WEEKLY UPDATES

                   16 February 2021

2021 BACKSTAGE AND ONSTAGE ARE GOING VIRTUAL

We are always so excited to connect and celebrate with you at our events, and this year is no exception. While we were hoping to be together at our BackStage and OnStage events this year, there are still too many factors* at play with the Covid-19 pandemic for us to hold these events in person. We are of course disappointed we won’t be able to gather with our leaders in Las Vegas for BackStage or with everyone at our planned locations for November OnStage, but we are happy to still connect virtually in a meaningful way. 

Those who attended our 2020 virtual events were thrilled with the experience and received lots of business and creative tips, a chance to network with other demonstrators and Stampin’ Up! staff, and received exciting goodies in the mail. Our virtual events this year will deliver another amazing experience for you!

We have even found that meeting virtually brings you unique benefits such as:

• Easy access to the content for you to watch and re-watch after the event.
• Bringing our events to more of you as you can easily attend without taking days away from home to travel.
• The opportunity to come together virtually without incurring travel costs.

Keep in mind that we will share registration and event details a little later than we typically do since you won’t need the information to book travel. Watch for more details about BackStage starting about a month before registration starts, which we expect to open by the end of May. You’ll start receiving OnStage details by August and registration will occur at some point after BackStage. In the meantime, clear your schedule for the event dates and plan to join us! You can review the dates and high-level information on the pages here:

BackStage@Home
OnStage@Home

While we’re excited to offer these virtual events, we want to emphasize that we still believe it is important to gather in person. As soon as we can safely do that and still meet the objectives of our events, we will be ready to go!

*Some of the factors that complicate us holding in-person events in 2021 involve: 

• Limits on attendee capacity and spacing that would make it hard to meet our attendance goals and provide a beneficial networking opportunity for you.
• Ability to provide the needed information and customer service for things like possible COVID-19 test requirements.
• Most of our markets currently have government-mandated restrictions or travel bans which inhibits us from providing the necessary event staffing due to affected cross-border travel.
• Complications around planning for in-person events when it’s impossible to predict the state of the pandemic and related travel or event restrictions through the rest of 2021.

UPDATES ON THE MAUI INCENTIVE TRIP

As our Maui incentive trip achievers are well aware, the 2020 trip was postponed to 2021 and there are also pandemic-related factors affecting the trip we will hold this year. For example, South Pacific and European achievers will unfortunately not be able to join us on the trip because of their countries’ government-mandated travel bans to Hawaii.  

Some of you may wonder why we are holding the incentive trip in person while our OnTour, BackStage, and OnStage events are all virtual this year. There are many differences between the trip and our other events that we considered when making these decisions. The goal of the incentive trip is to reward demonstrators while the goal of our other events is to gather demonstrators together to learn and network which is harder to facilitate safely in person. Achievers can still enjoy activities in Maui in a safe way as they venture out with their trip guest(s), and in the few instances the achievers gather together, they’ll be able to do so safely outside. Our other events would require sitting indoors with hundreds of people for several hours. Along with this, the spacing and capacity requirements at venues for BackStage and OnStage would severely limit the amount of people able to attend and would prohibit us from meeting our event goals.