Tell us about the event and how it came about.

It was definitely the highlight of my career. It's one of those events you have an inkling about, that it's going to be something great, but when the conversation first started it was a very small idea. 

Al Brown the chef wanted to do something after the flooding and the impact of Cyclone Gabrielle, but wasn’t sure what, and was throwing around a few ideas. The thing that we all know in this industry when a crisis happens is feeding people. That's our love language. So we had this idea of hosting NZ's biggest dinner party. If restaurants could open their doors and people could come and share a kai and how they were feeling about the situation and donate money towards the Mayoral Relief Funds, that would be our way of being able to do something. So, when we first met, he said to me I've got this idea and I said Restaurant Association could support this and make that happen. He said: “There's some people who can organise and there's some people who can make gravy, and I cannot organise,” and I said “Well, I can't make gravy. So I'll do the organising and you do the gravy.” And it was a match made in heaven.

We had an amazing group of people and companies that came together just out of the goodness of their hearts. We pulled together the most epic outpouring of wine from New Zealand winegrowers - we ended up with over 3,500 bottles of wine donated, we had over 150 restaurants who opened their doors on a Monday night to 6,500 ticket holders who went to the event, and we've raised $370,000 which was phenomenal.

How did Humanitix handle all the traffic?

Not once did Humanitix crash. I did say at one point, I think we're going to break Humanitix especially when I just had to keep adding event after event because we ran each individual restaurant as their own event. We did this so they could have their own profile and manage their own event, and pull reports for their own ticket sales and share their own direct link. We were worried at one stage that we were going to get a call from the team saying, what are you doing, and why are you adding this many events? So we’re really happy that it worked so well and it all went so smoothly.

What was your process for creating so many events in such a short timeframe?

In one week we gathered 156 different registrations and turned them into events on Humanitix because we could just copy one event and change small details in it. It was super quick and really easy to facilitate. People applied via an online form - we asked them to give us all the information that we needed for the tickets, and once we set up one profile, it was really easy as we just duplicated it. Then we literally just changed out the event name and the image and that was it. We got into the routine of adding them every morning because most of them came through overnight, and each morning we would make little adjustments and then they'd be live straight away. As soon as they applied and we added them on, they could start selling tickets.

What kind of support were you getting from Humanitix?

Darren's like my speed dial. I always call him up and say, “So I thought about this thing that I want to do, how can I do that in Humanitix? I've got these 75 moving parts but I want it to look like this and function like this,” and he always goes, “Let me have a think about it and talk to the team” and then he'll come back and go “This is how we think we would do it” and I go “Oh that bit doesn't quite work” and he's like “Okay, this is how you could do that separately.” He's really great at giving me options because he gets that I'm doing some non-traditional things through Humanitix. I feel like every time I talk to him, I learn a new little trick. 

With this most recent event, it was like a crash course in next level Humanitix. We learnt a lot of stuff that we didn't know that we had capability to do, because we ran 156 individual events through the platform. When you're putting in that kind of quantity, you can't help but pick up things that you haven't seen before.