SPIN's Shawna Suckow answers question from her The Attendee Experience: Making Your Show Count webinar from Meetings Focus
1. Please share your favorite meeting app.
My favorite is EventMobi. We’ve used it for the past four years for SPINCon, our own conference. I like it for several reasons, but especially because it has a Web-based address so any type of smart phone can access it. It also works offline when no Internet is available. As far as free meeting apps, try Yapp.us.
2. What seating is the best alternative to theater?
Anything is more engaging than theater-style! When you can’t fit tables in the room, try arc-shaped chairs, or chevron (V-shaped) seating, so at least attendees can see others around the room beyond just the person on either side of them. If you can fit tables, I like crescent rounds, or more non-traditional like different shapes and sizes of tables scattered around the room, from small cocktail rounds to big, square tables.
3. How do you get people excited about roundtables or activities that make them "active participants?”
Un-conferencing, meaning those sessions where the topics are curated real-time, not announced prior to the conference, is a format that’s not for everyone. Older generations and left-brainers especially struggle sometimes with the lack of structure. You can get people on-board by making sure everyone has a chance to suggest a topic.
Don’t leave it too open-ended, i.e. “What do you want to talk about?”…rather, give participants some guidance such as “What’s your biggest challenge at work right now?”…or “What technology tool do you want to learn more about?”…or “Suggest a way for our quality improvement process to be updated.” You can get the board excited by appointing them as table facilitators. It’s important to have someone at each table ensuring that nobody monopolizes the conversation, and everybody has a chance to be heard.
4. You suggested not allowing speakers to use charts. How do you accomplish this?
Well, in a perfect world, the speaker would never use a chart in a PowerPoint--audiences struggle to see them and understand them, while tuning out the speaker. I prefer the speaker use an image to represent the idea or concept put forth, and explain any data or findings that the chart would have represented. Of course, for medical or scientific meetings, this probably won’t fly!
5. How do you create community at a conference where participants are concerned about obtaining CEUs?
That’s always a challenge, but I just worked with such an organization as a consultant on improving their national meeting. It turns out that only half of their participants attend the conference for CEUs--the other half are there for the networking! What I suggest, especially if you don’t have this kind of data, is to offer tracks with CEU courses like you always do, and alongside those, offer some tracks with interactive discussions, un-conferencing, hands-on labs, things like that. Participants will “vote” with their attendance at the courses, and you’ll have your answer about what works with that particular conference.
Trying new things in breakouts is less risky than trying them center-stage! You can also offer plenty of white space, either while CEU sessions are going on or before/after them. Participants who must obtain their CEUs will be in the classroom, while others who care more about networking will be taking advantage of the white space.
6. How do you sell the idea of a less-structured conference to your stakeholders? To your participants?
Where stakeholders are concerned, you really have to come at them with data; data from last year’s conference, data from competing conferences. Convey that the No. 1 priority of most participants is networking, and show them that networking can be done DURING sessions by making them more engaging. Where participants are concerned, selling the idea means explaining it thoroughly, getting some of your well-known participants to endorse it, and then offering less-structured alternatives alongside more structured sessions. Also, ease into it--It’d be tough to flip your entire conference on its head in one year, so try out a session or two that are risky, meanwhile increasing your white space between sessions as much as you can.
7. Please name the 4 C’s of why people come to conferences, and explain how we achieve them AFTER the conference.
They are COMMUNITY, COLLABORATION, CELEBRATION and CHANGING LIVES. These are the four reasons people come to conferences. You can achieve the 4 C’s after the conference by planting seeds DURING your conference. For example, one conference I recently attended had us pair up with someone we didn’t know. Each of us wrote down a short-term goal and gave it to the other person, along with our contact information. The facilitator then asked us to follow up with one another in 10 days to check progress on our goals.
For me, this exercise achieved all four of the C’s: I met someone new, we were in a collaborative exercise around goal-setting, in 10 days we each celebrated our success, and each of us experienced a small but significant life change as a result of achieving our goals. Anything you can do to encourage and facilitate follow-up among participants after the conference is fantastic. I’ve found that you really need to give specific instructions, otherwise being too vague leads to inaction.
8. I missed what TED means.
TED stands for Technology, Education and Design. TED Talks are short; no longer than 18 minutes. You can watch them from all sorts of inspirational, incredibly creative people around the world here.
9. How do we convince our boss to let us attend a conference that is largely unstructured?
It’s all about R.O.I. where many bosses are concerned, and an unstructured conference isn’t measurable up-front. If there’s a conference history you can reference, great. Endorsements from past participants, also great. Most conferences today are only partly unstructured, so you can make your argument around the structured parts, and then explore some unstructured segments while you’re there. Also, asking the conference organizer can help--they’ve certainly faced the question from others, and probably have a prepared letter. This is something to offer your own participants if you decide to offer some unstructured content at your own conference.
10. How do you do Deliberate Networking?
Deliberate Networking facilitates the experience for introverts and first-timers, among others, and also keeps the room circulating. There are times for unstructured networking, where people tend to gravitate toward people they already know. Deliberate Networking offers some ways to mix people up into different groups, where they are comfortable meeting new people.
You can achieve this in any number of ways, simply by telling people to find two people in the crowd that they don’t already know, and the three of them strike up a conversation for 10 minutes. Then do it again. You can also create networking groups by birthday month, geography, common interest--you name it.
I’ve even had participants meet with others from different generations to talk about a topic. It’s interesting for them to hear from others they may never naturally network with, like a 25-year-old and a 70-year-old talking about cultural advancement--that was fascinating!
