Tag: conference best practices


[Webinar] Mission Critical: How One Association Transformed its Live Event to Virtual in Record Time

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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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. … [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 … [Read more…]

Evolve into a Caretaker of Content

Imagine designing your next conference or annual meeting from scratch around content instead of picking up the template you’ve been using for years and tweaking it. Not just your education programming, but your breaks, meals, even your exhibit hall (which we advocate for evolving into a solutions center, including changing the name). “Please stop designing … [Read more…]

Our Increased Distrust Of Institutions And What It Means To Your Association, Conference

“I’m done with __________________!” Go ahead and fill in that blank with any type of institution. Big business, conferences, education, government, medicine, membership associations, nonprofits, professional societies, religious organizations, trade organizations, etc. We are witnessing the rise of the Dones, as Dr. Josh Packard calls them. Groups of people that are done with traditional, outdated … [Read more…]