Working with Jodie on Balloons Over Waikato was an absolute pleasure. As the lead on marketing for one of the Waikato’s biggest events, Jodie played a key role in keeping the public engaged, informed, and excited prior and during the event.

Jodie brings sharp coordination and a steady hand to a complex event environment, managing messaging across multiple platforms while juggling stakeholder input, media opportunities, and changing logistics. Her clear direction, quick decision-making, and deep understanding of the event’s audience made it easy to collaborate and deliver strong, consistent comms.

On top of that, she’s genuinely great to work with, funny, down-to-earth, and someone who brings good energy to every conversation. It was a privilege to support the 2025 campaign alongside her.

Lightning, as a team, empower people to do their jobs. Their planning, communication and support is exceptional.

The team at Lightning Events are an absolute joy to work with. Their attention to detail, deep understanding of event operations, and joyful attitudes means it’s a total pleasure to work with the whole team and we always look forward to the next time our paths cross.

The Lightning team are in the fortunate position to pull on extensive prior experience of event delivery across a wide range of community led initiatives. We have found that Lightning have developed true partnership relationships with their key stakeholders, not just client/supplier relationships. Their values driven approach has made it easy to do business with them, as we can have robust conversations that ensure we are all focused on equitable and best practice outcomes that are not solely focused on budgets alone.

Working with Lightning is like having a Swiss Army Knife permanently in your back pocket. Regardless of the challenges that you might face in the course of partnership, Lightning are focused in clutch moments and have got all of the in-house skills and experience that you need to make your project or event a success.

We’ve worked on projects with Carla and the wider Lightning team for around 7 years and have no hesitation in endorsing the work they do and the values they hold. The projects we’ve partnered on have varied in scale, type, complexity and purpose, but the Cactus team always approach their work with a professional and personable attitude, build and maintain exceptional relationships and focus on quality experiences for all stakeholders.

Lightning invests heavily in ensuring their events are as safe and accessible as they can be. They understand what it takes to build confidence in their audiences and to ensure the audience welfare is at the centre of everything they do.

Lightning (previously Cactus) have successfully supported TAKA Trust for the last 3 years with event management, project management, coordination of initiatives, sponsorship and funding proposals and general support. They go above and beyond and provide outstanding, professional and 'do what it takes' services. Ka Rawe Lightning team. We love your mahi. Thank you.

Their passion, creativity and commitment shines through in everything they do. Their ability to take others on the journey with them is of great benefit to all stakeholders and the outcomes each project aim to achieve. To deliver public events of scale takes a level headed and calm approach along with exceptional attention to detail, authentic collaboration and a strong team each clear on the part they play and the outcomes being sought. Lightning Events brings all these things and more – hence why we choose to work with them time and time again.