We are extremely excited to welcome David Beckett, Vice President, Business Model & Performance to the Velvet Chainsaw Consulting team! To me, this is kind of like getting the band back together! I had the privilege to hire and work closely with David at Experient as well as when I was on the board of Eventcore. He knows what it takes to pull off the largest and most complex events in our space. David brings to the table a unique balance of business acumen, out-of-the-box thinking … [Read more...]
Panel Sessions 3.0 for 2023
For years I’ve been a fan of bringing in more outside voices to make mainstage sessions more valuable and deliver more impact. While keynote speakers can still be a significant attendance driver, I think 2023 is the year to resurrect the industry panel. What you don’t want to do is go back to the same old playbook — four or five industry experts sitting at an elevated head table. We can and must do better by mixing it up. Next-generation panels will incorporate these design principles: A … [Read more...]
Do’s and Don’ts: Six Tips to Help Justify Attendance at Your Event
As we progress through the event industry’s recovery to 2019 levels, conference organizers must have a laser focus on helping potential attendees make their business case for attending their events. The best path for helping them get approval to attend is to ensure that the majority of your education program is aligned to advance business outcomes or results. To help you on your business priority program development journey, consider these six tips: Learning Pathways — Do not organize … [Read more...]
Making Up for Fewer Skilled Workers at Your Conference
Throughout 2022, nearly every meeting service provider continues to be short-staffed and plagued by last-minute no-shows or insufficiently skilled workers. This is having a huge impact on event organizers and their teams during both planning and execution phases of events. More than ever, we need to be running several steps ahead — checking, double-checking, and even pitching in to ensure the attendee and exhibitor experience doesn’t suffer. To best prepare you, here are eight kinds of … [Read more...]
Seeking a Hybrid Conference Steady State? Here’s a Framework
With live conferences’ comeback, event organizers need to make complex decisions about how to incorporate digital product extensions into their business model. Based on our research, we estimate that there’s an even split between conference owners who are including synchronous or asynchronous hybrid options and those who aren’t. The half who is pursuing hybrid knows that they can’t just go back to what worked in 2019 despite the return of in-person events. They crave a predictable steady state … [Read more...]
Five Tips for Conference Sponsorship Pricing
In my experience, most large conferences this year are realizing about 80 percent of their 2019 revenue performance. For some of the major annual meetings we’re tracking, sponsorship revenue has been a bright spot when compared to exhibit revenue performance. The textbook outcome of a successful sponsorship is improved attitudes and behavior for that brand. But that’s about affecting emotions — difficult, if not impossible — to measure. In other words, a sponsor’s ROI is subjective in nature, … [Read more...]
2022 Conference Registration Pacing
Before March of 2020, pacing data was a useful tool for predicting final attendance and revenue. If you were pacing behind, you could make midcourse corrections. As we come out of the pandemic, we need a different playbook to drive attendance and earlier commitment. Use these five tips to develop a plan for optimizing registration for your major event in quarters 2, 3, and 4. Budget realistically. On average, associations are anticipating 2022 registration and revenue will be about 20 … [Read more...]
7 Design Considerations for Your Conference Hub
High-tech user conferences like Dreamforce and Microsoft Ignite have been designing innovative hub spaces to engage and nurture their top customers for years. While some of the elements in these areas can be costly to implement, they don’t have to break the budget. Creating a town-square-like experience can help grow your community through valuable connections. Our team got together for a strategy session and put on our design-thinking hats. We brainstormed what a hub should deliver from an … [Read more...]
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