Planning for a successful event starts with research and feedback. This primer is a collection of tips to help make your event more valuable, engaging and worth the effort.
I have had the pleasure of being hired by hundreds amazing conference organizers and speaking in front of tens of thousands of attendees. Each experience has taught me so much about what a great speaker can bring to an event, not only from the audiences perspective but from the organizers perspective as well. I’ve learned many lessons along the way about what it takes to put on an amazing event.
While there may be no such thing as perfection, there are some consistent tips and tactics that seem to contribute to the makeup of a successful conference. I’ve been taking notes for the last decade and have created this guide to help organizers attendees alike. Enjoy!
There is no such thing as over communication
The more you share information and the easier you make it to find, the more comfortable attendees will be and the fewer time-exhausting questions organizers will receive. We all have the tendency to think that people who have purchased tickets will remember what they’ve signed up for and where they need to be. But nothing could be further from the truth. Err on the side of communicating the all-important where/when/how details of the event. This information should be delivered via regular emails and presented front and center on the website for the event.
Make it easy for people to get there
Even with all of the technology that we have at our disposal, it amazing how many people fail to add the address and direction to their calendars. Provide easily located links to and descriptions of transportation from nearby airports, train stations, and cities. You might even consider providing a FAQ page for attendees to coordinate ride-shares. These pages can work well, but only if they’re publicized by the organizers.
Plan ahead to get the best deal on hotels and conference space
Conferences can be expensive for everyone involved. But there’s nothing like booking in advance to get a good deal. Call up the hotel or venue and try to get someone on the phone to negotiate. One event I speak at regularly hosts their conference in a different city every year. To control costs, they book their venue 4 years in advance. While you probable don’t have to go to that extreme, it’s clearly worth planning ahead.
Ramp up the communication frequency once the event starts
Once the conference gets started, theres’ no harm in sending out a multiple emails per day outlining the plans for that day of the event and recapping that events that have occurred. Include Keynote speakers and times, social events, meal plans, highlighted sessions, even the daily weather report can all help the attendee be more prepared when they reach the event.
Why feedback it so valuable
Create a process for questions and complaints
Each of these emails and all communication from conference organizers must include where and how attendees can ask questions or report problems about the event. Attendees will have questions and if you don’t clearly provide somewhere to ask them, simple questions can become angry public complaints on Twitter. Regardless of the contact method, assign someone to respond to requests promptly, especially during the conference.
If you have common questions, add them to the FAQ
It’s a given that you’ll be asked some questions over and over again.
Will sessions be recorded? And, if so, when/where will recordings be available?
Is there parking at the venue?
What’s the Wi-Fi password?
Where is the closest coffee shop?
What are the options for food?
Delegate and train as much as you can
Putting on a conference or event is a lot of work, with a lot of details. One of the largest mistakes organizers make is trying to handle all of these details themselves, thus becoming over-taxed bottlenecks. This inevitably leads to errors that could be prevented through delegation to trusted lieutenants.
Some of the roles helpful for most events to fill are:
volunteer coordinator to assist the volunteers in their duties and make sure all of the bases are covered
speaker coordinator to make sure the speakers have what they need to provide conference content (and to make sure they get to the correct room at the correct time)
A/V wrangler to field any questions and problems with the audio/video system and liaise with any contracted A/V staff
room monitors to assist with seating, moderation, and keeping order during sessions
These lieutenants will only be as effective as their training, so you must provide the information and skills they need in order to perform well in these roles. Simply throwing them into the mix and hoping they’ll pick it up as they go is a recipe for failure. Taking a little bit of time in advance to provide the necessary training will pay off in huge time savings during the event itself, as well as in more satisfied attendees. Whereas larger, better established conferences can and should offer formal training, for small conferences, a little written documentation on—and discussion of—the duties of each volunteer is a good place to start.
Content is king, but it has to be tailored to the audience
Be aware of—or figure out—the makeup and preferences of your attendees and make sure that all session content is suitable to them as well as the theme of the event. No matter how excited you are about a particular session or keynote, if it’s not pitched to the audience, you will get complaints and poor ratings. A talk that is too basic, too advanced, too demographically narrow, or too far off-topic for the conference is a problem (even if the speaker is famous).
A particular case of content mismatch is sponsored talks and other “corporate” presentations. These are appropriate for some conferences, and not for others, and when attendees encounter them unexpectedly, you will have a major source of public criticism and audience frustration. In general, sponsored talks should be clearly marked as such in the program. People will still go to them if the company or its products are interesting. (And if they’re not, why are they at your conference?)
Use the conference as a content creation event
The value of networking at an event
One of the greatest benefits of a conference is the relationships that you make. Facilitating lobbycon opportunities and moments to grab a face to face conversation, dinner or drink is often worth more than the price of a ticket.
The best way to network, part art, part science
Consider a mobile app for the event
Mobile app for creating and viewing personalized conference schedules are common. Unfortunately, what’s not common is for these apps to be any good. Crashes are frequent. When the apps work, they usually are lacking on the usability front, making finding and using the the information they’re supposed to provide difficult. Sometimes the apps are burdened with advertisements or sponsor pop-ups. Occasionally the schedule data they provide isn’t coming from the same source as the schedule on the website, so they don’t show the most current, accurate information.
Those of us who work in tech are intimately familiar with these problems in our own products—where we would not tolerate them—yet we still allow these issues to negatively affect the experiences of our event attendees.
A Bigger room is not always better
A small room that’s packed is better than a big room that’s empty. There’s no such thing as the perfect sized room, but the same discomfort of having a bunch of no-shows at your dinner party is experienced when you have a keynote or workshop with lots of empty seats. Far better to plan for standing room only. While a good speaker will insist on the few people sitting in the back of an empty room to move up front so everyone can be together, there is great power in the community and excitement of an overflowing venue.
Speaker compensation and getting your money's worth
I understand the challenge of finding just the right speaker for your event and compensation is tricky. In my professional role of leading go-to-market teams, I have been responsible for hundreds of events, from small team trainings to large multi day conferences. I learned quickly that the success of an event came down to the quality of the speakers. If they nailed it, everything was awesome. If they didn’t or worse, turned your stage into an infomercial, it was a better luck next time story.
Some speakers are not going to be willing to speak at your event based on the terms that you’ve structured. It helps to have a total budget in mind and be willing to build your roster holistically to fit within your overall budget. It’s tough when you get your heart/mind set on a particular speaker and they opt out based on fees.
You might consider looking for other ways to help compensate speakers and add value to the fee you can pay.
Offering them professionally-produced videos of their presentations to use on their speaker reel.
Doing a mailing (email) to help promote their book, product or service.
Referring them other work.
Open a forum for attendees before and after the event
Conferences are a great way to meet new people or to connect with folks you’ve known for a long time. They’re also wonderful for opportunistic meetups, but the event can enable serendipity by providing resources.
Providing a chat mechanism of some sort can do wonders for enabling community among the attendees: a Twitter hashtag, a private Facebook Group, a Slack team, a group, or whatever mechanism makes the most sense for your community. Once these options are set up, be sure to communicate them often so attendees can easily find information about how to network with each other.
Stay connected during the entire event
Anticipate bad wifi and plan for good
Event goers live and die by their wifi connection, never stop doing your best to provide a stable and functioning Wi-Fi network for the event. But prepare for the worst, and don’t require Wi-Fi for conference attendance. For instance, if the schedule is only available online, come up with an offline version—even simply a bulletin board—that attendees can rely on regardless of Wi-Fi availability.
Also, if your event is held in a hotel, contract elsewhere to provide your own Wi-Fi. Hotel Wi-Fi is rarely adequate to meet the needs of even a non-technical audience. For a room full of online-natives? That hotel Wi-Fi will undoubtedly slow to a standstill at the most inopportune moments causing attendees will be distracted and frustrated.
Make a plan for your entire team to be included
Event is a ton of work, with so many hours of planning and organizing that happens behind the scenes. Sometimes the most impactful thing you can do for your team is offer the kind words of “thank you” and “job well done”.
Figuring out creative ways to include the rest of your organization can have really positive ramifications, event if they can’t attend in person.
Follow up is the ket to a successful event
Participating in a conference can be like drinking from a fire-hose. So many new ideas, lessons, relationship and opportunities, it can be a bit overwhelming. The key to turning any event into a solid win is in the follow up.
Stay healthy and hydrated
Thanks to the team at Placester for helping to put the visuals of this guide together.
Interested in having Seth speak at your next event?
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