Creating Worlds: An Interview with Gill Tee, Founder Black Deer Festival … and so much more …

It’s not just event and exhibition organisers that create amazing experiences, inspire audiences, or come up with amazing, challenging, and insightful content. There are industries across the business world that do this and that we often encounter. 

GES is a business that is always looking to learn, and sometimes it’s good to look outside of our own world and see what these other professions are up to. That is what this series is all about and, as a market leader, we want to be the people that go out into the world to collect great ideas, and to share them with our peers. We start with Gill Tee. 

Last year, Gill Tee won the President’s Award at the National Outdoor Events Association’s Annual Awards, a special acknowledgment that recognises continued quality, consistency, innovation, and contribution to the world of events – specifically those of a sporting, cultural, or musical nature. Gill is widely recognised in the highest echelons of the festival industry.

To expand on what has been an incredible career. Since her early days setting up and growing the massively successful Party in the Park brand for the then Capital Radio, Gill has been a creator, operator, and producer of dozens of events across the UK of every size and scale. She also co-founded a support infrastructure business for festivals, entertee Hire, delivering high-quality fencing and flooring solutions to the events industry.  

Fast forward some 20 years, and ahead of the pandemic, Gill wanted to create her own festival, combining her passion for music and outdoor events to create Black Deer, a festival of Americana culture, music, and food. After a successful launch in 2018 and growing the festival further in 2019, hers was unfortunately the first UK festival to be rolled over from 2020 to 2021. Then with the lockdown continuing, Black Deer had to roll over again from 2021, finally opening its gates again in 2022.  Since then, Black Deer has grown and flourished, every year adapting and innovating what a consumer experience can look like. Gill has resilience built into her DNA.

This series is all about learning from other industries and other people, clearly Gill is an exceptional starting point. We started by asking what excites her most about her part of this industry, “We are world creators. We create these amazing temporary worlds, and then have the enormous pleasure of watching people walk through them,” comments Gill. “These worlds have an incredible effect on people. They create moments of joy and memories that stay with them forever. At Black Deer, you can walk in and smell the food, hear the music, and see the design, all within minutes. That’s not an accident.”

It’s a beautiful way of understanding what drives Gill and why her events have such longevity with her audiences. But the real question is how? How does she create these worlds so that they carry so much impact? “I’m constantly visualising the layout of the event. What does it look like at every hour of the day, who is coming into the event, where will they be when different bands are playing, when they are hungry, where will they sit in the sun, where will they play with their families? How does this all link together,” continues Gill. As she speaks you can see her imagining that very site plan, the experience and impact people have when they arrive and how it evolves during the day. 

It’s also about basic things like food, drink and toilets. At Black Deer there is an increasingly large camping option, and again this needs to be factored in. How does the experience change for those living on the site for the three-day event, how do they eat sleep and then enjoy the festival. 

It’s these details that we in the exhibition and more indoor side of the industry could do well to emulate. Seeing the event as a clock as well as a floor plan, looking at the personalisation of every delegate beyond just their professional needs but their personal ones as well. This idea of creating worlds is provocative as well. Imagine a conference as a world that is walked through, not a series of mini-activations from staging to sponsors, from exhibitors to event features. They need to work in tandem, creating an overarching theme that is inspirational, not just operationally slick. 

Many of the answers come down to a simple word, care. Gill speaks with an amazing amount of care for the people around her, not least her audience. But this approach begins at home and again, we see the innovation within her business come out. Both entertee and Black Deer have been part of a movement towards closer wellness for the people that work the event, right down to the enlistment of a team wellbeing ‘hand’ whose sole role is to make them feel supported, nurtured, and to provide a safe place for conversations or concerns. 

This is replicated on-site, where specialist areas are put in place for anyone who has had a bad experience or encounter and needs a judgement-free place that is safe and nurturing.

Again, there is much to be learnt from this approach. We see event teams constantly run ragged by clients, customers and stakeholders, and that’s before our own internal teams get involved. Wellbeing is an investment that Gill has made visible through an individual, but the effect can be the same, just by having processes in place that understand that events are stressful and demanding on the staff that run them. If they can get the best care, they can pass it on to the attendees. 

It’s also clear that this approach to care is as important to festival goers as it should be to our own audiences, and care is in the detail. It’s not just about who your acts are, it’s about sweating the details of how your audience is consuming your experience. The temperature, the lighting, the underfoot feeling… down to the food they’re eating. Events and exhibitions would do well to test out the small details. How do the chairs in a seminar feel after you’ve sat on them for an hour? Is the food served at lunchtime going to cause carb-coma’s in the afternoon? Has the organiser lived the event they are serving to their guests? If they haven’t then they are going to lack empathy with it and that can’t be good.

This is all about moving with the times, but it’s also about the organisation of events being done properly. There is a right and wrong way to do things, and this is an industry often blighted by those trying to cut corners at the expense of the audience’s safety or enjoyment. This is not the Gill Tee way. In short, while so many events and event companies are public proponents of the move towards wellness – or sustainability, or diversity, or inclusion – the proof in the pudding is the eating, and it comes across, both highly visually and subliminally, when you attend Black Deer. 

This care has amazingly positive consequences beyond a better audience experience, it increases engagement. Festivals are lessons in engagement, they bring together communities behind a common interest, desire, or fandom, and they reflect and reward that community. However, in the wider world of events, engagement between delegate and event remains a continual challenge. Simple things like food requirements, accessibility needs, and arrival times makes the event organiser’s life easier, and the event slicker, more sustainable and less wasteful. 

This element of care means a closer bond is forming between Black Deer and its audiences, a bond that was pushed to the limit when the show had to close the week before it was due to open in 2021, as the lockdown continued to put pay to a year’s worth of preparation. So, what is the secret in getting this right, at the moment of high stress, “For us, it’s always been about honesty and emotion. During the pandemic we needed to show that we were hurting too, and that we shared their (audiences) pain,” comments Gill. “We wanted to play the long game and ensure that they saw us working towards a positive future. We lost a hell of a lot of money, gave money back, but also asked for them to commit to us when we returned, and that we’d make it worth it for them. We offered them merchandise and gifts as a signal of our commitment and a chance to support us as a business. It was a horrible time, but it built a bond that is still in place today.”

This bond not only engenders loyalty, but fandom. Black Deer has created advocates within its community which means that marketing comes from within as well as through external activity. People like Black Deer, not just because of its excellent product, but because of its unambiguous personality. That means the show can keep clear channels of communication open that make organisation that little bit easier. It provides marketing insight, and in turn it allows the organisers to tweak the programme as the audience evolved. 

An event professional once said that great events have great cultures and great personalities. Gill Tee’s comes across in everything you touch at Black Deer. 

So, here are five things we learned while speaking to Gill:

1. Our job is to create worlds; look at the user experience across every hour of the day, and every aspect of the show. From functional to dynamic, young and old, day or night visitor, and how it/they all fit together

2. Events should stimulate every sense, not just sight; they’re about smell, taste and touch

3. Wellness is important, what is concrete on the inside of the business is reflected on its outside persona

4. Engagement comes with personality, honesty and integrity. Communities need to be nurtured and protected, even at the most difficult times

5. Live the experience of your guests. If you haven’t lived it, then you can’t expect them to love it