Five Steps To Take Your Education Programming From Blah To Wickedly Smart

Curation: it’s more important than you think.

And it’s extremely critical to the success of your education programming.

When it comes to choosing education programming, curation involves deep excavation of the right content for the right audience at the right time for the right issue.

Authentic Curation For Education Programming

Curation is more than just identifying content for your customers.

It’s picking the right education issue that is like currency and helping attendees exchange it for solutions that meet their needs. It is more than distributing a report or white paper or hosting a lecture.

Authentic curation involves:

• deep explanation:

  helping members and nonmembers deeply understand the relevance of the topic to their personal and professional needs

• illustration:

  practical, relevant examples illustrating how and why this topic is important to them as well as practical application of the topic

• discussion:

  more than a one-way monologue or panelist dialogue, it involves participants discussing with each other different views and practical application

• shifting perspectives:

  encouraging education participants to try on different perspectives of events, issues, and topics.

Five Steps To Wickedly Smart Curated Education Programming

If you are the one assigned to plan and prepare education programming for your audience, your job is to move from being a scheduler of experts and presenters to curating the content and learning experience.

Here are five steps to help you transition to the curated education programming model.

1. Use a refined sophistication to identify target market and their pain points.

Start by identifying your target market for your programming and their top needs. Then identify content that solves your target market problems.

2. When planning a conference education, develop the education schedule first.

Lay out your rooms and time slots for your schedule. Then select topics based on the target market’s pain points. Strategically place content next to or before and after other content that naturally creates a narrative. You goal with placing content is to evoke emotions, create a story and spur discussion. You want to intentionally incite contextual messages with the placement of the content. You want to display your best education programming assets and rotate in popular content from your past programming if it fits within the “issue-solution narrative.”

3. Use analytics to drive content education programming.

Remember your target audience and their pain points when selecting content. Then make sure you use evaluations from past sessions to help drive current selection. Use volunteers to provide advice only about pain points and topics, not selection of speakers. Look for speakers both within and outside the industry, not just your current echo chamber.

4. Practice responsible maintenance.

As the organizer of education programming, your job is to constantly assess and reevaluate the effectiveness and direction. Part of your job is to provide ongoing speaker training and improvements aids. You’ll want to provide detailed evaluations to all speakers and let them know your goal is quality improvements.

5. Focus on quality and quantity.

As an education programmer, your primary concern should be quality, not quantity. You want to create a demand for high-performing learning experiences. Stay away from trying to be all things to all people. Remember, you have a target audience for this product.

Wickedly Smart Curation

When you transition from a scheduler of experts based on the call for proposals to a education programmer curator, you can drive target market attendance and bottom line results!

What keeps you from curating education programming in your organization? How can you identify education programming that has been curated versus aggregated from a call for proposals?