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 and … [Read More...]
Transform Your Expo into a Networking and Learning Destination
Expos are the most disrupted element of association conferences today. If you’re still using “tradeshow,” “market place” or “exhibit hall” as names for the area where you feature solution providers—who are there to help your attendees deal with the problems and challenges they’re facing—it’s time … [Read More...]
Expo Decisions: Attendee Preferences over Exhibitors—Always
For those of you who organize large annual conferences and trade shows, there undoubtedly is a chicken-vs.-egg debate. On the one hand, your organization might receive as much as 50 percent (or more) of your event’s revenue from supplier investments in exhibits, sponsorship and advertising … [Read More...]
Education Committee: More Advising and Curating, Less Slotting
Most meeting organizers invest a significant amount of time creating the educational programming for their annual conference. Models vary, but most include a 15- to 20-person conference committee (slotters) and army of reviewers (graders). Progressive organizers are shifting to a blended model, … [Read More...]
Fostering a Winning Conference Culture
I have been struck by the disparity in how an association’s organizational culture translates (or doesn’t translate) to the on-site implementation or planning of its live events. There are many associations that tout their open and supportive cultures. But when it gets to “go time,” does that … [Read More...]
Are Your Speakers Speaking to Speakers?
I wonder about the future of peer review for conference abstracts. While it is a critical filter for high-quality journals, it is a very inefficient process for accelerating innovation and discovery at conferences. Many healthcare and STEM conference business models are heavily dependent on … [Read More...]
If You Build It, Will Teams Come?
This is the second installment of a two-part blog on team learning. In the first, we looked at why it’s a smart conference strategy. In this post, we’ll explore how to design, promote and execute it for your next conference. Since our work culture is mostly team-based, it’s about time we … [Read More...]
Leveraging Team Learning at Conferences
Traditionally teams from organizations attend a conference with a divide-and-conquer game plan, as they split up and attend as many different sessions as they can. The challenge with that strategy is that it’s very unlikely any real change will occur when the one team member who experienced the … [Read More...]
Looking into the Future of Event Tech
Your guidepost for event-technology decisions should be to put your customer’s experience before your staff efficiency. As the event-tech space continues to evolve with a number of mergers and acquisitions, I see four changes coming for larger annual conferences. #1. Security is Expensive, but … [Read More...]
