Spark Accelerate

Spark Accelerate is Spark's flagship customer event: a two-day summit for senior enterprise and government leaders, many of them chief executives, CIOs and CTOs. I joined Spark in July 2024 as B2B Live Experience Lead and Event Director, and led Accelerate in 2024 and 2025.

The programme gave customers a reason to leave the office: six keynotes, fifteen breakouts and eleven product specialists over two days, with showcases of IoT, private 5G and satellite technology they could see working.

Year one drew 600 people, 390 of them customers. For year two I designed a partnership programme that made partners part of the experience, and sold and closed the partnerships myself. All three year-one partners came back and invested more, and five new partners joined. Partnership income grew from NZ$45,000 to NZ$380,000, against a target of NZ$300,000.

The 2025 summit grew to 900 people, 650 of them customers. I built and oversaw the system that captured who came and what they engaged with, so the sales team could qualify leads from real signals.

One idea of mine, an AI photo booth built with a digital agency, put about 400 guests on a magazine cover in under a minute each and took over LinkedIn for two days. Recordings from the stage fed Spark's channels for months afterwards. The event is the hero, but it's never the whole story.