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The unique story of any conference should begin with the goal and then a detailed plan on how to reach this goal. If you understand your target audience, it’s not a challenge to build such a conference vision. If you understand your target audience, it’s not a challenge to build such a conference vision.
Does your conference committee practice organized abandonment and avoid no-bottom-line-mindsets? How are they at focusing on the purpose, goals and target market of the conference when making decisions? These three principles are vital to maintaining a healthy, strong conference. Conference organizers often avoid change.
To paraphrase Hoffer, you can never get enough of conference fads, gimmicks and trends. Unless your a conference participant and we often have had enough!). They also want access to your conference budget. Evergreen conference practices that have promising results are often obscured by our obsession with fads and trends.
Most conferences are stuck in a rut! So how do you create a conference experience that is not like all the others? Start by considering one or more of these conference big ideas. They are the conferenceplanning road less traveled that harvests success! Big Conference Ideas On The Road Less Traveled Part 1.
Who wants to attend a common, ordinary, ho-hum, everyday , I’m-just-like-all-the-others traditional conference? And who wants to plan or sell one? Your conference growth and revenue depends upon repeat paying attendees year after year. And your customer loyalty is built upon making your common conference uncommon.
A well-planned and executed conference will do wonders for your organization. A conference can help you achieve these things—if you host it correctly. To ensure your conference is a smashing success, invest in conference management. Keep reading this comprehensive guide to learn: What is a Conference?
Why do so many people rate the conference experience as stale, predictable and average at best? Why do conference leaders miss the mark at preparing their own unique DNA conference experience? Why do so many conference organizers miss the opportunity to create a matchless thumbprint on their event’s identity?
Too often conference and meeting professionals assume that their role is best suited to planning and executing the conference. They leave the big decisions about target customers, their needs and their aspirations to the organization’s leaders, the marketing department or even the education division. Their goal is to.
It’s as if Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore’s Experience Economy is just now hitting its stride—for conferences at least. The word is out: we’ve got to create conference experiences, not just conferences that feel like a patchwork quilt of our great grandmother’s dresses. A Disturbing Conference Trend. Read on…). Wrong hook!).
Too often when we think about conference growth or sustainability, we assume it means attracting next gen customers. Then we discuss how to plan, program and market to that specific age group. Eventually our planning discussions turn to generational differences. We pinpoint a specific generation, usually Millennials.
Yet deciding to abandon a conference programming element can clear the way for new successful traditions to take hold. It is creating a habit of regularly questioning every conferenceplanning practice and programming component that we currently use. Who is our target market and our primary customer?
Many conferences depend upon academic researchers to present at their event. Yet that very research often puzzles their conference stakeholders. The Irony Of Academic Research And Conferences. Here’s the irony of academic research and conferences. Do you see how all of this convolutes the conference’s purpose and mission?
It’s hard for conference organizers to stick to planning the essential elements of their events. As a conference professional, it is your mission each day to keep your focus on the essential elements of your event for your customers’ sake. Some of essentialism’s guiding ideas apply well to business and conferences.
Conference organizational debt. Your conference organizational debt includes the static roles, traditional structures, outdated models, long-established practices, antiquated procedures and legacy policies that prevent your organization from adapting to evolving markets, technology and society. What is it? What’s its history?
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. Who has the professional development budget to attend every year?
A Momentous Catalyst To Conference Attendee Behavior Change. I am often asked how to get conference attendees to adopt 21 st Century learning habits. The majority of conferences treat attendees as consumers of information. To Get Conference Registrants’ Buy-In For Behavior Change, First Re-Label Them.
Savvy 21st Century conference organizers can effectively demonstrate strategic learning alignment of their conference networking and education programming. Smart conference professionals are skilled at articulating the value of their event’s networking and learning opportunities. We all know our conferences need more innovation!
There is one debt every conference organizer must face and vanquish. It can cripple a conference. Organizational debt—the interest your conference pays when its structures, policies, procedures, practices, committees and leadership roles stay fixed and accumulate even as the world around it changes.* What is this debt?
Now imagine someone asking your conference participants that question. Then they would launch into a passionate description of your event’s annual Party with a Purpose, its pre-conference feel-good community service projects and its ongoing student scholarship fundraisers. Your Conference Purpose. How would they respond?
Who owns the overall experience that customers have at your conference? Who oversees and manages the conference customers’ journey? Or perhaps no one is considering the holistic experience of your conference customer? Do you know what your conference target market customer wants? Is it you or someone else?
Developing Your Conference Story Arc. Conference organizers that grasp our brains’ need for stories can use narratives to help their participants develop and grow. As you plan your conference, take into account one of the biggest challenges that your target market faces. Every story has a problem to solve.
Once you’ve observed the conference through the lens of your target customer and gained insights from conference data, you can move to the next steps. These steps are critical for you and your conferenceplanning teams to embrace, enlist and employ. Define A Common Purpose And Goals Of The Conference Customer Journey.
If there’s something strange in your conference-hood. Our cognitive frameworks—our mental models and paradigms—shape our thinking, behavior, operations and success of our conferences. We falsely believe that future conferences are just an extension of the past. Paradigm: We allocate resources to improve our conference logistics.
With so many moving parts to juggle, planning a conference can seem like a daunting task. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk you through how to plan a conference from A to Z. We’ll cover everything from budgeting and marketing to finding sponsors and speakers to reporting and analytics.
Conferences are an important part of professional development and business networking for all industries. A successful conference can come in all shapes and sizes, from 200 people over a weekend to 15,000 for a week. InitLive has had the privilege of working with many conferences, some of which are the largest in their industry.
And the conference and events you plan can be unique too. As a one-of-a-kind meeting professional, you are called to create one-of-a-kind conferences. Still they just copy what everyone else is doing with their conference. It must not be correct, or doable, or even marketable. Caged Conference Visions.
Are you making some changes to your annual conference? If you are, you need a conference intrapreneur! More than just one intrapreneur, you need a conferenceplanning culture of intrapreneurship. Ultimately, you’ll want to develop a conference team of intrapreneurs. And a culture of conference intrapreneurship too.
Established, successful conferences have leadership that are usually adept at incrementally improving their event each year. Or improving registration and marketing practices. Conference organizers must focus on both their customers’ needs—their pain points and problems to solve—and their aspirations—their wants and professional goals.
Only time will tell what impact these reductions will have on these chains’ market share. In my opinion, the two underlying market shifts that led to making this move are: Growing cost of sales beyond commissions; and. The post The Market Shifts That Led to Commission Cuts appeared first on Velvet Chainsaw.
It’s time to take your conference full frontal! 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. So how do we put full frontal into practice in our conferences?
Anybody who has ever planned a conference knows the value of flexibility and engagement. And if that’s what you’re looking for from your next event, you might want to consider planning a virtual conference. That said, many event planners are still new to virtual event planning—and that’s ok.
What is the breakthrough you most want to see happen in your conference in the next year? What do you imagine could be possible if you were truly collaborating with your conferenceplanning team, leadership and volunteers? Become A Conference Possibilist! I invite you to become a Conference Possibilist!
While these numbers look dismal for hotels, similar forecasts would apply to AV companies, exhibit service contractors, DMOs, exhibitor and attendee participation, conference-organizer revenue, and nearly any other product or service you can link to the live events industry. Conference Go/No-Go Decisions in a Pandemic. Remove Barriers.
You can make your conference the purple cow of all conference experiences. By creating conference experiences that help your participants think smarter! This means designing conference experiences that go full frontal ! The Traditional Low Level Cognitive Conference. Most conference experiences are passive.
Without a doubt, conference apps are a must-have tool for any event organizer. However, with so many different event apps for conferences on the market, it can be tough to know which one is right for you! What Is a Conference App? Before we dive into providers, you need to know what a conference app is.
The more you and your leadership truly understand the business case for your event, its target market and value proposition, the more successful you can be at making productive, appropriate changes. Common Conference Conventional Wisdom. When planning future events and conferences, we stake our claim in conventional wisdom.
Conferenceplanning is a no easy job. Event planning overall, for that matter, is a stressful job. There is a wide range of conferenceplanning tools in the market that make life much easier for conference planners juggling 10 tasks at a time. This is where the conferenceplanning software comes in.
She has won the International Live Events Association awards in Marketing Design in 2014,15 and 16 for her design suites for Baldwin & Lyons Race Weekend. How to implement hybrid event strategies for your meetings and conferences. Planning the audience experience and PR for your events. CONNECT WITH JULIA SPANGLER.
Conferences that are like time capsules promote and preserve nostalgia and the past. Conferences that are like time machines teleport people to the future so they can discover what’s next. Conferences that resemble time capsules defend the status quo and traditions. Meeting Planning Evolves. They are like time capsules.
Host Hotels & Resorts’ Sourav Ghosh (clockwise from top left), STR’s Amanda Hite, and Hotel News Now’s Stephanie Ricca participate in the online Hotel Data Conference. The Hotel Data Conference has been held annually for around 700 attendees in Nashville for the past 12 years. Screenshot by Rachel Daub).
A number of our consulting clients have made social responsibility a cornerstone of their conference strategy — with the desire “to leave the host city better because we were there.” When you adopt a strategic objective like that for your conference, it leaves room for creativity in achieving that desired outcome. Choose Your Charity.
Conference and meeting professionals like action when planning their events. Herein likes one of their challenges when starting a conference improvement process. Herein likes one of their challenges when starting a conference improvement process. The Traditional Present-Forward Planning Mindset.
However, your love affair with control can also stunt your conference growth! You’re a conference organizer. Your conference growth will be restricted. When you hit that ceiling, the size of your conference shrinks back to the size of your personal span of care. Four Control Mental Models That Cramp Your Conference.
With an excellent event team and a good strategy, you can plan and organize a successful conference for your organization. However, approaching conferenceplanning with outdated methods can lead to a slow and exhausting planning process. Event Planning Automation. Event Promotion and Marketing.
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