Can you believe that it's been a month since we were all together in Naas, Co. Kildare at Thriveabetes 2016? Myself and they team are well recovered at this stage and have made some decisions for the next Thriveabetes that we would like to share with you.  

DATE - Spring 2018 We have decided that the next Thriveabetes will actually be a 2018 event. And we are looking for a date in February or early March. We are excited about having a spring event.

VENUE As you can imagine, it's takes a lot of time an effort to find suitable, large enough venues and neither myself, Rebecca or Christine we're ready to launch into that straight away. And this is what influenced us to wait until Spring 2018. We have a lot of the research done already and we will be stay in the major motorway areas of the east. We hope to have this all in the bag by this coming March/April.

COST Our fantastic event is a costly affair, even though all of the organisers volunteer their time and services for free and we have subsidies from the exhibition, sponsors and fundraising, we still end up with a shortfall of approximately 4,000. So, we have had to review our ticket price structure for 2018. We will still work very hard to keep it affordable but there will be a major price increase for the child tickets and a small increase on the adult tickets. If might soften this blow knowing that we will invest more of the ticket price into the lunch we provide.

FUNDING & SPONSORS

We are currently looking for donations of raffle prizes for our fundraising raffle next September. We hope that this will supplement some of the cost of Thriveabetes 2018 and keep the cost to our attendees down.

SPEAKERS AND TOPICS The survey we emailed to you provide so many ideas for future speakers and new topics. We will be hoping to have speakers from 2015 and 2016 return. And we have a lot of interest from our Irish role models too.

We feel that we learned a lot about layout and facilities by making a few oversights this year and those are the best lessons to learn. We will take these lessons and use them to promise to deliver an even better event again in 2018.

In the meantime, here are couple of photos from Naas to relive the moments.

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