Do Not Be Seduced By Meeting Fads Or Conference Trends September 17, 2018 by Jeff Hurt Most conference and meeting professionals want the coolest, hippest, latest ideas and trends for their events. We are on the hunt for the next meeting, seating, session format, technology, and food and beverage fad. We want to know what unique things other conferences are doing so we can borrow their ideas. We pursue fads, gimmicks … [Read more…] Filed Under: Experience Design Tagged With: , conference bandwagon, conference fads, conference gimmicks, conference trends, emerging practices, evergreen conference principles
Start Your Conference Improvement Process With Enrollment July 31, 2018 by Jeff Hurt As conference organizers, we frequently ignore the evidence all around us of what’s working and what’s not. That evidence is everywhere. It’s just that we don’t know what to do with it once we have it. Often our conference planning teams and volunteer advisors follow our lead as we give more precedent to what feels … [Read more…] Filed Under: Experience Design Tagged With: , conference improvement, conference improvement process, data based decisions, enrollment to change
Transition Becomes Your New Conference Threshold July 24, 2018 by Jeff Hurt What’s your favorite room in your home? I have two: my front porch with its porch swing and my master suite that looks out into my backyard. I cross the thresholds of those spaces daily without much thought. We rarely think about thresholds. Yet, we spend a lot of time traversing them—both literally and figuratively. … [Read more…] Filed Under: Event Planning, Experience Design Tagged With: , conference improvement, conference threshold, conference transition
Abandon All But Tomorrow When Planning Your Conference July 18, 2018 by Jeff Hurt When do you stop pouring resources into things that have achieved their purpose? asked management guru Peter Drucker. It’s one of Drucker’s signature strategies: abandoning the past for tomorrow. He called it the concept of purposeful abandonment. Purposeful abandonment doesn’t sound very attractive. Few leaders brag about the product, service or idea that they abandoned. … [Read more…] Filed Under: Event Planning, Experience Design Tagged With: , abandoning the past for tomorrow, conference growth, conference growth policy, conference growth policy of abandonment, conference purposeful abandonment, Peter Drucker, purposeful abandonment
Hone Your Radar To Seize These Conference Innovation Invitations June 26, 2018 by Jeff Hurt Innovation may be a tired word. There is no doubt that innovation has become an overused and confusing buzzword. It is riddled with an excessive number of meanings from authors, dictionaries, experts and our personal experience. Ask ten people to define innovation and you’re probably going to get a dozen or more responses. Innovation is … [Read more…] Filed Under: Experience Design Tagged With: , experimentation, information liberation, Innovation, innovation invitations, science integration, sensemaking
Star Struck: Identifying Your Conference North Star June 21, 2018 by Jeff Hurt For centuries, explorers and those sailing the sea have relied on the North Star, or Polaris, to navigate. Long before the advent of the GPS, the North Star provided a distinctive visible position to true north. Travelers used its bright light as a guide to ensure they were voyaging in the right direction. Sailors adjusted … [Read more…] Filed Under: Experience Design Tagged With: , conference organizer, conference professionals, conference purpose, conference purpose as North Star, lead with purpose, meeting professionals, North Star for conferences, purpose, purpose-driven, purpose-driven conference organizers, purpose-driven conferences
Shifting from Delivery to Discovery Conference Education March 22, 2018 by Dave Lutz So much of our commonplace practices and conventional wisdom about learning is wrong. Educators have been talking about Bloom’s Taxonomy, critical-thinking skills, executive functions of the brain and HOTS — higher-order thinking skills — for more than five decades. However, those foundational learning principles have not transferred to most adult education experiences. Conference organizers still … [Read more…] Filed Under: Conference Education, Experience Design Tagged With: , 21st century conferences, Bloom's Taxonomy, cognitive learning, critical-thinking skills, discovery learning, executive brain function
Follow The Leader Can Be A Dangerous Game When It Comes To Best Practices, Solutions And New Ideas March 8, 2018 by Jeff Hurt Do you remember playing follow the leader as a kid? We all stood in a line behind one child who was the leader. We followed that leader around the room mimicking every action s/he took. When the leader squatted and quacked like a duck, we squatted and quacked like a duck. When the leader skipped … [Read more…] Filed Under: Experience Design Tagged With: , association best practices, best practices, emerging practices, toxic best practices
The Crisis of Connection February 2, 2018 by Sarah Michel We’re lonely. And not just a little lonely. We’re experiencing a global epidemic level of loneliness. Last week, the U.K. appointed Tracey Crouch as the Minister of Loneliness after the British parliament released a five-year study on loneliness that found more than 9 million people in the country reported they often or always feel lonely. … [Read more…] Filed Under: Conference Networking, Experience Design Tagged With: , association insights, attendance marketing, conference planning, connexity, cultivating connection, epidemic of loneliness, face-to-face connection, networking, radical hospitality.
The Conference Owner’s Guide: Steps 2-5 To Transition From Conference Touchpoints To Journey Experiences January 26, 2018 by Jeff Hurt Once you’ve observed the conference through the lens of your target customer and gained insights from conference data, you can move to the next steps. These steps are critical for you and your conference planning teams to embrace, enlist and employ. You want to move from conference touchpoints to conference customer experience journeys. And remember, … [Read more…] Filed Under: Experience Design Tagged With: , conference customer experience journeys, conference customer journey, conference experience leader, conference experrience, conference journey, conference owner, conference owner's guide, conference touchpoints, customer experience, event-customer-experience business
