They’re voting with their feet. It’s a common phrase. And one that we as conference organizers should pay attention to. And let's not forget: after participants vote with their feet, they vote with their wallet. We often wonder if a topic or session is valid or valuable to our stakeholders. The answer is frequently painfully obvious—participants voted with their feet. Meaning that people are or are not supporting, registering, attending, etc. The audience has already given you their … [Read more...]
Conference Organizer: Proceed With Caution!
Danger, conference organizer! Danger! Did you ever watch the late-’60s sci-fi TV series Lost In Space? Yeah, most of you reading this are too young to know or remember it. Still you may have watched it in reruns or at a slumber party. It was known for its iconic robot that served as an early-tornado-type-siren. Whenever it sensed a terrifying situation, it would flail its metal arms and shout danger. Your Conference Data Just Might Be Flailing Its Arms If you are paying close attention … [Read more...]
Business Improvement Conference Education Trends
Does your conference education drive attendees’ business performance? Or are your offerings more a roll of the dice, leaving it up to chance that they impact the attendees’ job performance. The most effective and successful conferences focus their learning opportunities on sustaining attendees’ critical strategic skills, building evolving organizational capabilities and linking conference education to business performance. Five Business Improvement Conference Education Trends Executives … [Read more...]
Using Human Sciences To Navigate Your Conference’s Future Through The Fog
Our linear and rational conference business models are our default thinking. Unfortunately, those traditional models cause us to navigate in a fog when the conference challenge is less straightforward. There are better ways to understand how to grow your conference than what you’ve done in the past. As conference professionals, we are inclined to continue to use models that have always worked enormously well for us. Yet our past has little relevance in the midst of an incredibly shifting … [Read more...]
An Anthropologist Walks Into A Conference
As your conference grows, it faces increased complexity. According to a recent IBM study of 1,600+ CEOs, the biggest challenge their companies face is the complexity gap. Eight out of ten of those CEOs expect their business environment to grow in complexity but less than half are prepared to face that change. Your conference’s growth faces similar complexity gaps. Forward-thinking conference professionals see gathering business intelligence about their target market as imperative. These … [Read more...]
Feeding A Zombie Project And Getting No Results
Is your organization stuck maintaining and nurturing a zombie project? A zombie project is one that continues from year to year regardless of its effectiveness. It sucks the very life and resources from your team and organization says authors Scott Anthony, David Duncan and Pontus M.A. Siren. Often many people feel these zombie projects have a birthright and should always be delivered regardless of the outcome. The organization and its leaders have strong emotional ties to its spawning, … [Read more...]
Measuring Actionable Or Vanity Conference Metrics
Your conference needs a checkup! Just like you need an annual doctor’s appointment for routine health checkup, your conference needs a routine checkup. Sure, you may feel like your conference doesn’t need it, just like you feel you don’t need a medical checkup. Regardless of how you feel, it is important. You need to assess a variety of areas to understand your conference’s level of health. You need some pre-established benchmarks to determine the health of your conference and plan for … [Read more...]
Frank Conversations On Better Conference Measurement
Recently, I wrote about how most conference organizers are really bad at measurement. Oh, we’re fairly good at measuring our conference goals. As long as those goals are based on common conference inputs and outputs. You know, expenses/revenue, attendance, exhibitors and sponsors. But rarely do we measure anything else that proves ROI, ROO or ROA (return on attendance). And rarer still do we even know how to define and measure conference shatterpoints (vulnerabilities in our conference, … [Read more...]
