What Curio Conference is all about

Wondering if Curio is for you? This is what we’re all about.

Curio is a conference about harnessing your creativity and curiosity to make great content. It’s happening in Brighton on 29th November 2019.

We believe creativity and curiosity are the driving forces behind great content. That’s why we (me, Lauren Pope and my co-founder Lou Whitfield) started Curio: to share stories, ideas and inspiration about how to harness and nurture those forces in your work.

What can you expect from Curio?

• Case studies showing how asking difficult questions, doing research, or thinking differently led to brilliant content
• Approaches for harnessing and applying curiosity in your work through research, data and insight
• Ways to nurture and develop your creativity, make your ideas a reality, or get a creative side hustle up-and-running
• A diverse line-up of speakers.

Who’s Curio for?

• Content people, marketers and creatives from any sector
• Charities, not-for-profits and start-ups who want to tell their story
• Frustrated artists, writers, musicians etc looking for an outlet for their talent alongside a day job

Our mission

1. Be curious

We want Curio to celebrate curiosity and creativity. This means we’ll seek out speakers who we think have a great story to tell about following an interesting thread. Some asked a difficult question, some dug into data or research, some tried to do something in a different way, others are creative powerhouses who inspire us. We want our attendees to follow their curiosity too, so we’ll create opportunities for discussion throughout the day.

Finally, we want to run the event with curiosity. It’s an adventure and we want to experiment, learning as we go.

2. Be open

Being open means a few different things to us. Firstly, it’s about being open to feedback at every stage of the process. We’ve already had helpful suggestions that we’ve put into action. So tell us what you’re thinking — we’ll listen.

Secondly, it’s about being able to open the event up to as many people as we can. A lot of the brilliant conferences we both want to go to cost hundreds, even thousands, of pounds. Putting on an event takes a lot of time, energy and money, and justifies those ticket prices. But it puts them out of reach for many people who’d love to go along. So we’re keeping ticket prices as low as possible and implementing a pricing structure that we hope will make the event fair and accessible. We’ve also got free tickets available for anyone who can’t afford to attend otherwise.

Another part of this is being open to hearing what we need to do to be accessible. There’s step-free access to our venue. We can reserve you a seat at the back or the end of a row if you need one for any reason. We’ll do pronoun stickers. We welcome babies and breastfeeding. We can hire a sign language interpreter. If you want to come but something’s getting in the way, let us know so we can find a solution.

3. Be good

We also wondered if there was a way we could do a little good as we went along.

We’ll donate 20% of any profits we make to The Clock Tower Sanctuary, a charity that supports homeless young people in Brighton. One in 69 people in our city are homeless — the work they do is so important.

It’s also important to us to keep the amount of waste we create to a minimum. That means no lanyards, no plastic bags, no bottled water, no printed agendas.

That’s what we’re all about. If you like the sound of it, buy a ticket at curioconference.com or sign up to our mailing list.