Do You Plan Meetings With 500+ People?

Do you plan meetings with 500 or more people?

Do you secure both professional and industry speakers for your events?

If yes to both questions, would you give us about 10 minutes of your time to complete this survey?

Velvet Chainsaw has partnered with Tagoras, a leading market research and learning consulting company to capture trends and statistics about industry and professional speakers. We are also looking for some of the standard speaker selection practices used by most organizations.

The survey is live through September 9, 2011.

What’s In It For You?

1. We will share the results here on the blog. There is already some interesting information that may be a surprise to the industry and readers.
2. Aggregate data will be shared with all participants who request it.
3. You could be a lucky winner of one of five $50 gift cards.
4. You can be part of identifying the trends and help the hospitality and meetings industry progress.

We appreciate your help in improving and caring about the educational benefits of face-to-face meetings!

A Conference Meeting Take Away Tip

If you’ve read this far, we wanted to reward you with at least one conference take away.

During the past several months of consulting, travel and speaking, one thought seems to have taken hold of many meeting professionals:

“Our attendees don’t want any changes to our conference education. They want more of the same thing that we’ve given them in the past. They like the traditional didactic lecture.”

Seth Godin addresses a similar issue recently. He said,

“People looking for more of the same aren’t actively looking. While there may be a lot of them, they’re satisfied with what they’ve got, which means that they’re hard to attract.

No, the real opportunity is in reaching out to the dissatisfied, to those in search of something new.”

Your Real Opportunity To Grow Your Event

Your opportunity is reaching out to new audiences, to those dissatisfied, to those searching for a different type of conference education. You will not grow your event trying to attract more people who are satisfied with what they’ve got.

Those that are willing to pay for registration and sit passively in your conference for six to eight hours a day aren’t actively looking. They are satisfied with status quo. They are very comfortable with average.

But you’re not going to grow your conference or event offering more of what you’ve offered in the past.

In order to attract new markets, you need to do things differently. You need to change it up. You need to offer a new type of education mix.

Why have so many meeting professionals settled for efficiency when planning an event instead of effectiveness? As a conference attendee, which do you prefer, an efficient, well organized event or an event that is effective and helps you grow professionally?