking sponsors, remarks from the CEO, into awards, dinner break, ending with a nationally recognized musical guest. Recommendations for change included a “cold open” with our newly added roving camera to follow the co-chair through the audience conducting quick interviews with attendees.

The faster-paced open was accented with tighter scripting, allowing the award-winner videos to tell the story of those being honored in a more dynamic way. We also engaged attendees by showcasing photos from the reception during the dinner break and having an onsite videographer capture and edit testimonials during the reception, which were used to close the show. This created an immediate ‘Look there I am’ moment for the attendees throughout the program.