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 content for events and start thinking about designing events for the content.” That’s a quote from Sourabh Kothari, director of advocacy, … [Read more...]
Conference Experiential Design: Why Emotion Trumps Efficiency
This post, Delivering Experience, by Anthony Iannarino stuck in my mind as it sparked new ideas about conference experience design. Iannarino recounts a dining experience with his wife at a "funky, cool, eclectic" restaurant. Within moments of arriving, drink orders were swiftly taken and delivered. Entrees arrived moments later. Then the check, lickety-split. The Speed Drill Speed is usually appreciated by dining patrons. It also makes for faster table flips. Yet Iannario and his wife … [Read more...]
How Much Faith Do Your Attendees Have In Your Conference?
Faith. When you read that word does your mind jump to religion? Mine does. Our American experience tells us that “faith-based” refers to an organization that promotes a specific religious belief. Yet, there is another type of faith we need for conference success. Faith In Your Conference Your success as a conference organizer is entirely dependent upon your attendees’ faith in your conference. Faith is defined as complete trust or confidence in someone or something. It is often a … [Read more...]
Sculpting Customer Feedback To Design Your Conference
The voice of the customer is always right. Or is it? When conference organizers look for ways to improve the attendees’ experience, they typically turn to their registrants for feedback. They turn to their customers to direct their investment decisions for conference improvements. Gaining Conference Attendee Intelligence Conference organizers use a variety of ways to collect customer feedback. Usually, they send an overall conference evaluation to all of their stakeholders. Some … [Read more...]
Six Conference Space Properties To Transform Attendee Behavior
As a meeting professional, you have the power to identify and manipulate the properties of a space to foster specific behaviors and attitudes. These spatial characteristics can be fine tuned to create a unique attendee experience. And it all rests within the power of your planning. Six Properties That You Can Adjust Properties are the individual aspects of people or space that are altered to effect behavior. Each of these six properties, as defined by Make Space, can be adjusted to alter the … [Read more...]
Conference Organizers Are Space Designers, Cultural Translators And Learning Facilitators
Meeting space is the body language of the conference host organization.* Conference organizers have the ability to transform behavior, affect mood and foster learning with their attention and intention to the space's design. Their lack of intention to that design also has an impact on the attendee. Your Space Decisions Define Your Beliefs The conference venue's form, functionality and final room layout reflect the beliefs, behaviors, culture and priorities of the conference organizer and the … [Read more...]
How To Use Your Meeting Space To Create An Ownership Experience
Have you ever been in an Apple Store? They are bright, open spaces with lofty ceilings, sleek design and great technology to play with at your fingertips. They offer a variety of services from the private one-on-one Genius Bar consultations to how-to classes to events to roving staff that are more like personal assistants than sales clerks. What's interesting about Apple Stores is that the space and their services are inseparable. You can't describe the Apple Store by just describing the floor … [Read more...]
The End Of Conference Education As We Know It
"In the spirit of honoring tradition, conferences hang on to past practices imperiling their futures," paraphrase, Clayton Christensen, Harvard University. Conference speakers present today, exactly the same way they did one-hundred years ago. Little has changed. Yet, we've learned so much more about how people learn and retain information. Unfortunately, the conference presentations have not yet caught up with 21st Century education research, insight, wisdom and practice. Five Drivers Of … [Read more...]
