This is not a typical story. The American Association of Suicidology's annual meeting had been growing steadily in recent years. When their reimagined conference couldn't take place in Portland, Ore., in late April, staff and volunteers went into overdrive to transition the physical meeting to a virtual one in a matter of days.They knew how critical it was to deliver much-needed content to their global community. Jonathan and Colleen will share the unvarnished truth about what they learned, … [Read more...]
Five-Step Framework for Effective Collaborative Design
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 lasting change. This isn’t about tweaking schedules, adjusting formats or adding activations at your event. The framework puts the participant at the center … [Read more...]
Your Conference Content Has Magnetic Pull
Content marketing has grown by leaps and bounds during the past five years. Unfortunately, too few event organizers fully embrace the long-tail, pull benefits of content marketing. Likewise, many conference professionals have no idea what embracing the long-tail, pull benefits of content marketing even means. It’s a foreign concept to them. Most marketing and communications teams agree that content marketing serves as the foundation to their conference marketing strategy. Still, very few … [Read more...]
Why Your Conference Should be Target-Audience Obsessed
In order to design relevant education and networking experiences at our conferences, we need to be focused to the point of obsession with our target audience. Over the past 18 months, we’ve carefully scrubbed and analyzed the attendance of 20 major conferences. These projects had an aggregate attendance of 110,000-plus participants with registration revenue in excess of $30 million. Peter Fader, professor of marketing at Wharton, and author of Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers … [Read more...]
How to Improve Your Call for Presentations Process
When Velvet Chainsaw Consulting conducted speaker research with 120 associations with research and consulting company Tagoras Inc. in 2013, we found that nearly 77 percent use a call for speakers/sessions process. Associations value member input. One-third of these organizations accept 60 percent or more of the proposals, indicating either a low number of submissions or very forgiving quality filters. About 62 percent close off submissions eight months or longer before the conference. These … [Read more...]
Specific Strategies To Take Your Conference Full Frontal!
You can make your conference the purple cow of all conference experiences. That is if you want to be seen as unique and different. So how do you do that? By creating conference experiences that help your participants think smarter! This means designing conference experiences that go full frontal! Going full frontal means engaging the frontal lobe of your brain. The Traditional Low Level Cognitive Conference Most conference experiences are passive. They deliver information and distribute … [Read more...]
Take Your Conference Full Frontal
It’s time to take your conference full frontal! No, not a full frontal lobotomy. Nor a behind the scenes look at the private parts. It’s time to challenge and encourage your conference stakeholders to focus on engaging their brains at a higher level. It’s time to develop conference experiences that help your stakeholders think smarter. It’s time to equip your participants with the ability to conquer the complexities of their 21st Century work by going full frontal! (Hat tips Dr. Sandra … [Read more...]
Mediocrity Is Your Biggest Conference Competitor
Your real conference competition is not that event held six months after yours. Nor is your competitor time, money and resources. Your real competitor is mediocrity to paraphrase authors Karin Hurt and David Dye. You’re In A Difficult Position: Look Backwards Or Forwards For Programming? Today’s technology driven, hyper-connected, instant gratification, real-time world puts you as a conference organizer in a difficult position. You’re expected to deliver highly participatory, … [Read more...]
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 53
- Next Page »
