Tag: meeting planning best practices


[Webinar] Mission Critical: How One Association Transformed its Live Event to Virtual in Record Time

This is not a typical story. The American Association of Suicidology’s annual meeting had been growing steadily in recent years. When their reimagined conference couldn’t take place in Portland, Ore., in late April, staff and volunteers went into overdrive to transition the physical meeting to a virtual one in a matter of days.They knew how … [Read more…]

Five-Step Framework for Effective Collaborative Design

Your conference strategy should include a plan to inject fresh content or experiences each year as part of an ongoing improvement process. There are a million ways to make these improvement plans. Some work and many don’t. Working with one of our clients, we devised a simple framework to help develop innovative plans for meaningful … [Read more…]

Your Conference Content Has Magnetic Pull

Content marketing has grown by leaps and bounds during the past five years. Unfortunately, too few event organizers fully embrace the long-tail, pull benefits of content marketing. Likewise, many conference professionals have no idea what embracing the long-tail, pull benefits of content marketing even means. It’s a foreign concept to them. Most marketing and communications … [Read more…]

Ninja Moves for Improved Conference Session Marketing

Better session copy helps put butts in seats! As conference education trumps the exhibit hall experience at many association meetings, or creeps into your trade show experience to create a solutions-driven, holistic experience for your attendees, upping your game with session titles, descriptions, and learning objectives has become more important than ever. In 2013, we … [Read more…]

Getting More Value from Conference Keynote Speakers

Not long ago, becoming a professional speaker was a third step in a thought leaders career path. Many built their expertise in an industry or function, shifted to consulting and then wrote a book to launch their speaking career. In today’s digital age, the path to creating a thought leader platform, leading to speaking gigs, … [Read more…]

Four Stupendous Strategic Steps You Should Practice Regularly

One of the biggest challenges we face—especially nonprofit association and conference professionals–is spending adequate time thinking. For some reason, we believe that doing is better than thinking. When we do something, we seem to make progress. Well, at least that’s what we tell ourselves. When we think, there doesn’t seem to be any forward movement. … [Read more…]

What a CEO Can Do For Your Conference

Wanted: An individual with a laser focus on, and advocate for, the conference customer. Someone to educate leadership on the advantages of being customer and experience focused. A silo buster. A strategic professional with a high empathy quotient. Many conferences are planned and implemented leveraging a variety of departmental silos and often, several volunteer committees. … [Read more…]

In Today’s Economy, Significance Precedes Momentum

So many people ask me, “If ______________ (fill in the blank) is so important for conferences, why aren’t more conferences implementing it?” “So you wait to make changes to your event once you see other conferences are already doing it?” I respond. “You wait to copy someone else instead of being the leader?” Frequently, conference … [Read more…]

The Future Conference Is About Increasing Attendees’ ROI

The future conference is not about the environment, the furniture, the venue, the audio visual or the technology. The future conference is about increasing the paying attendee’s ROI. The future conference is about helping the attendee transfer and apply their conference learning to their job. Actually, the fundamental job of future conferences is threefold: To … [Read more…]

Helping Sponsors Turbocharge Through Activation

Activation (or leverage) is the most misunderstood, yet most critical, success driver for sponsorship ROI. Savvy marketing professionals totally get activation. But most of our profession doesn’t. This is why many of us continue to sell non-emotional promotional opportunities and incorrectly call them sponsorship. We need to capitalize on this golden opportunity. Consumer events are … [Read more…]