No sector — outside of medical — was as profoundly affected by the global pandemic as was the event industry. It is where quality social interaction is the main ingredient of any memorable gathering. The East End depends so much on event design and execution for all of the philanthropic galas that support everything from the arts to healthcare to the environment and more. The panic of the pivot that needed to ensue was a huge undertaking, as thousands of extravaganzas big and small had to be postponed, shut down, or reimagined. To survive as an industry, there needed to be fast and creative thinking. Technology had to be learned and integrated, while the messaging had to be powerfully precise.
Who better to understand this historic moment of the past year than Philip Dufour, the President and Creative Director of The Dufour Collaborative, the premiere design experience firm that has navigated the pandemic without any layoffs or furloughs. Mr. Dufour is a world-leading expert in bringing people together, having served in roles ranging from Social Secretary to the Vice President of the United States under the Clinton-Gore administration to Director of Development and Events for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation.
“We don’t use the term event planner — we are really considered producers of the guest experience,” Dufour explained. “Our process is always to start at the end and work our way back so when a client comes to us, whether it’s a corporate or a non-profit, is to ask what it is that they want guests to feel when they leave their event. What is it that you will have wanted them to see and feel and what is it that will compel them to come back again.”
It has been a while since Mr. Dufour has been in the Hamptons, like when he was the development director for three years for the Elizabeth Glazer Pediatric AIDS Foundation for whom he produced an event here. His experience with politics also often brought him to the East End for fundraisers. His attention to detail must be exquisitely laser-focused. We inquired about how he organizes such events where so many lives are affected.
Dufour calls it the “treadmill.” It’s a classic pitfall that when an event ends, the gears shift immediately to thinking about the next year instead of analyzing how the last one was received. He explained further, “It becomes this thing that is somewhat hard to break in terms of really taking the time to assess or reassess what works and doesn’t. What we do is try to really arc backwards so that if the Humane Society of the Hamptons, for instance, had an event that we were privileged enough to produce, I want to start with where they want things to be when it’s over and arc back to every detail. This starts with the save-the-date, the invitation, every piece of the way it looks and sounds, what is being spoken about on the podium, what the videos look like, and how is that thread woven throughout each of those pieces so that it has the continuity of its message. You don’t give it all away at the very beginning because you want there to be elements that are revealing. You want there to be moments that people learn something or are surprised by something.” He expounded that all of those elements are as important as the decor and the crescendo of the program, so that people don’t get bored, “but also you continue to pique their interest into why it is that they’re there and why it’s important for them to be there.”
“At the end of the day we’re storytellers,” Dufour said.
Any great event will tell a tale — whether it’s a wedding, bat mitzvah, or a gala. “At the end of the day we’re storytellers, you know,” he exclaimed. He sounds much like a novelist, as he explained that the detailed nuances are what make a memorable story.
“You obviously have a very discerning audience in the Hamptons,” he said. “In that people appreciate when you have taken the time to focus on the small details, even if they’re just simple nods that someone might not quite get exactly but they understand that there’s been a lot of thought that went into it. I often think that a lot of people get lost when they’re doing these things, that they fail to focus on the super-fine details. If you are thinking through an overarching theme, this makes the biggest difference.”
Covid-19 upended every element of the event industry. Every single one. Somehow Dufour managed to navigate the turbulence without any furloughs. The man knows how to pivot. “It was pretty close to a year ago my husband and I had just gotten back from a trip abroad that, of course, if we had waited one week we would not have gone!” he laughed. “I remember at the very beginning of March, we produced a big event for a group called Vital Voices. It’s a big 1,500 people event at the Kennedy Center where we manage the entire front of the house. I remember being in our third seating meeting when we were beginning to get rumblings from people starting to get nervous about coming. We also had a three-day conference for a small 250-300 very high-profile audience at the Conrad in New York City. We learned over that process that what you’re really doing is that you’re producing a television show. This means that the content has to be more precise and more concise. We had to pivot that in about two weeks to a completely all-virtual event and I’m grateful that I have really smart people who work with me who understood how to do that quickly. The virtual conference was ironic since we actually had greater undivided attention by the attendees for three straight days!”
With live events, there are infinite ways to lose the audience’s attention. For example, speeches come and go with people chattering through them. One may miss the “pull-at-the-heartstrings” video because they’re in the restroom. It taught Dufour a lesson about how the content they are putting together is really important. They quickly moved all of the events they had on the docket to the Fall, which was hightailed to the fourth quarter and now late 2021 or 2022. “We have learned how to engage donors for nonprofits, how to engage stakeholders for other groups, we encouraged one group whose event scheduled, to not go dormant for ten months while we moved their event and created a series of webinars for them that allow them to stay in touch with their stakeholders and database. There was an event where we sent out an invite on a Monday and by Wednesday morning we had three thousand people signed up.”
Dufour explained that they couldn’t just sit around and cry during those early days of the pandemic. His superpower is admittedly that they are an industry of problem solvers. While this was devastating in the beginning, it gave him the opportunity to recreate something completely new. “I have a friend who’s in the same business and he mentioned that so rare in life we have a chance to reset everything. How we help people to continue to raise money for really important causes like the Elizabeth Dole Foundation For Military Caregivers,” he illustrates. “They raised as much money as they had years before because people saw the promise of what they do. Because it was virtual, we were able to engage a lot of people that we would have never been able to get into the same room, like Adam Driver and Darius Rucker. That’s been the other advantage of virtual is that it allows you to engage people to be a part of your message who you could have never gotten before. Tomorrow we’re producing a series we call Great Americans for the Smithsonian Museum of American History where they present a medal to a great American for variety of reasons — tomorrow is Dr. Fauci.”
The effects of the pandemic are not only about the economy and jobs but of mental health and how we’ll need to heal collectively. Dufour believes there will be a lingering effect, such as masks being a part of our lives for a long time, an item that will live in our “briefcase or purse or pocket, that if we feel uncomfortable we will be putting it on. I think we’re going to have to get used to temperature checks as a constant, and that buffets probably won’t be around for a while. But I’m optimistic. Without getting political, normal coming back is good and that stuff is boring, yeah, but how grateful are we that we’re over the hump.”
Dufour thinks real estate always had an edge with virtual tours and drones and ways of leveraging the Internet to buy and sell homes. No matter the type of live event a person produces, be it an open house or a gala, he has created organizations to help and advocate to Congress and beyond — but most of all, to help. “I became quickly involved in two coalitions that were literally formed at the onset of the pandemic. The DC Events Coalition and The Live Events Coalition which is made up of people all over the country because we’re kind of a different industry and our role is to educate other people about what we do and how we do it. We are some 12 million people in the event industry that brings one trillion dollars to the economy. When the Elizabeth Dole Foundation dinner gets canceled at the Anthem, you know it’s not just the anthem and a few people who lose out — there’s an ecosystem that is related. When the caterer gets canceled, it’s all of the people that grow the food, it’s the people that prepare the food, it’s the people that drive the produce to the caterer, it’s the 1099 workers they bring in for two days before to chop and prepare everything, it’s the valet attendants, it’s the coat check attendants, it’s the people who clean the room. This industry is critical for so many sub-industries.”
Sometimes the way various states have handled the lockdowns and pause-orders feels unfair. Elaborating on how the capacities were determined could easily affect thousands of lives. “What we are trying to get across now is equity, meaning why do restaurants get to have 25% capacity but we can only have 10 people at an event at a hotel. Why can’t we use the same 25% rule? We are really pressing local officials in DC about that and I think that could be used as a model around the country. Of course, we want to be safe about it, we don’t want anyone to get sick, we want to be smart about it. But I’m optimistic. In one month’s time people aged 75 and over were being vaccinated from 14% to 65% so we’re heading in the right direction.”
Having an intimate relationship with politics as Tipper Gore’s Deputy Chief of Staff was the greatest professional experience of Dufour life. “You know, any time you work in the White House, if you take it for granted, than it’s time for you to leave. I never took that for granted. I was the first male Social Secretary — you oversee everything that happens at the Vice President’s residence. My job was to take care of all of the details of running a house but also overseeing all the events they needed so that they could, you know, take care of the business of running the country,” he laughs. “It was a family home. They had two kids still at home so it was also creating an environment that allowed them to be a family that reflects who they were as people but still in keeping with the job of being the Vice President and the wife of the Vice President. I was at state visits so when there was the king of Morocco over for a state visit, we would typically host a big luncheon. But also make sure their home was what they needed it to be for their family.” During the Biden-Harris transition, he advised on the Vice President’s residence which he says hadn’t changed in twenty years.
As we move closer to normal, he urged people in any aspect of the event industry to join the DC Events Coalition, which he explains is very active, such as their every-other-week Tuesday calls, which he says is open to everyone. It was started by six of his competitors who started talking with each other when they wanted to understand what each of them were doing and how they were going to handle all of the live events that were planned. When the bottom fell out, they decided to keep the calls going because it went beyond commiserating to getting down to business in the new normal. For example, they might talk about insurance policies for events and what they might look like going forward.
Dufour also emphasized the national Live Events Coalition which is the one that they help set up to support twenty other coalitions around the nation in various states who advocate on the event industry’s behalf in front of Congress. He said, “We are very vocal in the Rescue Act to help small businesses. We hope that in the next round there will be some things that are a little more specific with event-related issues. The Save Our Venues Act was great for certain venues but it does not include all venue so I would love for people to log on, ask questions, become a member — we’re only as good as we support each other. We have calls that are about legislation, spin off calls about venues are going through. High tides lifts all boats. Be vocal. Be engaged. We’re here to share.”
