You have to move faster when leading in a crisis

A new job, a major event transitioned online and an events company to grow in a pandemic – it’s been a dramatic year for Phil Loose. Essential Christian’s CEO discusses the changing face of Spring Harvest

- Phil Loose

Phil, 2020 has been a transformational year for Spring Harvest. What it was like for the team taking such a huge event online with less than a month’s notice?

It was about pioneering, perseverance and partnership. Spring Harvest takes 18 months to plan and everything was ready to go. It was a Friday, the first lorries were packed and we were making last-minute preparations. Then the difficult but inevitable decision was made – we needed to cancel and Butlin’s would shortly close their doors for several months. It was full lockdown, and not only did the event stop, but all the team left to work from home.

You had an events team raring to go, thousands of guests expecting to come – how did you manage that?

We took the weekend to think and pray, then on Monday we took the decision to take Spring Harvest online as “Spring Harvest Home”. All the speakers were asked to record their talks at home, using phones or laptops, then the team built Spring Harvest online. This sense of pioneering brought a lot of energy with it.

As Spring Harvest was the first Christian event to be told it couldn’t happen physically and the first to go online, there was no roadmap to follow! But in a crisis you have to adapt, so we learned fast, persevered, and took steps into the online world, where we’ve rapidly become pioneers able to help other organisations facing similar challenges.

How did people respond?

It was amazing. We had 187,000 devices connect to our YouTube channel. But in our house four of us watched on one device, so the number who watched it was definitely more than that. Our YouTube channel went from 1,700 subscribers to 33,000.