We Are
Connect
Community.
A Manchester agency that plans and runs recurring events and campaigns for brands, companies and venues. Built on one idea: people should leave having met each other, and want to come back.
Our Belief
Loud is easy.
Useful
is rare.
Think about the last free sample pushed into your hand at a festival. Most of them end up in the bin. That's what a lot of brand activity feels like: something in the way.
We do it the other way round. Every format we run is something people would choose to walk into even if no brand was paying for it. A cooking night, a match, a games night, a place to recover after a race. Once someone opts in, the brand stops being in the way and becomes the thing that helped.
And we keep it going. One good night is nice. A room people come back to every week is what actually builds something.
"You don't need to buy an audience. Somebody in this city already built it. Your job is to make what they're doing better, not put your logo on it."
Anas Husein, Founder
Why Now
Somewhere To Go
That Isn't Home Or Work.
The sociologist Ray Oldenburg called them third places. Home is the first place and work is the second. The third is somewhere you go regularly, see the same faces and talk to people you didn't arrive with. The local pub, the community centre, the youth club, the cafe where they know your order.
A lot of those places have gone. Work moved home. Pubs closed or got too expensive. Many community spaces were council or charity run and shut after years of budget cuts.
You can see the result. In 2018 the UK became the first country to appoint a Minister for Loneliness. Young people are hit hardest. The generation that's online more than any before it is also the one most likely to say loneliness is affecting them.
But people haven't stopped wanting it. Run clubs exploded because the run is the excuse and the coffee and conversation after are the point. Give people a reason to turn up at the same time every week and they will. That's what Connect builds, with brands paying for the room so it doesn't cost people a fortune to be in it.
adults in Great Britain feel lonely at least some of the time.
ONS, Dec 2023 to Jan 2024
feel lonely always or often. That's millions of people living with chronic loneliness.
ONS, Dec 2023 to Jan 2024
of 16 to 25 year olds say loneliness has a negative effect on their mental health, against 54% of all adults.
BACP, 2025
of people surveyed made new friends through fitness groups, as run club participation grew 59% in a year.
Strava Year in Sport, 2024
Sources: Office for National Statistics, BACP, Strava.
How We Think
What We Stand For
The way we judge a night is simple. If one person is still talking about it years later, and came back the week after, it worked. Everything below comes from that.
The question we ask about every event: are people looking at us, or at each other? If it's the first one, we change it. The brand makes the room happen. It isn't the point of the room.
Our rooms are for regular Manchester people, not influencers or a guest list. Nobody gets in because of their follower count, and nobody is there just to be filmed.
A brand has to fit the people in the room and bring something useful. If it doesn't, we say no, even when the money is there. That's what keeps the rooms worth being in.
A table of twenty people who actually talk beats a crowd of five hundred who scroll. We'd rather run a small night that feels personal than a big one nobody remembers.
Every format starts with something real, like eating alone, struggling to make friends as an adult, or sport costing too much. If we can't say why a night exists, we don't run it.
Sometimes we build something new. Sometimes the smarter move is to back a club or group that already has trust. We're clear about which one we're doing and why.
Who's Behind It
Built from
the inside.
Connect is run by Anas Husein. Before this, he spent three years on the creative team at Bournemouth 7s, a sport and music festival with 460+ teams and around 30,000 people across one weekend.
Watching brand activations up close, season after season, the pattern was clear. The ones people remembered were useful and kept showing up. The ones that got binned were loud and gone by the next day.
Connect is built around the first kind. Being one person running it means you deal with the person doing the work, from the first call to the last session.
See Our ServicesWorking With Us
Four Ways In
Back a single session, a full season of recurring events, or a campaign built for you. You get presence, content and real numbers, not just a logo on a banner.
Original ideas made for your brand or cause, planned for the build-up, the day and the days after. Priced on the idea, not the hours.
Away days, socials and client evenings built around your team. Food, games or sport, all run for you on simple 30-day terms.
Venues with spare rooms and groups with an audience. We bring the format, the organising and often the sponsor, so it works for everyone.