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"I realized this morning that your event content is the only event-related 'stuff' I still read. I think that's because it's not about events, but about the coming together of people to exchange ideas and learn from one another and that's valuable information for anyone." — Traci Browne

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Lessons from Anguilla: Getting meeting attendees to connect with one another

Monday, March 4th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

How can we get meeting attendees to connect with one another?

Walking in Anguilla

Every morning for the last three weeks I’ve been taking a brisk 25-minute walk in Anguilla, a 35 square-mile British Overseas Territory in the Virgin Islands. Today I kept track of interactions on my walk. (Yes, I know this sounds weird but keep reading and you’ll see the point.) Here’s what happened:

		——– Interaction type ——–
	# passing me	Waves	Hoots	Verbal	None
Cars	14	10	3		2
On foot	1			1

Twelve of the fourteen cars that passed me waved or hooted (one driver waved and hooted). I swapped a “morning” with the one guy I passed on foot. The two cars with no interaction were driven by an Anguillian woman and a tourist.

Based on my three weeks’ experience, this is typical in Anguilla. Almost everyone says hello in one way or another. Exceptions? Well, tourists rarely interact as you pass. Most female Anguillian drivers don’t either, but they wave more frequently than tourists, about the same frequency as Caucasian locals. (You can tell an Anguillian local’s car because the license plates start with “P” for personal. Isn’t that fun?)

Friendly culture

The behavior I’ve described is built into Anguillian culture. As native Anguillian Denise Crawford says:

“Anguillians are a friendly lot. To pass someone and not greet him with a wave or a ‘good morning’ whether you know the person or not is considered ill-mannered.”
—Leaving Island Life, Denise Crawford

This makes it simple to get to know Anguillians. They will respect your privacy if you don’t want to talk, but otherwise, it’s easy to fall into conversation with them. Anguillians are brought up to be this way.

Can we “Anguillianize” conference attendees?

Although we know that conference attendees crave appropriate connection with their peers at least as much as their desire for appropriate content, most conferences do not supply an environment for easy connection. We’ve all had the experience of being thrust into a room of strangers, wondering how and with whom to strike up a conversation. If most attendees have never grown up in a culture like Anguilla’s, can we at least make it easier for attendees to connect—”Anguillianize” them?

Getting meeting attendees to connect

Though we can’t change the past cultural experience of conference attendees, we can provide an environment that supports and encourages connection. Getting meeting attendees to connect isn’t rocket science. Here are three ways to create such an environment:

Provide opportunities for attendees to connect during conference sessions

Stop hoping that attendees will meet each other during meals, mixers, and socials. That’s the old model, and you’re doing your attendees a disservice if you stick to it. The best way for attendees to connect with each other is via shared experience—and there’s no better place to provide this than the conference sessions themselves.

Use small group and pair work regularly

Attendees do not connect with each other while listening to someone talking at the front of the room. They connect when they are discussing content with one other person, or in small groups of not more than a few people. (They also learn better too; an added plus.) Providing attendees regular opportunities—every ten minutes or so—to work with their peers on a topic of mutual interest turns them into participants in their learning and creates a host of safe places for connections to occur.

Set up small group and pair work to include the exchange of contextual information

Anguillians invariably strike up conversations with tourists with the question “Firs’ timer?” The answer and how it’s communicated leads to further possible questions: why did you come, how long you’ve been coming, where you’re from, etc. We can adopt this approach as well. When designing interactive small group and pair work in conference sessions, incorporate reasons for participants to share appropriately about themselves in the context of the discussion. For example, instead of simply asking participants which course of action they would choose in a given situation, have them share the relevant past experience that leads them to make that choice.

Lessons from Anguilla

I’ve been vacationing in Anguilla for the last twelve years and always seem to learn something during my time on this delightful island. Here are some other Lessons from Anguilla.

Photo attribution: “The site formerly known as Bob Green’s Anguilla News”

Tags: Anguilla, connection| Posted in Connection, Lessons from Anguilla | 2 Comments »

Don’t let the tech tail wag the event dog

Monday, February 25th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

We often let the tech tail wag the event dog.

I’m steamed up after reading an article by the prolific and thoughtful journalist Jason Hensel (don’t worry, this is not about you, Jason). Here’s the relevant excerpt:

“I recently attended the second annual EventTech conference and expo in New York. It was a chance for me to learn more about “leveraging social media + technology to optimize live events,” as the event describes itself. There were several good sessions…however, there was one I think you’d find particularly interesting. It was called “FutureCast 2032: What Will Events Look Like in 20 Years?” Joe English, creative director-experiential marketing at Intel, led the discussion.

Joe started off by listing the value of live events, values that we’re all aware of: connecting people, serendipity, idea exchange and social exchange. What was most interesting, though, was his answers on how technology will be applied to live events in the future. There were six applications:

We will know far more about the audience. Contextual tools and data management will be important. And we’ll move from a shotgun approach to more of a sniper rifle approach when marketing to potential delegates.

We will gather much more about audience behavior. Once again, contextual tools will play a role in this, as well as relatedness engines and RFID/GPS.

We will make more useful suggestions to our audience. Yep, you guessed it—contextual tools and relatedness engines will play a role in this.

Our attendees’ roles as ambassadors will increase. This will be achieved via future social media technologies.

Technology will be the delivery vehicle for information. Distance learning technologies will drive this.

Technology will connect attendees with one another at events.”

—6 Ways Technology Will Be Applied to Events in the Future, Jason Hensel

A couple of these predictions tick me off.

Been there, done that

“3. We will make more useful suggestions to our audience.”

I hope this statement is true in the future. But the notion that you need new technology to make better suggestions to event audiences annoys me.

First, this formulation sides with the old worldview that treats event attendees not as adults but as children who need external authority to determine what they need to learn. That’s training, and most successful organizations abandoned years ago the concept that the majority of learning comes from training.

Second, we know now how to allow people to control their own learning at an event; i.e. via well-designed participant-driven process that uncovers needs and matches them to the considerable resources available from the people formerly known as the audience. Unfortunately, we rarely allow this to happen. I think we will find that future technology will not do as good a job at making better suggestions for our audiences, compared to what we can do now with well-tested, straightforward participative process.

Welcome to WALL•E

#3 started the pressure build-up, and #6 brings me closer to boiling point.

“6. Technology will connect attendees with one another at events.”

I guess this is what you might expect from a director of marketing at Intel. When you only have a hi-tech hammer, everything looks like a hi-tech nail. Joe’s pronouncement evokes the world of WALL•E—Disney’s 2008 movie about a future where obese humans live in outer space, barely able to move about, interacting with each other via advanced technology. Is this the vision of the future we want?

I’m a fan of virtual and hybrid events. I see them as providing important ways that technology can create new opportunities for us to be present at an event that we would not or could not attend physically. But in my opinion, baldly saying that in the future technology will connect attendees with one another at events goes too far. The human race has spent hundreds of thousands of years developing ways of connecting face-to-face. Unless we have holodeck-quality technology that creates a reality essentially indistinguishable from our face-to-face experience, I don’t believe that technology will replace the quality of connection and engagement that routinely occur at well-designed face-to-face events.

What to do?

Sadly these days, I routinely see queries on LinkedIn groups asking about the latest “hot” technology for events. This is sheer laziness that benefits no one except lucky tech suppliers. Instead of looking for new technology to make an event novel, spend your time incorporating processes and formats that will fundamentally improve the quality and value of learning and connection at your event. And if this leads you to incorporate appropriate technology to support these activities? Well, then your event dog will be wagging its tech tail, the way that nature intended, rather than the other way round.

Photo attribution: Scientific American

Tags: eventtech, Hensel, Technology, training| Posted in Event design | 5 Comments »

Why it’s hard to stop conference lecturing

Monday, February 18th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

Stop conference lecturing!

“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
—James A. Baldwin

Sadly, lecturing dominates the vast majority of conferences, even though we’ve known for years that it’s a poor way for attendees to learn. Why? Here’s some…

…history

Somewhere around 50,000 years ago Homo Sapiens invented language. Language accelerates learning by allowing communication, coordination, the spreading of ideas, and accreting knowledge from one generation to the next. Language, as Kevin Kelly puts it, “turns a mind into a tool”. Later we developed other tools—writing, books, the internet—that allow us to pass on learning to others.

During childhood, our culture finds it advantageous to inculcate a large amount of information. Despite our amazing abilities to learn experientially, we primarily use broadcast methods to educate our young in school, because there’s no way a child could figure out experientially in the first two decades of life what has taken thousands of years for the human race to learn.

A mistake

So, a mistake we consequently make is to assume that we should extend into adulthood the broadcast learning we got as kids. Adult learning from an expert made sense in the industrial age. Now that information is moving outside our brains we have less and less need to use adult learning modalities that concentrate on packing information into our heads. Instead, most of what we need to learn to do our job today is based on working informally and creatively with novel problems with solutions that need just-in-time information from our peers.

Indoctrination

We find it hard to stop conference lecturing. Why? Because it’s the dominant learning modality to which every one of us is exposed during our formal education—i.e. school—before adulthood. Teaching us in school, however inefficiently, via lecture about the amazing things humans have created, discovered, and invented indoctrinates us to believe that lecturing is the normal way to learn. That’s why we continue to inflict lecturing on conference audiences. It’s what we’re used to, and, sadly we’re mostly unfamiliar with alternative and more effective learning modalities that are becoming more and more important in today’s world.

Want to learn about alternatives to lectures?

My most recent book provides presenters and event organizers with the antidote to lectures. It’s a compendium of powerful low/no-tech participatory techniques that can greatly improve any conference session. You can find out more about it here.

Photo attribution: Flickr users tonayo and Drumaboy

Tags: lecturing| Posted in Learning | 1 Comment »

Facilitating change: Don’t confuse your product with your business

Monday, February 11th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change. Today, we’ll explore what happens when you confuse your product with your business

Don't confuse product with business: Comparison of Microsoft's (MSFT) stock price (red) over time with Apple's (AAPL) in blue — Comparison of Microsoft stock price (red) over time with Apple’s (blue)

At any point in time, our businesses have a range of products and services available to customers. We have worked hard to develop and market these products. We’ve struggled to create something unique that can be distinguished from those of our competition.

There is a trap that’s easy to fall into, a trap baited with a simple truth about human nature.

We fall in love with what we create.

The trap of falling in love

When we’re in love, we want everything to stay the same forever. Times are good, we have created something wonderful and we want it to last.

But in business (and life too) nothing stays the same. Our competitors see what we have done. If it’s successful, they copy it and work to co-opt, improve on, or commodify what was once uniquely ours.

The need for continual business growth

Just as the best human relationships are those that provide the possibility for each person involved to challenge the others to grow, the most functional and successful businesses are those that are able to challenge the current status quo they have made and build something new, even at the cost of moving on over time from what they once created and loved.

Consider Apple, the maker of the iPod, the most successful music player. Did Apple, having defined and owned the category, focus on building better and better music players? No; they made incremental improvements while pouring energy into the development of the iPhone, a whole new product area that, while eventually cannibalizing Apple’s iPod sales, made far greater profits than if they had stayed with what they first built.

The same lesson holds in the world of consulting. As my mentor Jerry Weinberg puts it: “Give away your best ideas.” Novice consultants are often fearful of losing the secret sauce they have concocted. Veteran consultants—and there are many novice consultants who never become veterans—have learned that when you teach your clients to handle future similar problems themselves, they’ll appreciate your generosity and are more likely to give you further work or favorable word-of-mouth.

Fall in love with what you do

Since 1998, Microsoft put its resources into incremental improvement of its cash cow products, to the expense of its efforts to create innovative new products. The result—a stock price that has not changed significantly over the last fourteen years. (Apple, whose stock price has increased 50x over the same time period, will suffer the same fate if the company doesn’t continue to innovate.)

If you want to be successful in the long term don’t confuse your product with your business. Fall in love with what you do not what you create, and you will be able to move on from the successes of your past to the successes in your future.

Tags: business, facilitating change, growth| Posted in Facilitating Change | 1 Comment »

One way to build a movement at a conference

Monday, February 4th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

Here’s an illuminating example of how to build a movement at a conference.

“On Wednesday, I walked into our boardroom at USGBC for our Green Building & Human Health Summit and I got goose bumps.”
—Rick Fedrizzi, CEO of the US Green Building Council

One of my greatest challenges and pleasures is creating “just-in-time” process that meets the evolving needs of an event.

Last week I was invited to consult on a two-day, one hundred participant “turning-point” summit for the US Green Building Council (USGBC) in Washington, DC. A much wider range of organizations were convening than at previous USGBC events in order to explore a major long-term expansion of the green building movement. So, good process was vital.

During the event, we dreamed up a simple yet powerful exercise to uncover and communicate participant expectations for the meeting. I say “we”, because at least three members of the summit working group contributed to what became an effective and dramatic way to expose and share what participants saw as successful outcomes for the event. Here’s what happened:

What would success look like?

We designed the summit around a set of “shirtsleeve sessions”. We began some short stimulating talks by expert “igniters”. Next, participants divided into small groups to discuss three principle goals and formulate key strategies to address them. At a working group meeting at the end of the first day, we had to decide how best to use the thirty minutes that had been scheduled the following morning before the next shirtsleeve session.

Someone proposed that we ask participants to share their answers to the question “What would success look like?” either from a personal or group perspective. The working group liked this idea. I suggested that answers be written on large sticky notes and displayed in a central location during the day. This allowed the group to view all the responses during breaks, rather than hearing just a few of them in the limited time available.

The participants liked this activity. Soon, a large grid of answers was posted on a lobby wall outside the breakout rooms, available for all to see.

During the afternoon, another working group member had the bright idea to review and categorize the sticky notes’ contents. At a subsequent working group meeting, we agreed that during the closing session she would briefly share seven groupings she had devised that covered just about all the definitions of success that participants had proposed:

The seven groupings

A “trail map” for the future. During the event, one participant said the meeting was more like a base camp than a summit. The metaphor stuck. We started thinking of our journey as an expedition that needs a trail map to be successful.
Inclusiveness. As the organization adjusts to working with a broader community of interest, issues of how to expand connections and social equity are important.
Public relations and messaging. Successfully framing USGBC’s messages is key. This helps people understand that choices they make in their home and business can enhance their family’s and employees’ health.
Standards. How do we emphasize and integrate knowledge and actions that improve well-being into existing standards?
Definition and valuation of health and well-being. We need to define and value health and well-being in USGBC’s and the related community’s mission.
Research. What do we know, what are the research gaps, and how can we obtain funding to fill them?
Paradigm shift. How do we get to a place where the green built environment is synonymous with health?

Building a movement at the conference

Providing summary feedback at the close of a “turning point” event is very important. Participants have put a lot of time and effort into their work together. They need to feel heard and receive assurance that what has happened will lead to significant next steps.

At the USGBC summit, the complexity of the issues and constituencies involved, plus the reality that not all key players were able to attend, meant that detailed trail map outcomes would take some time to formulate.

The sharing of participant’s seven categories of success was, therefore, an important way for participants to feel heard and know that others shared their goals and aspirations. As a result, this simple focused sharing of major insights and common agreements became a key ingredient for “building a movement,” a phrase heard frequently during the high-energy closing session of the summit. After offering a next-step communications plan and an impassioned closing speech by Rick Fedrizzi, USGBC’s CEO, many participants shared that the summit was a milestone moment in the development of green building.

Do you have examples of how to build a movement at a conference? Share them below!

Photo attributions: US Green Building Council

Tags: build a movement, group process, movement building, participation techniques, success| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Should you self-publish your book?

Wednesday, January 30th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

Should you self-publish your book?

“Here’s the problem with self-publishing: no one cares about your book. That’s it in a nutshell. There are somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 books published every year in the US alone, depending on which stats you believe. Many of those – perhaps as many as half or even more – are self-published. On average, they sell less than 250 copies each. Your book won’t stand out. Hilary Clinton’s will. Yours won’t.

So self-publishing is an exercise in futility and obscurity. Of course, there are the stories of the writers who self-publish and magic happens and they sell millions of books, but those are the rare exceptions. How rare? Well, on the order of 1 or 2 per million.”
—Nick Morgan, Should You Self-Publish Your Book?

Nick paints a realistic picture of the work required to become a “successful” self-published author—if you’re defining success purely in terms of book sales. But I think there are other perspectives to consider.

My experience of self-publishing my first book

My first book, about participant-driven and participation-rich conferences, was published three years ago. I have only sold a few thousand copies (though sales per year continue to rise). The money I’ve made from selling books translates into a few cents an hour for the four part-time years I took to write the book. Not successful by Nick’s terms, right?

But. During those three years, I’ve moved from complete obscurity to becoming a fairly well-known authority in the field of innovative event design. My blog had 2.25 million page views in 2012. I’m routinely presenting at industry conferences. And a typical consulting gig brings income equivalent to selling five hundred books.

If you are writing non-fiction for a niche market and you have something important to say, your book can provide wonderful exposure and authority that may (no guarantees!) translate into significant income.

Why I didn’t use a traditional publisher

I considered going the traditional publishing route and I’m glad I didn’t for several reasons:

Traditional publishing typically adds another year before your book is published.
I had complete control over the look and content of my book. I hired the same professionals—editor, proofreader, book designer, cover designer, copywriter—that major publishers use (they are often freelancers these days) and worked with them directly without the publisher as an intermediary.
You’re very unlikely to make significant money from book sales. But you receive significantly more money on each copy of the book.
I have been able to build relationships with many of my book buyers. Although the paperback version of my book is available everywhere, I sell the ebook myself. Most of my sales come directly from my website, perhaps because I offer 30 minutes of free consulting to anyone who buys the book from me. This allows me to connect one-to-one with my readers, which translates into additional consulting/facilitation/presenting work while building up a list of people who are likely to be interested in my next book, which is due to be published later this year.

I hope my experience and thoughts are helpful and perhaps encouraging for some who have been considering self-publishing.

Image attribution: Dianne Heath

Tags: author, marketing, self-publish, self-publishing| Posted in Marketing | 4 Comments »

The psychology of event sponsorship

Monday, January 28th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

Who would have thought that event sponsorship psychology was a thing?

The following story by Vaughn Bell on a recent change to the DSM “psychiatric bible” shines a light on a fundamental but little-known reason why smart companies sponsor events that have a bearing on the products or services they supply. Yes, event sponsorship is a way for a sponsor to increase visibility, image, prestige, and credibility with a target audience, differentiate the company from competitors, help to develop closer and better relationships with customers, and showcase sponsor offerings and capabilities. Yet we’ve known for over five decades that gift-giving activities like sponsorship change recipients’ behavior in ways that they’re not aware of. In other words, event sponsorship psychology exists! Read on:

A change to the DSM manual

One of the most controversial changes to the recently finalised DSM-5 diagnostic manual was the removal of the ‘bereavement exclusion’ from the diagnosis of depression – meaning that someone could be diagnosed as depressed even if they’ve just lost a loved one.

The Washington Post has been investigating the financial ties of those on the committee and, yes, you guessed it:

Eight of 11 members of the APA committee that spearheaded the change reported financial connections to pharmaceutical companies — either receiving speaking fees, consultant pay, research grants or holding stock, according to the disclosures filed with the association. Six of the 11 panelists reported financial ties during the time that the committee met, and two more reported financial ties in the five years leading up to the committee assignment, according to APA records.

A key adviser to the committee — he wrote the scientific justification for the change — was the lead author of the 2001 study on Wellbutrin, sponsored by GlaxoWellcome, showing that its antidepressant Wellbutrin could be used to treat bereavement…

The association also appointed an oversight panel that declared that the recommendations had been free of bias, but most of the members of the “independent review panel” had previous financial ties to the industry.

Actually, it’s kind of sad that this isn’t a surprise, but perhaps more worrying is the fact that the chairman of the mood disorders panel that made the change, Jan Fawcett, doesn’t seem to understand bias.

“I don’t think these connections create any bias at all,” Fawcett said. “People can say we were biased. But it assumes we have no intelligence of our own.”

Fawcett is assuming that bias means ‘dishonesty’ where people deliberately make choices for their own advantage against what they know to be a better course of action, or ‘sloppiness’ where people don’t fully think through the issue.

But bias, as you can find out from picking up any social psychology paper from the past century, is where incentives change our behaviour usually without us having insight into the presence or effect of the influencer.

This is exemplified in the work of Dan Ariely, and the research that won Daniel Kahneman the Nobel Prize.

So when someone says, “I don’t think these connections create any bias” it means – ‘I’m not willing to think about the bias that these connections create’ which is a red flag that they won’t be recognised or addressed.
—A depressing financial justification by Vaughn Bell

Event sponsorship psychology works!

The Middle East merchant who invites you into his shop for coffee before discussing a sale. The Italian winemaker who plies you with her wines to taste before she graciously shows you the cost to ship a dozen bottles back home. (Yes, this happened to me recently).

Most cultures learned long ago the power of giving gifts to change behavior.

Western cultures believe in the supremacy of our minds over our emotions. Daniel Kahneman describes this as “the rider over the elephant”. Consequently, they discount the effects that sponsorship can have on our hearts and subsequent decisions. I sincerely thank the myriads of event sponsors who have often made my time at events easier and more pleasant. I also acknowledge their influence on my future consulting recommendations and purchasing choices. As Bell points out, people who believe their intelligence will protect them against the ways our brains actually work are fooling themselves. Meanwhile, the smart sponsor smiles and continues to be generous.

Event sponsorship psychology works!

Tags: bias, marketing, sponsorship| Posted in Event design | 3 Comments »

Human spectrograms—video from the FRESH Conference

Saturday, January 19th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

Thanks to Merv Wyeth of Chanctonbury Associates for this video of the human spectrograms (aka body voting) I facilitated at a session on facilitation at the 2013 FRESH conference on innovative meeting formats in Copenhagen, Denmark. In the video, we explore participants’ answers to the following questions:

What percentage of the meeting sessions you organize use facilitation? Then moving to…
What percentage of the meeting sessions you organize do you think should be facilitated?
How willing are you to try participative formats?
How willing are your meeting owners to try participative formats?
How willing are your meeting participants to try participative formats?
How successful are you at persuading meeting owners to use facilitation, when appropriate, during sessions?
What percentage of your attendees are familiar with participative formats? (The audience suggested this question.)

So you can see how I use human spectrograms to interview participants at different points on the answer continuum to shed light on their viewpoints and circumstances.

The video also illustrates state-change human spectrograms. Here the group can watch the movement between the answers to two slightly different questions. In addition, the video demonstrates a form of two-dimensional human spectrogram, where we differentiate answers along a second axis in the room—in this case how answers differ for corporate and association meeting planners.

Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Dear Adrian—How do I break in to the event services industry?

Monday, January 14th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

Another issue of an occasional series—Dear Adrian—in which I answer questions sent to me about event design, elementary particle physics, solar hot water systems, and anything else I might conceivably know something about. If you have a question you’d like me to answer, please write to me (don’t worry, I won’t publish anything without your permission).

Q. Dear Adrian,

I was wondering if you would be able to share some of your experience in the events services industry. I’m a Middle East Studies professional and I’m looking towards a career change into event management. I was just wondering what you studied, and how you got into conference design. What were some of the difficulties you had along the way? How does one “break into” the conference and events services industry with a degree in liberal arts?

In your book, which I am reading (which is amazing by the way, congrats!) it says that you managed a solar domestic hot water heating system manufacturing company. How on earth did you get into event management with that background?

I appreciate any answers you might have time to answer and I thank you.

Kind regards,

A student in George Washington University’s Event Management Certificate program.

A. Dear Student,

I’m afraid that the career path that led to my “breaking” into the event services industry is so atypical that it can in no way serve as a guide to others. This post has some information that sheds a little light on the circumstances.

And yet there is something one can learn from the strange journey that brought me into the conference and event services industry. Although I have only been connected to the “professional” event industry world for a few years, I have met and learned a little about the backgrounds of hundreds of event professionals in many industry segments. And I can assure you that a majority of those people did not plan a career in our industry but, like myself, found a calling or attraction to their work.

The people I’ve met have prior experience in all kinds of seemingly unrelated fields. Besides hospitality experience, which you might well expect to be a precursor, I’ve met people who have years of theatre experience, people with degrees in computer science or who worked in high tech, who started organizing conferences around a hobby they loved, and who ran companies and associations related to completely different industries.

As a result, my conclusion is that you are unlikely to be able to predict the fit for an events industry position by simply looking at prior experience listed on a résumé. Founding and managing my solar hot water manufacturing company, for example, gave me valuable business experience in a host of areas: finance and business planning, working with employees and contractors, marketing, and selling, to name a few. (And I’d add that your liberal arts degree could be excellent preparation for a career in the events industry, as a good program teaches you how to think creatively about a wide range of subjects; valuable expertise in such a diverse, wide-ranging, and often fast-paced industry as ours.)

What the event professionals I’ve met who clearly enjoy their work all have in common is their pleasure and satisfaction in successfully creating an enjoyable environment where people can come together, connect, and learn. That’s certainly what motivates my work. Is it something that also speaks to you? Then, if you have or can build the necessary competencies over time, there’s a place for you in this profession.

As far as practical considerations go, there are a wealth of opportunities available to you. I’m a big believer in the power of personal networking, whether face-to-face or, increasingly, online. The local chapters of industry associations are an obvious starting point. Reach out to your local chapter and explain your situation; attend a meeting or two and start to network there. Can you afford to volunteer or intern? This is one of the best ways for people and organizations to learn your capabilities, potentially leading to paying job opportunities.

Online, the MeetingsCommunity (commonly known as MeCo) has proved to be a great resource over the years. Check out the #eventprofs #mpi #pcma, and #ises streams of tweets on Twitter. Also, explore the many LinkedIn groups that cover every facet of the industry.

I hope this is helpful. Getting started in the event services industry is probably the hardest part. But persistence, with a bit of luck and serendipity, is usually rewarded. I wish you well in your endeavors. Keep me posted about what happens!

With best wishes,

-Adrian Segar-

Tags: event management, event services, getting started, meeting industry| Posted in Dear Adrian | No Comments »