Event Management Services (EMS) Ltd

Carol Baines

Carol Baines is a seasoned international marketing and events management professional with over 15 years experience. Carol specialises in developing events plans that feature innovative conference formats, distinguishing the delegate experience from "the norm", and delivering premium quality, profitable conferences.

Carol's career started at the Royal Society of Chemistry in London running chemistry conferences for academics. She went on to gain a solid grounding in the commercial events business at International Business Communications in London, one of the largest event organisers in the world, where she managed 15 profitable IT conferences and seminars annually. She then moved to BIS Strategic Decisions, later to become Giga Information Group, an international analyst advisory firm that offered IT management events within its product portfolio.

Carol spent the 8 years growing the Giga events business worldwide from $0.5m to $8m annually, first in Europe and later spending 4 years in North America. Carol drove the transformation of the business to align with a new corporate strategy, originated the event sponsorship programme at the organisation, and served as a member of the management team through the IPO process. The business grew to 20 major conferences, plus a substantial seminar series, attracting 5,000 attendees per annum. Carol created a range of innovative conference formats, pioneering for example, an online, dynamic one-to-one meetings scheduler for 1,500 delegates at the annual GigaWorld IT Forum, back in 1999. Carol finally returned to Europe to head up international marketing programmes as the firm expanded globally, before leaving Giga to found EMS.

Carol holds a BA in Modern European History from Warwick University and a Diploma in Marketing and Business Studies from City of London University.