What I learned from Andrea’s workshop: I had been choosing venues from memory
She has mapped 131 event venues and 62 hotels across Brussels. The map is useful. The reason she built it is more useful.
Sebastián Rodríguez Pérez is a European campaign strategist with direct experience running and advising campaigns for some of Europe's largest pro-European organisations. He founded the European Campaign Playbook to codify practitioner knowledge across the EU's 27 political environments and make it accessible to campaign professionals, advocacy teams, and civic organisations working at the European level. His work spans electoral strategy, EU public affairs, digital campaigning, and the integration of AI tools into political communication workflows.
Disclosure
Sebastián Rodríguez Pérez is the founder of the European Campaign Playbook and Campaign Intelligence Library. He has worked with pro-European organisations across multiple EU member states. He maintains editorial non-partisanship in all published content; where articles relate to campaigns or organisations he has directly worked with, this is disclosed within the article. He holds no current positions in active electoral campaigns.
What it covers
What Andrea Bittnerová’s workshop on organising EU policy events changed about the way I choose a venue, built around the public map of Brussels venues she maintains.
Who it is for
EU public affairs teams, trade associations, NGOs and advocacy organisations, think tanks, corporate affairs teams, consultancies and project consortia organising events in Brussels.
When to use it
When you know what your event is for and are ready to choose where it happens. Shortlist from the map, then visit before you commit.
Key takeaway
The room shapes the conversation that happens inside it. Choose the venue for the event you are designing, and go and see it before you sign.
In brief
- I used to choose venues from memory: the usual place, or whatever sits in the EU quarter.
- Andrea maintains a public map of 131 Brussels event venues and 62 hotels, sorted by type, each with the capacity of its largest room.
- It has been viewed more than eighty thousand times, which tells you how many of us start from scratch every time.
- The sorting taught me more than the list: by type, rather than by neighbourhood or price.
- Rows of fixed seats produce a different conversation from small tables. The room is part of the programme.
- Her one rule I would now never break: go and see it before you sign.
Framework
Venue type to job
Start from what you need to happen in the room, then pick the type of space that makes it easy. Each type carries its own trade-offs.
| Layer | Label | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Dedicated event venue | Scale and structure | Conferences, plenaries and multi-room programmes where the logistics need to be invisible. |
| Hotel | Multi-day and international | Participants who travel, several days, and people who need to sleep where they meet. |
| Museum or cultural venue | Atmosphere | Memorable settings where the place itself carries part of the message. |
| Restaurant or bar | Informality | Networking, dinners and exchanges that work better when the hierarchy flattens. |
| Co-working space | Working sessions | Smaller roundtables, workshops and seminars where people need tables and whiteboards. |
| Institutional space | Access | Proximity to the institutions, usually with operational constraints attached. |
I had been choosing venues from memory
I have organised a fair number of events in Brussels, and until recently I chose the venue the way almost everyone I know chooses it. The place we used last time. The place a colleague mentioned. Whatever happens to sit inside the EU quarter. Then I designed the programme around whatever that room turned out to be.
Andrea Bittnerová works the other way round, and in her workshop on organising EU policy events she showed us why. She has been writing Brussels venues down for years. The result is a public map of event venues across the city, sorted by type, with the capacity of the largest room recorded for each one. There are 131 event venues on it and 62 hotels. It has been viewed more than eighty thousand times, which tells you how many of us are solving this problem from a standing start every single time.
What changed my thinking was the sorting rather than the list. Laying venues out by type, rather than by neighbourhood or by price, makes the real question visible: what do you need to happen in that room, and which kind of space makes that easy rather than difficult?
The room changes the conversation
Andrea’s argument, and the part I have repeated most often since, is that a venue is part of the programme design. The physical arrangement of a space decides what kind of exchange is possible inside it, before anyone has said a word.
Rows of fixed seating facing a stage produce one kind of event: people listen, and a few of them ask a question at the end. Small round tables produce another: people talk to each other, and whoever is at the front has to work to win attention back. A museum produces a different atmosphere from a hotel ballroom. A restaurant changes the hierarchy between a director and a junior policy officer in a way that a formal auditorium quietly reinforces.
None of those is better in the abstract. They are better or worse for the thing you are trying to achieve. If your objective is for twenty practitioners to compare how they are implementing a new framework, a tiered lecture theatre is working against you for the entire two hours. I have booked that room. It did not go well.
| Venue type | Often useful for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Dedicated event venue | Conferences, plenaries, multi-room programmes | Cost, and rooms that feel corporate whatever you do to them |
| Hotel | Multi-day events and international participants | Minimum catering spend and inflexible AV packages |
| Museum or cultural venue | Atmosphere and memorable experiences | Restrictions on catering, noise and what can be fixed to walls |
| Restaurant or bar | Networking, dinners, informal exchange | Acoustics, and no real space for a presentation |
| Co-working space | Roundtables, workshops, seminars | Capacity limits and shared access with other tenants |
| Institutional space | Access to the institutions | Security, access times and rules you do not control |
Never book a venue you have not seen
This was the rule Andrea would not budge on, and the one I would now take without argument. Go to the venue. Walk the route your participants will walk, from the metro stop to the registration desk to the room.
Photographs are taken by people who want you to book. They will not tell you:
- how confusing the building is to a first-time visitor
- whether two people at the same small table can actually hear each other
- where registration can physically go without blocking the entrance
- what the lighting does to faces, and to photographs
- whether there is a smell
- whether the breakout rooms are real rooms or a corner with a screen
- what happens when two sessions end at once and everyone wants coffee
- whether the venue manager answers emails
That last one predicts more about your event day than the photographs ever will. Arrive with your questions written down: capacity, room configuration, accessibility, microphones, screens, power, wifi, interpretation, registration area, signage, cloakroom, toilets, catering flow, breakout rooms, security, supplier access, emergency arrangements, cancellation conditions, and the name of the person who will be there on the day.
Where the map stops being useful
A map tells you what exists. It cannot tell you whether you should be holding the event at all, who needs to be in the room, which format gives your objective a chance, or how to write an invitation a Commission official will answer. Those decisions come first, and the venue follows from them.
That ordering is the part I had backwards, and it is the part Andrea spends most of the workshop on. By the time you open the map, you should already be able to say in one sentence what participants will be able to do by the end of the day that they could not do at the start.
She runs it again next week: Organising EU policy events, level 1: introduction and starter pack, on Tuesday 20 October. Strategy, format, timing and invitations, and you leave with the starter pack.
If you already run events and want the harder material, level 2, from plan to reality, runs on Friday 23 October. That one is about what you do when the plan meets the day.