I would enjoy my job more if it weren’t for people, said the meeting professional. Unfortunately, he wasn’t joking. He didn’t like dealing with people, especially disgruntled conference stakeholders. As conference organizers, we can easily fall into today’s culture of cynicism. It’s difficult to be sincere when we are constantly bombarded with an outrage culture. Any of our attendees can turn to social media to announce their smallest irritation with our event. Kindness Versus … [Read more...]
Rebalancing Conference Vertigo By Starting With Design-Less Strategies
Leaping to action without a solid comprehension of your conference target market and their needs causes all sorts of mayhem. Some conference organizers and their planning team members don’t even realize they are in the eye of a storm. That mayhem is their blind spot. Planning a conference without a deep understanding of what makes your target market tick is like building a house without a blueprint or foundation. It’s a shaky conference foundation. It’s like the parable of building your … [Read more...]
Quantitative Or Qualitative Conference Measures. Which Matters Most?
Many conference organizers and their organizations tend to focus only on linear, incremental improvements. Most of those improvements are transactional in nature. Improving online registration, ecommerce, confirmations, lodging, CEU tracking, etc. Or they tend to copy what another conference is doing. Rarely do they explore the actual reasons behind number trends. Instead, they just twist metrics into their own exaggeration to serve their own needs. We have to remember that correlation of … [Read more...]
Your Conference Is Unbalanced!
Your conference is out of balance. And most conference organizers don’t even know it. Sure as a conference organizer you know that creativity and innovation are important to your planning. You probably even realize that collaborating with others on the schedule and programming make for a better conference experience. However, as a conference organizer most of the paths you take for conference improvement follow the traditional path. You spend all your time on improving the efficiency and … [Read more...]
Putting Design Empathy Into Conference Practice
Empathy is powerful! It plays a fundamental role in our connections, our networking, our learning, our problem solving, our innovation and our collaboration with others. According to research, when we are empathetic, we actually enhance our cognitive abilities. (Decety and Ickes, 2011). Putting ourselves into others shoes helps us improve our thinking. We improve our ability to see contextual clues and put information within context. This helps us understand how things relate to each other … [Read more...]
Your Conference Needs To Adopt Design Empathy Practices
The group kept returning to this word. I thought we were finished discussing all of its nuances and implications. Then another small group would underscore its importance. It’s as if this word was a floating bobber in a lake constantly tossed around due to wind and waves. It wouldn’t disappear. Just when we thought no one would mention the word again, its concept and its real meaning jumped back to the center stage. And The Word Is… Recently, my colleague, Sarah Michel, and I spent a … [Read more...]
