The TED Ecosystem: Building Human-Centered Experiences at Scale

Monique Ruff-Bell:

We've always been about ideas, connection, and community. And we say we are about the humans, not the herding. It's not about a transactional environment of moving people from one place to another. It is not about having 4,300 different types of panel sessions. It is literally, what does a human need to enjoy their experience?

Alyssa Peltier:

Great events create great brands. But pulling off an event that engages, excites, and connects audiences, well, that takes a village. And we're that village. My name is Alyssa.

Rachel Andrews:

I'm Rachel.

Kelly Cheng:

I'm Kelly.

Felicia Asiedu:

And I'm Felicia.

Alyssa Peltier:

And you're listening to Great Events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts, creators, and innovators in the world of events and marketing.

Rachel Andrews:

All right. Hi everybody, and welcome back to Great Events, a podcast by Cvent. I am your host, Rachel Andrews. And today we're digging into experience design and all the things that come with that, which is why I'm very excited for today's conversation with Monique Ruff-Bell, Chief Program and Strategy Officer at TED. Monique helps lead the strategy behind TED's flagship global events and conferences, TEDx programs, initiatives, and then key brand and marketing verticals. Welcome, Monique. Thanks for joining us.

Monique Ruff-Bell:

Oh, thank you so much for inviting me. I'm really excited about the conversation.

Rachel Andrews:

Yeah, me too. I've been a longtime fangirl of TED and all the things that you all do. So you all are very well known for deeply content-driven, emotionally resonant events. So we're going to dig into a little bit of that. But before we do all that, I want to talk about you because I feel like you're one of those people in the industry that a lot of folks look up to and within your career and just how you got to where you are. A lot of people listen to our podcasts, like a lot of people in the ecosystem. What we kind of like to do is just talk like you would normally talk to anybody, explaining what you do. How did you get into this event's world? Are you insane like I am?

Monique Ruff-Bell:

That's a really good point because sometimes the insanity is just like, how do you even stand it sometimes? I have always been in the events industry. My first job was with Ringling Brothers Circus doing event promotions.

Rachel Andrews:

So very on brand. Yeah.

Monique Ruff-Bell:

Exactly. That's why I was like, "Yeah, I get it." And that was my first corporate job out of college. I had an internship at a small boutique events and media company in New York. And you know when you're an intern, they kind of give you everything. I was 19, raising money, pitching people for PR, doing logistics. I was doing 10 jobs, and I was enjoying it. So I was like, "Oh, I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. So I'm going to just do this. It seems like I can do this. I'm good. I'm detail-oriented. I love people. I love putting on experiences." So it kind of started from there. I did not get intentional about my career in events until around 2010, 2012, I think, between those two years. And so I graduated school in '99. So between that and 2010, 2012, it was literally like, "I just want to figure out what I like." And ended up in content; love content, love research, love the motivation, inspiration that people bring to stages and stay there for a while. And then like I said, I got intentional about my career in wanting to be a leader in the industry. And then I started to pull all the levers to make that happen. Number one, what are the skills I'm missing? I'm not going to take jobs unless they're going to give me particular skills. Number two, what type of industries do I want to play in? Well, I can't just stay in the association world. I can't just stay in a nonprofit space. What are other places that they do events that I really want to try? Number three, how do I get access to the rooms with the leaders that are leading our businesses?

What do they like to hear? What do they need to hear? So I would ask. I was like, "Hey, I know you're going to give this presentation to a CEO. Can I come in? Can I join?" Just so I can understand what does a CEO look for? I was like, "Oh, they want people who make money. I need to learn how to do more of that too. So now I need to start concentrating on creating the right sponsorship packages." So for eight years, seven to eight years, that's all I was doing. It was going from one role or a different industry or a different job, collecting skills like Pokémon cards, and then getting to the point where I was like, "I think I have it all. Now I need to go for what I want." It all was planned in a way, but also the first part was just me roaming around and trying to figure out what I liked.

Rachel Andrews:

Yeah, that's amazing. I do think just one point you said, figuring out what you don't like, is equally as important as figuring out what you are good at.

Monique Ruff-Bell:

Everybody's always evolving, and you always can change, and you can change your mind at any time, but I think locking yourself down in something in your 20s when you don't even know thyself yet is not the best idea. I think you should keep trying and figuring out while you have time on your side. And that's the way I looked at it. I was like, "I'm not going to pick a lane and then have to stay in there for the next 20 years, especially if I don't like it. I need to figure out what I like." And so I ended up figuring out what I liked, which was content.

Rachel Andrews:

Well, let's talk about that because you designed some pretty epic, incredible experiences for folks. Chad is at the global stage, and you're designing highly personalized things for your audiences and bringing that energy. I mean, to talk about collecting skills, that's a great place to also go to do that if you want to learn new things from TED. Walk us through a little bit about how the TED programs work and how you've built them very intentionally and what other experience designers can learn from your journey doing that.

Monique Ruff-Bell:

A lot of people do not know that TED is a very robust event platform. Our TED Talks are filling that events. People think they're in studios and things like that. They don't know. We have about three flags... What we consider flagship, flags just are usually one event, but we consider we have three, and then we have 4,500 TEDx events globally. So we are 100% a robust event ecosystem. When I came to TED, they created wonderful experiences for people. I literally helped to kind of create certain frameworks and structures and to take bets and risks and do things a little bit differently. I brought in a little bit of the spice, as I like to say, but we've always been about ideas, connection, and community. And we say we are about the humans, not the herding. It's not about a transactional environment of moving people from one place to another.

It is not about having 4,300 different types of panel sessions. It is literally what does a human need to enjoy their experience, especially if they're taking a whole bunch of time out of their day. And some of our conferences are premium-priced. We can go up to 10,000, $12,000 for a ticket for one of our conferences. So how do you human, not herd? That is all about the true connective of when someone comes into our event, we don't queue lines. We greet you, we get your name like a concierge, and we give you a seat on a couch, and we go back there and bring you your bag and your badge and all of these things that's because we know you just came off of a plane or you just had a long week or whatever. So what kind of centers you when you enter our events?

Then it's like we don't want to compete like everybody knows TED from a TED Talk. We don't have multiple tracks happening when we have our TED Talks happening on our main stage. So it's about the quality, not the quantity of things. We don't keep people just within our venues. We take people offsite for our conferences because it's not about just what is happening from a content perspective. There's wonderful experiences that you can design outside of a venue that will create a unique aspect for an attendee to bond with someone else. We had a workshop where we had a tree doctor, and we took you out into the forest to learn how to listen to trees or how to design your own sneakers. So when you're in those very unique types of experiences, you kind of bond with the person next to you, and you have interesting conversations, and it's just not about a transactional topic.

So we really think about how do you keep the connection at every point of an event. One of our longest events is five days, and we keep you talking and going from morning until night for five days straight, and then you walk away with a TED ache is what we call it because there's nothing like it, and you kind of ache for that environment again. So we are really intentional about putting together experiences that create an emotional connection to TED, not just a mental connection to TED.

Rachel Andrews:

How do you even start? I remember you spoke at SEMA, and you were saying your target audience is everybody. Your ecosystem, when you look at it, it's anybody that wants to learn, right? How do you even narrow that down to pick content or design for something that could be literally anything because the sky's the limit, it feels like, no?

Monique Ruff-Bell:

Yeah. So some of our conferences have themes, and so we will pick different content that kind of really complements the theme of the conference, and our curation team comes up with a theme of the year for that particular conference. But we also kind of look at what's going on in the world. We're not going to ignore the good stuff, and we're not going to ignore the hard stuff and the bad stuff that's happening, and how are people trying to move through to give people hope and optimism? Our foundation is about hope and optimism. You're never going to have content where someone is screaming at each other or doomsday content. We just don't play in those spaces. And so that can live in science, that can live in health, that can live in technology. TED stands for technology, entertainment, and design. And so we'll always have those three big components as part of any content that we put together, but then there's like, what is happening in the world?

What are we going through? What's coming down the pike that you have no idea about? We were talking about AI years and years and years before everyone understood. And now we're still talking about AI in the cultural zeitgeist, but they're on AGI. They're like, "AI is old. We're already somewhere else." We're bringing that to our content. Even the things that people don't hear about, they'll hear about it first at TED. And so really being intentional about crafting content that really surprises the light informs, motivates, and inspires.

Rachel Andrews:

Holy cow. So that's like a tall order, I'm sure. You probably don't sleep much and have to design. How many programs do you have a year?

Monique Ruff-Bell:

So we have three flagships. One is every other year. So we have what we call Big TED. So that's our TED annual. We've been in Vancouver for the last 12 years, and now we're going to be in San Diego starting in 2027, which we're excited about. Then we have our conference, TED Next, which is about the future you, the next version of yourself. And that usually skews to a younger audience that loves to attend that, that's based in Atlanta. And then we have our climate change conference, which we call Countdown, and we move that around the world every other year. We were in Kenya last year. We're looking at Hong Kong in the future. So those are our three key flagships. But then, like I said, 4,500 events worldwide on almost every continent.

Rachel Andrews:

You brought up a good point about next gen, and this is just top of mind for I think a lot of experienced designers just because by 2030, most of the other generations are going to be retired. Is that a big focus for you right now? Is just how to attract some of the other generations coming in. Are they asking you for different things? Are you having to redesign things because of them or for them?

Monique Ruff-Bell:

It's a really good question because I remember being in a room with a bunch of event organizers and no one was under the age of 40. And then most of their attendees were 40, 50, 60. Conferences are skewing older. And the thing about it that I said it was like, I'm really focused on building a pipeline and an ecosystem to give everyone access to TED. And so when you think about TED's ecosystem, you have TED-Ed, that's our education where we're in a bunch of schools teaching public speaking and communication. So a lot of kids learn about TED in school, and then you will grow up and you'll probably go to a TEDx event, which is... Like, "I know TED; they're having something in my city. I'm going to go to that." That's usually like $50. It's one day built by local organizers with local businesses and speakers and things like that.

Then it went all the way to Big TED, which is a $10,000 ticket. There was nothing in between for a person who could be in their 20s or even in their 30s who can afford access to this wonderful TED experience. Instead of us saying, "How do we drive more of the younger people to Big TED?" Which we still do because there are younger people that can afford it. How do we create a pipeline where they get to touch our experience in an accessible way? And what could we create that will drive more of them to want to experience TED, and they can afford to experience TED? That when they do financially grow up to be able to go to Big TED, that's the first thing they think about and or they are saving to invest in a Big TED because they love this other version that they get.

And so that comes from having younger people on your team. That comes from asking them to participate in your strategy sessions. That comes from them giving them projects and programs to lead. I'm almost 50. If we're still just the people in the room having the conversations about our event strategy, we're losing the plot. We need to bring in others and younger people who just engage with events differently and be open to designing for those people because they grow up and they will eventually come into our bigger and other pipelines that we have, but we have to meet them where they are.

Rachel Andrews:

Are you using just tons of data for that? Is it audience insights? Is it focus groups? How are you doing that? Because a lot of people are struggling with that because maybe they don't even have clients that are in that bucket, but they want to be forward-thinking about it. How's that work?

Monique Ruff-Bell:

All the above. And so, one of the things that I bring to every job I go to is investment versus costs and really being clear about the language, as there are absolutely certain things that are costs that can be redesigned, reduced, or be done in a more efficient way that we can easily adjust. Then there are investments that actually pay off and do research, actually doing focus groups, and/or buying lists for younger audiences that fit the lookalikes of who's coming to your event, but they're the 30-year-olds instead of the 50, 60-year-olds and things like that. So those are investments that are eventually going to pay off. And as long as you have the language and the data to kind of showcase why you should be putting money towards that and knowing that it can pay off in three to four years for the business, you should be doing those investments.

The thing is that sometimes as organizers, we don't have the right language to sell that because we've never had to speak like that. We've concentrated on logistics. We've concentrated on operations. We've concentrated on just creating an event and not a business strategy for our events. And so that's the thing where more people have to start leaning into is that you have to be future-focused. We've concentrated on just creating an event and not a business strategy for our events. And so that's the thing where more people have to start leaning into is that you have to be future-focused. You're going to age out of knowing what the new stuff is within our industry, and the people who are coming, they're going to age out. They're no longer going to be wanting to travel wherever you're going and things like that. You need to be planning for that stuff now.

Rachel Andrews:

Yeah. I think as we're planning as event leaders, we need to think through that because it could be one day it just disappears, and then all your pipeline, all your clients, it just goes. I'm not doomsdaying it, but it's stuff that you need to think about, especially with your management team. Sometimes your management team is not your target audience, right? And so you got to have that data to back it up of what is your target audience, which I always find fascinating about your events because you guys... It's like the world is your target audience. It's everybody. It's kind of probably hard to narrow that down. I mean, even when you go to the TED website, I mean, anybody can nominate anybody to speak, right? How the heck do you even go about that selection process for picking who the next coolest, hottest speakers are going to be or hottest content's going to be? I'm sure that's like a big process.

Monique Ruff-Bell:

Oh my God, there's 22,000 recommendations that have come through that sheet, but we have a full-time curation team, and that's another investment. So you have content programmers, and then you have curators, and we call our content people curators. And so they are full-time looking for the best people to give talks, but they just don't confirm a person. They put them through a process. And so now you're confirmed; now we have to talk about what your topic is. That's a few days of that. I mean, it's sometimes months. Then it's like we have to do speaker coaching with you. We have to help you write your script. So this curator is on a journey with these different speakers for months at a time. It is not, "Okay, show up on this date, send me your PowerPoint presentation two weeks before, and we'll take it from there. Oh, you shouldn't have this in your slide, and that's it."

No, it is a full-on journey. It could be from the best speakers in the world that this is their full-time job to do it. They still have to go through our speaker journey and our speaker training and things like that because we invest in the best content because we wouldn't be who we are if we didn't have trust from our audience that we're bringing factual content to the table, good content, interesting content, relatable content. And so that takes a full-on speaker journey in order to do that, not just someone confirming a speaker.

Rachel Andrews:

That's super interesting. I knew it was probably complicated. It's like so much beneath the surface of that. That's fun to weave that also into your events and pick that. I'm sure there's a very fun process there.

Monique Ruff-Bell:

Absolutely.

Rachel Andrews:

I wanted to ask. I got to ask about AI because we all do, right? Are there things that you are weaving into your events and content selection or experience design that's helping you plan currently?

Monique Ruff-Bell:

Well, we are absolutely looking into how those 22,000 recommendations, how can AI sift through that for us a little bit faster than a single person looking through all of that? We are looking to how do you personalize more of your marketing using AI. And so how can you feed in certain information that you can connect certain dots about the content that you're having at your event to that person to make it even more interesting for them wanting to buy a ticket. We're using AI to think about how do we create certain interstitials within our event program. We use AI to challenge our thinking. So we have something called Big Bets for every event. We decide to invest in three different new ideas every single year, and we practice the 80/20 rule, knowing 80% is going to be great, 20% might not be, but we'll learn from the 20%. So we use AI to now give us the challenges of this idea, like what are the cons of this?

What do we need to think about? What haven't we thought about? So I use it every day. We use it on a regular, consistent basis on how to just be more efficient, to challenge ourselves, to help us do things faster, to help us connect better with people. So there's so many different ways that you can use AI, but you have to play in it. And another thing, I went to another event and was speaking to some organizers, and some of them like, "I don't touch it." And I'm like, "Girl, it's coming for you regardless if you touch it now or not." You need to understand what's happening. I'm sitting in rooms with the content that we're... Because we have even dedicated AI conferences now where I'm hearing some things and I'm like, "You don't even understand what's about to happen in the next 10 years with this that is going to change society as a whole." You need to start playing with this or you are going to be left behind. It is so important.

Rachel Andrews:

Well, some people just have trust issues, and I think that the trust issues are fair, but people are relying on it to do too much with bad data. And I think you have to remember that AI is only pulling from what's happened. It's not inventing the future for us. But if you keep that in mind, AI is not going to take your job as a strategist, right? But it's going to really help you do more faster as far as foundational building things. Build this template, research this stuff, but you have to triple-check it. I've researched some things in AI, and they've been completely wrong, and you have to look through that. But it's built me some amazing PowerPoint templates to get me to a place where I've literally saved hours, and then I plug in the real strategy part of it. I think people just forget that you can use it as a rocket booster to help you advance yourself, but it's not exactly perfect. And I think that's where the trust comes in.

Monique Ruff-Bell:

You can build up an understanding of how you want AI to work for you. The way it works for me might be different than how it works for you. But I'm telling you, what is coming down the pike, you will have no choice. It is being built into almost everything that we are going to be engaging with in the future. So you can sit here and say, "I have trust issues. I'm never going to touch it." You're going to be living in the forest then because there is just no way that eventually you're not going to be touching this. I even use it to test out how I want to pitch certain things to my boss by giving it my boss's personality, by copying certain things that the boss has said to me, because I want to use the language that's most appealing to my boss.

So that has even helped me get certain things over the line. It could be used in various different ways. It absolutely hallucinates. So you do need to understand what you're asking and what you're looking at, but it can be used in such powerful ways for you. I'm an AI optimist, even though I am in the room and I'm like, "Oh my God, is anybody else hearing this?" But it is what it is, what the journey is, but you're going to have no choice. Everyone's going to have to deal with this.

Rachel Andrews:

Yeah. I was like, "Maybe living in the forest doesn't sound so bad."

Monique Ruff-Bell:

And maybe it's going to be a whole bunch of people living in the forest.

Rachel Andrews:

Well, it sounds kind of nice, honestly, with all the stuff I have to do. Oh, I love it. Well, one other thing I wanted to bring up, and this is kind of a random one, but for a long time I would get really annoyed by the fact that we do events, and then after the event is over, the event is over, and you all are really big on community, big on your extended digital footprint from events is part of your entire company strategy. Can you speak to that? When you're planning events, you're also planning for the pre, during, and post and the whole life cycle of this. And so I feel like you're the original extender of events. TED was one of the inspos for people basically building YouTube strategies after their event programs. What does that look like for you? Has that evolved? Is that still part of your core mission goals?

Monique Ruff-Bell:

Absolutely. I mean, you have to pay for the free, and we do a lot of things free in society. We are a nonprofit. A lot of people don't know that. And so the digital strategy is a monetization strategy for us as well. So it helps us grow our brand and people absolutely get access to our... We don't have paywalls. So you literally get access to our content for free, but there is a monetization that comes with that as well. And so when we think about it, we are serving an in-person audience and a digital audience. Your in-person audience has a very specific look because they can afford that or they are in certain industries that they want to be in the room to hear this kind of thing. And then you have a digital audience where it could be a little girl in Bangladesh watching a TED Talk, and you have to make sure that your content is appealing to her just as much as to the person that can pay for the $50 ticket, the $2,500 ticket, or the $10,000 ticket.

There is a push and pull that comes with that. You can't lean too much one way or the other. It's really about the balance. But we've been really good about creating a format where if you ever listen to a TED Talk, you kind of start with your personal story, kind of the journey of how you got to this or whatever. And anybody can relate to a personal story because there's just universal aspects to kind of what you go through in life, whether you're in various countries or you speak a different language. And so that helps to set everybody to want to listen further and understand when you create this particular format that kind of weaves in your personality, your personal journey into the topic and the idea. And so that's a standard of a TED Talk, and it's really appealing. People really get it and get connected to it.

And so regardless of if you're serving an in-person audience or a digital audience, the format helps you to serve both. And so when you're thinking about your format, I'm telling you, I don't know how many times I can say this. The panels have to go. It is not about the panels. It is literally about how are you having good conversations with two people if you have to do an interview style or giving up one person the opportunity, but in a very short structured format to get to their point. Because another thing that TED does is you can only talk about one idea, and people love to talk about 10 things when they're talking to you. They want to get it all out. And the one idea can be really impactful. So structuring the right formats for your conferences or events, have them talk about the one thing and make sure they stick to it. And that means you have to go along on that journey with them when they're putting their presentation together.

Rachel Andrews:

That's a good point. I think we just try to cram so much in because people just want to learn so much stuff.

Monique Ruff-Bell:

Quality, quality over quantity, quality over quantity. And believe me, I love to sit in a room with good content over sitting and listening to 50 sessions with a bunch of panels where I was like, "You didn't even let this person get to their point, and this person has no point." It's like, give me the good stuff.

Rachel Andrews:

Well, I have two last questions for you. And for me, I always like other event profs; they look to companies like TED and Apple and Salesforce, these big companies, B2B and B2C alike, or if you're in the events world, you're looking for inspo. Where do you draw inspo from? Because I know you probably fan girl other events, and you probably look at other things to see what other people are doing, or do you not? Where do you get your inspo?

Monique Ruff-Bell:

I absolutely look at different types of events. So it's not necessarily in the conference space because I think a lot of it is cut and paste in certain areas. But I just went to a World Cup game. I went to the Brazil and Morocco one and I'm literally crafting a letter to the head of transportation to say what a good job they did. You cannot let go of your event brain. How do you move 80,000 people into MetLife Stadium without having parking or anything at MetLife? And whoever came up with the strategy for that, it was so seamless. I was shocked, and I was like, "I'm going to write to somebody and tell them what a good job." So I'm taking these little bits and pieces from different experiences around life. It could be anything anywhere, like the World Cup; it could be kind of like a parade; it could be anything.

I'm picking up different things that I would say, "Hey, I can weave that into my conference." You have to kind of look outside of our industry a lot of the time. And like I said, you have to bring in different perspectives. If you are the only person strategizing, you're doing it wrong. I have team meetings where we all break out into different breakout groups to tackle the six pillars of events. The six pillars of events are intrigue, arrival, exploration, participation, exit and extend. And those six things, we have different groups coming up with different ideas and we're like, "We got to try this. We got to try this." For every single flagship event that we do, we do this type of exercise. I'm not the only thinker here and if I was, then we got a problem. So it's like you really have to bring different age groups, different voices, different people to the table because everyone has something to contribute. They just need a chance to do it.

Rachel Andrews:

Oh, that's such a good point. That's such a good answer too. I think a lot of people struggle with that because it's all on their shoulders, and they're like, "I don't have time to do this," or "I don't have people that actually care enough to do this," but if you build it, I feel like-

Monique Ruff-Bell:

They will come.

Rachel Andrews:

... they will come. Yeah, exactly. Love that so much. Well, is there anything, final words of wisdom, and this could be based on your career path, advice you'd have for others, and maybe advice for the next gen coming into our industry, like anything final you want to tell our listeners today?

Monique Ruff-Bell:

The events, conferences, meeting industry is such a wonderful and viable career path. I don't think a lot of people say that enough because, yes, there's burnout because you are highly detailed, you're juggling multiple events and things like that. But also there is such a wonderful experience. I get to travel the world because of being in the event industry. I get to see so much joy and happiness on people's faces that I absorbed into myself because I work in the events industry. I get to make money for organizations, and they know the value that I bring in doing that because I work within the events industry. This is a great industry, and anyone who takes it seriously and saying like, "I'm not going to put myself in a box," or "I'm going to reach for different types of roles and leadership," or "I'm going to ask for access so I can understand how to do things differently. I'm going to take risks and I'm going to be all right with that. I'm going to carve out time with my team for us to just dream and imagine."

If you can do some of these things, it really opens up this industry to be even more impactful and wonderful for you, but you got to get out of your silo, and you got to get out of your own way, and you really got to believe that you can create the life that you want. I love the life I was able to create because of being in the events industry, and that was all due to intentional decisions for myself. And if I can do it, anybody else can do it.

Rachel Andrews:

Oh God, that was so inspiring. Let's make that a TED Talk. All right. If you're listening in the car right now, I need you to go to work and do everything that Monique just told you to do in your life. Well, we really appreciate you coming on the Great Events Podcast. Where can our listeners find you if they want to reach out?

Monique Ruff-Bell:

I'm on LinkedIn. I'm not on much social media, but I definitely talk a lot there. So please feel free to follow me on LinkedIn.

Rachel Andrews:

Appreciate you taking the time. I know you're busy.

Monique Ruff-Bell:

Absolutely happy to do it. It was great to have a conversation with you personally.

Alyssa Peltier:

Thanks for hanging out with us on Great Events, a podcast by Cvent. If you've been enjoying our podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

Rachel Andrews:

And you can help fellow event professionals and marketers just like you discover Great Events by leaving us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

Felicia Asiedu:

Stay connected with us on social media for behind-the-scenes content, updates, and some extra doses of inspiration.

Rachel Andrews:

Got a great story or an event to share? We want to hear from you. Find us on LinkedIn, send us a DM, or drop us a note at greatevents@cvent.com.

Felicia Asiedu:

Big thanks to our amazing listeners, our guest speakers, and the incredible team behind the scenes. Remember, every great event begins with great people.

Alyssa Peltier:

And that's a wrap! Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.