“These events are always a labor of love, so it was helpful to have LMH Experiences as a reliable partner in place to support our vision and needs.”
Name : Katy Harth
Company: Sprout Social
Location : Chicago, IL
Position : Events Operation Manager
At Sprout, Championing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is a critical value for the work we do, and how we engage with those around us. While LMH is already a minority owned business, and you have great events that are created and facilitated by your team, you also offer excellent partnerships with several other small, minority owned businesses; supporting all those businesses via LMH helps us to live out our value. It was a bonus, as a fellow company headquartered in Chicago, to see that nearly every aspect of your events were facilitated by local businesses in our city. Last, but certainly not least, your mission to provide a percentage of proceeds to charitable organizations was huge for us - extra cool to see those funds going to one of our customers, Donors Choose!
We had to transition a beloved company tradition to suit the needs of a quarantined world, while still providing our employees with engaging, unique opportunities to create and connect. LMH was available to help not only with the event selection and scheduling process, but with backend coordination as well - creating the zoom meetings, acting as co-hosts for all the events to help keep our folks engaged, and more. We had several events happening across the whole day, with many events overlapping with one another. LMH's coordination on the event day made it possible for me to be in "multiple places at once" with ease, so I could focus on the most valuable problems to solve. These events are always a labor of love, so it was helpful to have a reliable partner in place to support our vision and needs.
What I find so exciting is that virtual events provide an opportunity to improve event accessibility in ways that we have not yet seen in most spaces, and I encourage all of us to keep pushing the boundaries of how we define and support that mission. It would be incredibly valuable to see LMH and other event creators prioritize virtual experiences that can be replicated across all time zones without sacrificing on quality, or the ability for attendees to directly engage with one another. Furthermore, providing captions serve a broad range of needs—they are great for folks who are deaf and hard of hearing, for those who do not share a first language with you, for those who have ADHD, and more. It would be wonderful to see LMH support an add-on to provide live, human-generated captions to support this. Event and class facilitators should consider vision impairments in all their material; making sure text is large enough for attendees, testing for color contrast, and thinking about color blindness when selecting multiple colors on slides and printouts. During live experiences, hosts can be inclusive by carefully describing images used and actions taken, especially with hands-on experiences. Ultimately, I look to you as the experts to share what you have learned and how you are continuing to innovate and improve in all of these areas and more. I look forward to hearing what content, strategies, tools, etc. are proving to be most inclusive and engaging for teams as they gather together over virtual experiences with LMH.
“It was helpful to have a reliable partner in place to support our vision and needs. ”