Sustainable Events

Mosaic Events are working to make all our clients events more sustainable for 2011.

Sustainability is a key issue currently, individuals are making a more conscious effort at home and at work to ensure they limit their actions on the environment and society.

For example from recycling and car sharing with friends at home to car sharing to events, recycling bins and locally sourced organic food for events.

We work with numerous venues across the UK on a wide range of different event requirements for our clients and have come across a number of venues working to become more “green” and helping to create more sustainable events for clients holding events there.

In particular we have worked with the Window a modern not for profit venue which is London’s only exclusively vegetarian conference venue and offers small meeting rooms and a larger conference space upstairs for events.

The venue is focussed on ensuring client events are sustainable and provide high quality vegetarian food which where possible is locally sourced. 

They also stock belu water, the UK's first carbon neutral bottled water. (All their profits go to clean water projects in the UK and around the world.) and fair trade coffee and tea are also available and can even source organic wine with prior notice.

The Window have a number of sustainable practices in place including, low energy lighting throughout the building, heat condensing boiler for efficient use of gas, a green energy supplier, low flush toilets and urinals, off-site recycling: glass, paper, cans, plastic bottles, cardboard, wood, metal, printer/toner cartridges, IT equipment and furniture, carbon neutral taxi service, staff and volunteer education on sustainability issues and practices, recycled hand and toilet paper and ecological air sprays, hand soaps and cleaning products.

Working with venues who are also working to be more sustainable allows both Mosaic Events and the venue to learn from each other different initiatives and ways to improve the way we work and reduce the impact on the world as a result of the events we organise.

We are always learning and are keen to learn of any ways you or your company are trying to work more sustainably, please let us know by commenting on our blog below or via email to sarah@mosaicevents.co.uk

 

For more information about The Window venue visit www.thewindow.org.uk

Sarah’s top 5 Yorkshire venues

Location, location, location

Whether you’re organising a giltzy party, corporate conference or an intimate one to one interview, there’s no doubt that finding the right venue is key to making any event both successful and memorable. Great venues offer a unique location, fabulous service and value for money as well as good catering and on-site facilities.

Mosaic Events have tried and tested many venues across the region. Here are our top five:

1)     Thorpe Park Hotel and Spa – our star venue is this four star hotel, part of the Shire chain, located 10 minutes from Leeds city centre. The hotel is well appointed with a modern tranquil feeling. What makes it stand out from the crowd is the great service it offers from well-trained staff as well as excellent meeting rooms with air-con, natural light and dedicated cafe area so delegates can take refreshments when required. Not surprising it won Hotel of the Year in the White Rose Tourism Awards in 2008.

2)      Electric Works Sheffield – a two minute walk from Sheffield train station Electric Works was built as a unique contemporary office space for creative and digital businesses. Bold, striking and stylish the interior boasts the only three storey helter skelter in a UK office building. The Works provided a fantastic back-drop when Mosaic organised the imove event last year, celebrating the launch of Yorkshire's Cultural Olympiad.

3)      York Racecourse – is a great flexible venue suitable for both small and large events including conferences, dinners, exhibitions and parties. The catering is always of a great quality and the venue offers good value for money with the bonus of lots of car parking space for larger events.  All this and a great visual setting. 

4)      Harewood House – offers an impressive location which is sumptuous, secluded and steeped in history. It also offers great flexibility with lots of different spaces to suit different events as well as quality catering. A marquee on the lawn can accommodate dinners for up to 1000 but smaller rooms can also suit intimate meetings or exclusive dinners.

5)      Village Hotel South Leeds – just outside Leeds this hotel offers a good location, modern surroundings and purpose built meeting/conference facilities, quality catering and on-site parking as well as good value for money.

If your looking for a venue for your event, you can use our free venue finding service. 

Let us know what your top venue is!!

Tips for catering at events

Booking catering for any event sounds daunting. Get it wrong and it could either be costly or embarrassing. So here’s my simple fool-proof guide to getting it right.

1         Be aware that when you book a venue you are often tied into using either their in-house caterers or designated supplier. The reasons for this are not just financial; venues are protecting their reputation by using a caterer they know and trust.

2         When working on a menu think about your budget, the type of event you are planning, the feeling and ambience you want to create and whether you want to use a particular theme.

3         When agreeing catering with a supplier always insist on trying a sample menu first. The supplier should provide this free of charge.

4         Always cater for 90% of the total number of expected guests.

5         For canapés served before dinner I usually order 3-4 per person; otherwise at least 6 per person for a drinks reception. 

6         I work on 5 glasses of wine from a bottle and 7 glasses of champagne per bottle. So to calculate the required amount of bottles for an event where you are catering one glass per person divide the number of people attending by the number of glasses in a bottle.

7         If putting wine on a table for dinner (10 guests) I would advise ½ bottle per person (two red, two white and possibly one rosé).

8         And my top tip is this very useful website, which can help with calculating catering quantities for all kinds of events and guest numbers.

It would be great to hear about any tips you have for catering as always if your interested in

blogging for us contact sarah@mosaicevents.co.uk

Mosaic team goes green!

The Mosaic team is feeling pretty excited, because after months of preparation, we are delivering our first eco friendly event this week.

We have been working with local sustainable business expert Anthony Day, from Cyber Associates and Louise Hawson from Groundwork for four months to find ways to minimise any environmental impact the Local Authority Research Intelligence Agency (LARIA) annual conference could have as it takes place at the University of York.

We will continue to use Anthony and Louise’s expertise and guidance in the coming months to ensure that all our future events are sustainable whilst also working towards the new industry standard for sustainable event management systems, the BS8901. The standard was introduced by the government ahead of next year’s London Olympics to create a strategy to cope with the mind-boggling environmental issues caused by large-scale events.

Many conferences and large events can have numerous environmental implications. Such events can result in bags of landfill waste, large energy consumption and a staggering carbon footprint; not to mention left-over water bottles and delegate packs as well as high carbon emissions created by hundreds of delegates.

For the LARIA conference I have been working with the venue addressing all of these areas of concern. Where possible, the event is using renewable energy and food has been sourced locally or fair-trade.

Delegate packs have been printed on recycled paper and conference waste will be recycled and not sent to landfill. What’s more delegates were encouraged to travel to the venue by public transport and we also provided an online service (through website liftshare.com) to allow delegates travelling from the same area to car share. There are lots of other ways in which an event can be made more eco friendly; by re-using badge holders and using the auditorium screen for promoting event logos and brands instead of printed banners, for example.

The LARIA conference will be acting as our pilot event as Mosaic prepares to go green and I will be reporting back on how we got on in a later blog.