116—Kristin Rowan—Leveraging PR and Logistic Strategies during a Large-Scale Event Emergency

Small Biz Buzz, by Keap

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Derek Harju are joined by Kristin Rowan, the director of marketing and public relations and sales for Square Egg Entertainment, the parent company for Phoenix Fan Fusion, who discusses how to pivot and adjust when a large-scale event suddenly faces an emergency.

In this case, the coronavirus pandemic. When it started getting bad, everything changed when everybody started to realize this didn’t look like the seasonal flu, this was different.

Rowan’s team started planning early when it became apparent that Phoenix Fan Fusion wasn’t happening. For her small, but mighty team of six, they didn't have a team of PR people or lawyers or all of those who can revise what they needed to do. Any revisions, any statements that they made came down to one person and long hours were experienced by all.

“We pivoted from, ‘Hey. Here are all the guests we have coming out, and here's all the events we're planning and look at all this fun,’ to virtually nothing,” said Rowan. “When you're planning an event that gets postponed like that, we don't know which panelists are going to be available. We don't know which rooms we're going to have in the convention center. We don't know what guests are still going to be available. And their filming schedule was stopped the same as our schedule was stopped. So for us, it was not so much a pivot as it was a full stop.”

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