Mystery Creek event managers, Sandra Jenkin and Marie Rechner, can’t wait for a packed Fieldays at Mystery Creek.
In June after last year’s event moved online, due to Covid-19. It has been a quieter year than usual for Senior Event Manager, Sandra Jenkin, and Event Manager, Marie Rechner, as some events at Mystery Creek were cancelled last year, though major events Festival One and the Motorhome, Caravan and Leisure Show were still able to go ahead safely.
The two women have strong backgrounds in events and ensure all the events at Mystery Creek run seamlessly.
Sandra has been with the New Zealand National Fieldays Society for seven years, after 12 years with ForumPoint2 working on conferences, and gaining experience of big outdoor events such as Rhythm and Vines.
Marie has also been working at the Society for two and a half years after previously being contracted to run the Kitchen Theatre at the Fieldays event. This follows a career in hospitality and construction before gaining a Graduate Diploma in Event Management ten years ago.
This year’s Fieldays will be back at Mystery Creek and will be boosted by a re-launch of last year’s Fieldays Online event for people overseas or those who can’t make the trip to the physical event at Mystery Creek.
Fieldays will be held from June 16-19, while Fieldays Online will build on the success of the 2020 virtual event and run for a month, hosting seminars and demonstrations and access to exhibitor deals and information.
“There is a month-long programme now to cover all things agribusiness, which is an awesome thing for us to offer over and above the four days of the physical event,” Marie says. She says “Kitchen Theatre has been a highlight. I’ve been privileged to organise and run this and help develop the Fieldays food strategy, as well as work with an awesome bunch of volunteers.”
Sandra says the Fieldays Online platform works well for seminars. “You can only have so much seminar space here on site when you really want to sell exhibitor space and have the public here. So, this gives us more scope to deep dive into hot topics for the primary sector.”
As an event centre, Sandra says Mystery Creek has a unique appeal with the enormous range of events it caters for. “What we do here is always bespoke. We can have a small meeting for ten people one day, and then an event for 4000 the next so there’s huge variety.
“At another venue, you’d have a small piece of the whole event to work on, and you’d work on that same thing across a number of events. Whereas here, we tend to work across the whole event, being able to co-ordinate a wider scope, from the organisation and logistics to working with our operations team and delivering the event.”
Marie says their work on Fieldays and other events make money that can then be given back to the community. “An example of this was a donation to Rural Youth and Adult Literacy Trust, which provides free tuition to isolated rural adults and teenagers who struggle with reading and writing.
“These kinds of programmes are really important to us, and when you think we contributed money to that cause, that’s really cool.”
The New Zealand National Fieldays Society which owns the Mystery Creek Event Centre is a not-for-profit organisation that is committed to supporting the advancement of agriculture in New Zealand. “So, the payoff is a win-win for us,” says Marie. “We’ve got our own personal goals and then those of the Society that we work towards. It’s got a strong community attachment.”
