Intro
The Grand Railway Collaboration is a partnership between all the organisations involved in rail in the West Midlands. In both 2022 and 2023, we ran an Away Day for members from all over the network. We had people from every level and experience coming together in Birmingham to spend the day together.
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28/04/2023
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West Midlands Grand Railway Collaboration
The Challenge
The West Midlands Grand Railway Collaboration brings people from different levels across train operating companies for an away day each year. The purpose is to hear from industry experts and spend time discussing key challenges and celebrate things that went well over the past year.
The room would be full of people who don’t know each other but work in the same industry.
The Solution
We delivered this one-day event at The Studio in Birmingham. This venue had some great spaces for breakout sessions, a separate dining area, and a hall for the speakers and icebreakers.
It was close to Birmingham New Street station so people were able to get there using public transport from all over the West Midlands.
The Event
We started off the event with arrival coffees and bags of gifts for people to take away with them. The gifts included reusable flasks, pens, notebooks and even a stress train (think a stress ball shapend like a train!). This provided an opportunity for the group to meet casually, get settled, and have a talking point to find something easily in common.
We then started the day off with an icebreaker called People Bingo. This activity got people walking around the room and getting to know quirky things about each other and starting the day with high energy.
We then heard from some great guest speakers who gave engaging presentations on the GRC and Customer Experience. To keep people engaged we used Slido to run live word clouds and quizzes.
The venue provided a great lunch in a lovely space with lots of areas for people to sit, stand, move around and get outside for some fresh air.
The afternoon consisted of breakout groups where the teams moved into different areas to discuss a range of topics and offer their insights using a lot of post-it notes! These didn’t just get left at the end of the day. Our team collected them and spent time writing up each of these sheets for the GRC team to read through a day after the event.
After the event had finished, people stayed for a drink at the bar and spend time with their new connections.
The Results
We were extremely proud of the day. The energy stayed consistently high, there were great conversations, relationship building and a lot of fun was had by the group.
Our events team dealt with facilitating the day by hosting icebreakers and panel discussions, running the audio visual equipment and keeping the event moving at a pace that kept the energy and outputs high.
Project Gallery
Lucy Wootton Head of Grand Railway Collaboration
BA Events are more than just an events company. They really managed the event seamlessy from start to end. They really get under the skin of exactly what it is we need from them and the outputs that we’re looking at for the day. And because they’d done the first event they were familiar with what we did the previous year and worked with us to ensure that we didn’t deliver the same event again. There were some differences to help keep it exciting and rngaging for those that were in attendance. And they also took the pressure off ourselves in terms of their delivery on the day. They brought a lot of energy into the room and they realy got people engaged.
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