"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
While preparing to emcee my Pecha Kucha session at EventCamp East Coast, I thought it would be useful to collect together in one place my scattered Pecha Kucha posts and videos about the format, as well as a video of one of the Pecha Kucha presentations I’ve made. Enjoy!
How you program conferences depends (or ought to) on your answer to the question: Do conference attendees know what they want?
No one ever asks this question, of course. But if they did, the conventional answer, given while under the influence of truth serum, would have to be: “No they don’t. That’s why we have a program committee that puts together a set of sessions that’s tailored to our audience.”
The problem with this answer is that, after twenty years of running participant-driven conferences where I’ve had the luxury of comparing what participants chose to do with what the organizers predicted they wanted, I know the following to be true:
The best conference program committees predict only half the program sessions that attendees really want.
Think about that for a moment. Half or more of the sessions in your last conference were not what your attendees really wanted.
What a waste.
So don’t listen to those who say that a committee of subject matter experts will do a good job putting together a conference program. It won’t.
Now it’s not that I think that the conventional answer to the question that I started with is wrong. Conference attendees don’t know what they want any better than the program committee if you ask them before the event. (Yes, I’ve checked that statement by comparing pre-conference attendee suggestions for sessions with what participants actually chose. Same dismal prediction success.)
The reality is that if you want to find out what conference attendees really want to discuss and learn about at a conference, you need to do the following:
Uncover topics for discussion at the event
Potter Steward, Supreme Court Associate Justice of the United States famously wrote that pornography was hard to define, but that “I know it when I see it”. In the same way, individual attendees (or program committee members) find it hard to define in advance the session topics they’d like. But when they use a group-generated comprehensive list, they find it much easier to pick what they want to have happen. As I’ve written about before, this process works poorly in advance. By having group members request topics while the whole group is listening, everyone hears good, unexpected ideas for topics that may subsequently initiate a novel and popular session. This is one of the important functions of the Three Questions session that Conferences That Work uses.
Provide a convergent/divergent process for choosing the topics that will be scheduled
To get a conference program that optimally reflects the true needs and desires of the people present you need to first publicly stimulate divergent thinking. The whole group generates a comprehensive set of plausible ideas. You then follow up with convergent process that narrows topics down to a realistic set of popular group choices. This is similar to classic brainstorming and decision-making process. It surprises me how rarely such a well-established protocol has been used for the creation of conference programs. The peer session signup used in Conferences That Work provides this two-stage process.
Your choice
So, do conference attendees know what they want? Yes, they do—when the above criteria are satisfied. And they do so better than any well-intentioned committee attempting to create a good program before the event.
So you have a choice.
Keep building your conference program the same old way, knowing that half or more of your sessions are not what attendees would choose.
Or, use process that guarantees success, because your attendees get the program they want by creating it themselves.
What size should our conferences be? Here’s an interesting quote from John Sculley, the former CEO of Apple, that gives us a clue.
“The other thing about Steve was that he did not respect large organizations. He felt that they were bureaucratic and ineffective. He would basically call them “bozos.” That was his term for organizations that he didn’t respect.
The Mac team they were all in one building and they eventually got to one hundred people. Steve had a rule that there could never be more than one hundred people on the Mac team.”
—John Sculley (former CEO of Apple) talking about Steve Jobs
There’s that number one hundred again, the same number I use as an upper limit to the size of the conferences described in Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love. We need to remember that large meetings are the exception rather than the rule. Hospitality data indicates that, for ~80% of the meetings held today, if you want a participant-driven and participation-rich conference, the book’s meeting design is all you’ll need.
In addition, you can extend the methodology described in the book to larger events. I share how to do this in the free supplement to the book, available here.
So what size should our conferences be? My answer is: no bigger than necessary!
Has anyone ever told you, “There are no wrong answers to these questions”?
Over 50 years ago, a teacher asked me to publicly announce my score on a ten-question biology pop quiz. “6,” I said, and there were loud gasps in the classroom. The class of twenty-three students was shocked. They thought Segar (we were all addressed by our last names) was smarter than that. Although it has lost its emotional impact, I still remember the shame I felt at that moment.
I suspect that most people can remember, all too well, similar experiences during their childhood. Setting up people for shame about their performance is, sadly, a far too common occurrence that can have a serious effect on one’s feelings of self-worth later in life.
And that’s why when I introduce The Three Questions exercise at the start of Conferences That Work, the most important instruction I give is to tell participants:
“There are no wrong answers to these questions.“
There are no wrong answers to these questions
For example, when each participant answers the first question: How did I get here? (in this room at this conference today) he or she can provide an answer ranging from the factual:
I drove here on Route 9
to the intimate:
I have been coming to this conference for years and got my current job through the connections I made here. This year I will be on the winning team at the annual softball game, and I wouldn’t miss our conference for the world!
Every answer is right. Every answer provides the opportunity for a participant to share at a comfortable level, whatever that might be for them.
I love offering participants the freedom to answer The Three Questions in any way they choose. Perhaps I’m still sensitive about what happened in high school, or, at least, still sensitized to its effects. Whatever the reason, starting with a safe way to share about oneself at the start of a conference provides a gentle introduction to sharing at a deeper level as the event progresses. And knowing that whatever you answer is right is a valuable gift to anyone who has felt shame about their performance, as I did so many years ago.
The Tyranny of TED? If you read my blog you’ll know that I’m a fan of short presentation formats like Pecha Kucha (20 slides x 20 seconds) and Ignite (20 slides x 15 seconds), and I have no fundamental objection to the longer, eighteen-minute free-form TED format.
But there’s something about TED that I don’t like.
TED is elitist.
TED’s marketing: “The annual TED conferences, in Long Beach/Palm Springs and Edinburgh, bring together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers”. TED hand-picks attendees. Attending TED is very expensive: currently $6,250 per year for TED Conference and $6,000 per year for TEDGlobal. TED promotes the elite audience as a plus. Presenters must spend significant time creating a highly scripted presentation that touches the audience profoundly, ideally in some novel way.
There’s a page on TED’s website that attempts to address these issues. It defends the exorbitant cost of attending TED live events. How? By claiming that the majority of attendees are very successful and that their success has enabled them to pay these fees. The private nonprofit Sapling Foundation owns TED. The foundation’s 2015 990-PF tax return states that the foundation had assets of $53 million, revenues of $65 million, and paid its top six employees over $2 million in compensation. TED states that they give scholarships to some people. But the 990 shows no details on the level of financial support provided. The website is silent as to the method of selecting scholarship recipients.
It doesn’t have to be this way
I believe that the majority of people have something worthwhile to say about some topic. What they have to say is of interest to their peers. The Pecha Kucha events I’ve run have been filled with presenters who responded to an open request. The resulting sessions have been interesting, entertaining, and fulfilling to their audiences. TED perpetuates the myth that only a minority in this world have something worth saying. The organization derives revenue from appointing itself as the gatekeeper of who should be up on the stage and creating an exclusive event that can be capitalized. TED is welcome to take this approach, of course, and entitled to its success.
Don’t believe that the presenters of TED are the only people who should be presenting in this way. This is the tyranny of TED. Such a belief perpetuates the old hierarchical model of learning: a minority of people know and a majority don’t. The reality of the importance of social learning in today’s world, learning where a teacher at one moment becomes a student the next, is weakened by an organization that succeeds in the marketplace by selecting and glorifying a few to the exclusion of the rest of us.
During a conference session I was facilitating recently, I met a man—I’ll call him Paul—who had no problems. Since the session was described as an opportunity to get answers from a small group of your peers to problems you were having in your professional life, I found Paul’s attendance surprising. “If you have no problems, why are you here?” was my first question. “I just came to help.” was Paul’s reply.
The group of peers at his table questioned Paul further. Paul apparently had no problems at work at all. His boss loved his performance. Paul felt happy and fulfilled at his job. Even one of my favorite questions in circumstances like these—So Paul, if you had a problem, what would it be? (It’s surprising how often this works!)—elicited a short silence followed by a further protestation of problemlessness. Just to see how far we could go, I asked Paul if he had a problem with any aspect of his life. “Well,” Paul admitted, “I’m no longer married.” I allowed that this problem was outside the scope of our session, and we moved on to the next participant.
Of course, as my mentor Jerry Weinberg wrote long ago: There’s always a problem. I don’t know for sure, but perhaps Paul’s biggest problem was that he was in denial about his problems.
Whatever the reason, Paul missed a great chance to work on some important aspects of his professional life. It’s rare to be offered such an opportunity, but, as we can see from Paul’s example, it’s still possible to turn it down.
Pecha Kucha presenters at Event Camp Twin Cities 2011
Last week, at Event Camp Twin Cities 2011, I emceed my third Pecha Kucha session. So I’m sharing what I’ve learned about organizing events with multiple consecutive Pecha Kucha (or Ignite) presentations. (If you’re thinking—What’s Pecha Kucha and why is it cool?—read this post first.) I’m going to gloss over information about venue selection and marketing since these are pretty well covered on the global Pecha Kucha site. Instead, I’ll concentrate on some of the lesser-known but important issues that arise when you use this popular format to educate and entertain.
PowerPoint or Keynote or both?
The first logistical question any Pecha Kucha organizer faces is: What presentation software to use? The Wintel/Apple debate may have lost some of its fervor over the last few years, but in the world of presentation software it’s alive and well in the popularity of both PowerPoint and Keynote. Unless you’re running a session at a school or organization where all the presenters have access to the same software, it’s unfair, in my view, to restrict presenters to only one of these products. While PowerPoint has a greater market share, Keynote is more likely to be used by the creative types who tend to populate Pecha Kucha presentations.
This means, of course, that you’ll need access to both software packages yourself. So you’ll have to use a Macintosh since that’s the only platform that runs Keynote. If that’s the case, I recommend you build the single multi-presenter presentation in Keynote, which I consider the superior software for Pecha Kucha-style presentations.
Selection criteria for presenters
If your presentations are to reflect the interests and variety of a community, I suggest you provide relaxed criteria for selecting presenters. Creating and practicing a Pecha Kucha presentation is a significant amount of work. I am reluctant to impose my selection criteria on what people offer to do. If you receive many more offers of presentations than you can accommodate, then schedule multiple sessions and populate each one with a somewhat consistent set of presenters.
Pecha Kucha templates
To create a uniform look, it’s important to provide all presenters with templates for your session. These typically will include twenty-two slides in all:
An opening slide containing the event logo and presenter and/or topic information;
Twenty “blank” slides; and
A closing slide with presenter contact information.
I like to provide a visual indicator of time passing on each of the twenty slides. So, I use a translucent circle that moves from left to right in twenty seconds along the bottom of the screen. I do not remember whom I stole this technique from, but it works well and is appreciated by presenters. Here’s a link to sample Keynote and PowerPoint templates that use this technique.
Make these templates available several weeks before the event. Creating a good Pecha Kucha takes time. The quality of your session will suffer if presenters have to rush to create and practice their presentations. Since the templates are large, upload them, together with a set of instructions, to a file-sharing site and send your presenter the link.
A word about fonts
Tell your presenters not to use obscure fonts in their presentations. Why? This may cause ugly font substitution effects if the computer on which the master presentation file is created does not have a font the presenter used.
Before the session
Before the Pecha Kucha session, you must round up all the individual presentations, convert them (if necessary) into the chosen software format, check them, and merge them into a single large presentation. Don’t underestimate the time required to perform these steps. It’s easy to be stymied by a late presenter, omit a slide component when converting, or delete one of the many slide auto-transitions. For a set of six presenters, I’d allow several hours to do a careful, accurate job. I tell presenters that their presentation is due ten days before the session. Send reminders a few days before the due date, and follow up immediately if any are not received on time. Invariably, one or two presentations will be late, but at least the rest can be converted, checked and merged into the master file while inveigling the tardy.
How to merge multiple Pecha Kucha presentations into one master
Here’s the procedure I use to merge multiple Pecha Kucha presentations into one master file. Start with an appropriately renamed master copy of your Keynote template. Next, decide on the order in which the individual sessions will be run. How you merge each individual presentation into the master Keynote file depends on whether it’s Keynote or PowerPoint.
Keynote merge
It’s easy to merge an individual Keynote presentation into the master file.
Switch to Navigator View of the individual presentation, and click on one of the slides in the slide view
Select all (Command-A) the slides and copy (Command-C) them.
Switch to the master presentation and click on the slide right before where you want to insert.
Paste (Command-V) to insert the entire individual presentation into the master file.
PowerPoint merge
As you might expect, merging a PowerPoint presentation into the master Keynote file is more complicated, and there are more opportunities to make mistakes.
Begin by adding a blank copy of your presentation Keynote template into the master Keynote file, using the technique described in the previous section.
Copy the presenter-supplied text on the opening title slide and paste it into the corresponding slide in the master Keynote presentation.
Click on the first of the twenty PowerPoint presenter slides and carefully select all the elements on the slide except the animated timing circle.
Copy your selection, switch to Keynote, and paste it into the corresponding Keynote slide in the master file.
Click on the animated Keynote circle and choose Bring to Front from the Arrange menu. If you omit this step, the moving circle may not be visible when showing the slide.
Repeat the above three steps for each of the twenty presentation slides.
Finally, copy the presenter-supplied text on the closing title slide and paste it into the corresponding closing slide in the master Keynote presentation.
Final steps
Since the above processes may take several hours, be sure to frequently save your work!
Add a title slide for the entire Pecha Kucha session to the front of the completed master file. Also, add a black slide at the end for the production crew to display when the final presentation is over.
Testing the master presentation
Once you’ve created the master presentation, it’s time to test it. To avoid font and hardware problems, use the computer that you will be using at the event.
Testing the master presentation requires constant attention for the entire duration of the presentation. Check that:
The presentation pauses on each presenter’s opening and closing slides.
You’ve copied all slide elements correctly from each of the twenty slides in the individual presentations.
The presentation auto-advances every twenty seconds on each of the twenty presentation slides.
You have only one animated circle moving on each slide.
The animated moving circle is visible on each of the twenty slides.
Presenter tip
In your instructions, emphasize that practicing the session is important. Even if the presenter knows their content well, discovering what can be said in the twenty seconds before the current slide advances takes time. Multiple run-throughs will help presenters learn to recover from the inevitable minor slips that occur.
It’s an art to match what you say with the twenty seconds each slide is on the screen. Like most art, one’s skill improves with practice.
Sound concerns
As with every presentation, poor sound can severely impact your Pecha Kucha session. If any of your presenters have included sound in their presentations (yes, it happens), you will need to arrange to mix the sound output of the presentation computer into the sound system for the event. Presenters should use a wireless lavalier (preferred) or wireless handheld mike so they are free to move about during their presentation. Ideally, use three microphones (for the emcee, the current presenter, and the upcoming presenter). But you can get away with a single handheld microphone if that’s all that’s available.
Presenter introductions
Think about how you will introduce each presenter. The approach I like, much appreciated by audiences, is to ask each presenter to write a short poem about themself. So far I’ve employed the haiku (4-line) or cinquain (5-line) forms—you can obtain a description of these online. I encourage presenters to be creative and/or amusing with their poems. Tell them not to worry about following the precise formal poem structure. At the event, the emcee slowly reads each presenter’s poem out loud before she starts.
Other miscellaneous tips
Budgeting Pecha Kucha sessions is not complicated. Unless you’re holding a for-profit event (which requires, incidentally, a minimum donation of $200 to the PechaKucha organization) you are normally aiming to cover your expenses. These are chiefly venue rental and A/V services. If you are serving drinks, I suggest you employ a cash bar. Your income can come from an event sponsor or a modest door charge.
If you’re holding a Pecha Kucha session at a conference, consider reserving time right after the presentations are over for the presenters to lead small group discussions of their content. Allow about thirty minutes for this, and suggest that audience members can move between groups as desired. We did this at Event Camp Twin Cities 2011, and it was very well received.
Finally, if at all possible, video the entire session and have someone take photographs, too. Upload the movie to a video-sharing site. Photographs provide a great memento for presenters and good content for advertising your next event.
Other Pecha Kucha organizers out there: what tips do you have for organizing a Pecha Kucha event? Please share your experiences and advice in the comments.
I expect much will be written about the problems encountered with communications with the remote pods at Event Camp Twin Cities 2011 (ECTC) last week. Rather than concentrate on what went wrong, I thought I’d share some ideas on hybrid event architecture that grew from my on-site experience and a long conversation with Brandt Krueger, who produced the event, the following morning. Without Brandt’s explanations, I wouldn’t have been able to write this post, but any errors or omissions are mine and mine alone. I am not a production professional, so I write this post in the spirit of provoking discussion and input from those who have far more experience in this area.
Event Camp Twin Cities hybrid event design
Let’s start with a brief description of the set-up at Event Camp Twin Cities. As with many hybrid events, there were three audiences:
The local on-site attendees in Minneapolis
Seven “pods” (small groups of people that gathered in Amsterdam, Philadelphia, Toronto, Vancouver, Silicon Valley, and two corporate headquarters)
Individual remote audience members
Both the pods and the individual remote audience members viewed the activities in Minneapolis via Sonic Foundry’s Mediasite platform. This product provides, via a browser-embedded player, A/V from the event (e.g., a presenter speaking) alongside additional media feeds (e.g., presenter slides). The flexibility of this technology, however, includes a cost that contributed to the problems encountered at Event Camp Twin Cities. The “real-time” feed delivered to remote attendees was delayed approximately twenty seconds.
During ECTC, individual remote audience members viewed the Mediasite feed and interacted with the proceedings via Twitter as a backchannel, ably assisted by remote audience host (aka virtual emcee) Emilie Barta. From the accounts I’ve heard, this channel worked well.
The pods also viewed the Mediasite feed and could interact via Twitter. To provide additional interactivity for the pods, Event Camp Twin Cities set up live Skype calls to the pods. Several pods clustered on one Skype call. When local participants wanted to have a real-time conversation, they switched to Skype, turning off the Mediasite feed. This is like the way a radio show caller turns off their time-delayed broadcast radio once on the phone.
How it worked out
For reasons that are not clear to me, this switchover process did not work well at ECTC. Rather than concentrate on what happened and why, I’d like to suggest another architectural approach for the pods’ experience that may prevent similar problems in the future.
Instead of switching between delayed and real-time channels for the pods, I think that pod <—> local communications should be set up only via real-time channels. One reason that the pods at ECTC use the (delayed) Mediasite feed is that it provides a convenient aggregation of the two broadcast sources needed for any event these days—A/V of what is going on at the venue plus a channel for slides or other supporting materials. That works for the individual remote audience, which only interacts with the event via Twitter. But when you want to have significant real-time, two-way communication between pods and the main event, you have to handle the complexity involved in switching between delayed and real-time channels on the fly.
Possible improvements
Here’s how my approach would work. All the pods would receive a single real-time broadcast channel for supporting materials (slides, movies, etc.) created at the event. You can easily do this using one of the “screen-sharing” solutions in wide use today. The A/V from a “master” computer would broadcast to each pod. And the event would link to each pod via its own two-way channel. This could be a Skype or other videoconference call.
With this architecture, the pods would not receive a delayed feed (i.e., no Mediasite feed), so no switching between delayed and live would be necessary. (Individual remote audience members would continue to receive the delayed feed, as before.) The main event site would need to produce the audio feed, to avoid distracting sound from the pods. But this approach would eliminate the complexities of switching between two channels on the fly.
I think that this approach might be an improvement over the Event Camp Twin Cities 2011 design. It would allow easier spontaneous real-time interaction with the pods while eliminating one potential source of problems during the event. I await with interest any comments from those who understand the issues better than I do.
Hybrid event production professionals, hybrid event attendees, in fact, all event professionals: what do you think?
Thanks, Ruud Janssen, for the photo of the production studio at Event Camp Twin Cities 2011!
During my workshops on participant-driven and participant-rich events, people sometimes ask: “But what do you do with people who won’t participate.”
When we explore what’s behind this question, we find an assumption. If we don’t get everyone at our event participating we’ve failed in some way. There is fear of how some attendees may respond to an event environment that’s different from what they habitually experience.
Yes, there will nearly always be attendees who, for a variety of reasons, don’t want to participate. And their reasons may be totally legitimate. I remember one attendee who completely clammed up midway through a workshop. We eventually discovered that he had just heard that his best friend had been lost at sea. There are people who are scared of judgment by their peers on what might come out of their mouths. People who arrive at events exhausted, unable to expend any more energy than necessary. People who are sure that they learn best by listening to lectures rather than conferring with their peers…
Some people, when gently encouraged and supported to try participating, discover that it’s actually not such a terrible experience…in fact they quite like it! Often they become the biggest cheerleaders for increasing the amount of participation in events.
On the other hand, some people will probably never convert. In my experience, they are a small but always-present minority (around 1 – 2% at my conferences).
You can’t please everyone
But we cannot censor the use of participation-driven and participation-rich event designs because a few attendees are uncomfortable or resistant to them. To do so is to penalize the majority of attendees who benefit greatly from the opportunities they receive. Opportunities to create the event they want and to learn about what they want to learn from their peers during the event.
So the next time someone tells you that “some people won’t like” the participatory event design you’re championing, point out that the tail may be wagging the proverbial dog.
Because the danger of being fixated on creating an event that works for everyone is that you are likely to end up with an event that works for no one.
If allowed by the venue, masking tape is a convenient method to hang paper and cards on a wall. I recommend 1″ wide, fresh, name-brand (e.g. 3M, Scotch) tape. A couple of 3″ strips of tape placed at the corners will hold a piece of flip chart paper securely. If you are going to be hanging many sheets of paper, you can use a continuous strip of high-quality double-sided masking tape e.g. 3M 9415PC. Run the strip horizontally at about a six-foot height, and you’ll be able to hang paper anywhere along its length.
Self-adhesive pads
Although much more expensive than plain paper pads, flip chart pads with a 2″ strip of tacky adhesive at the top of each sheet provide a convenient method of quickly hanging flip chart paper without having to mess with strips of masking tape.
Self-adhesive paper rolls
One way to create large drawing surfaces is to tape roll paper to a wall using continuous strips of masking tape. If you have to move the drawing surface a few times, consider using an adhesive-backed paper roll. Two products I have found but not yet used are manufactured by Pacon: GOcraft! and GOwrite!
GOcraft! banner paper is available in 12″ x 40′ and 24″ x 25′ rolls. The paper is backed with a post-it-like adhesive. The manufacturer claims it will adhere indefinitely to a clean, hard surface and to textured surfaces like fabric-covered walls for several days. You use a permanent marker to write on the product and Pacon claims that no bleed-through will occur.
GOwrite! is available in 18″ x 6′ or 20′ and 24″ x 10′ or 20′ rolls which provide a dry erase surface to use with any dry-erase markers. According to the manufacturer, GOwrite! erases cleanly without whiteboard shadowing. You attach the product by removing a peel-off removable liner sheet. It will adhere indefinitely to most hard surfaces, but will not stay on textured walls for extended periods. Pacon claims that removal will not ruin surfaces. You can move it “two or three times” before its adhesion deteriorates and the corners start to curl.
Sticky notes
Sticky notes are a great tool for “cards-on-the-wall” group techniques, like affinity grouping, and they are often the only things that venues will allow you to attach to their walls. For small groups, 3″ x 5″ notes may be large enough, but I prefer to use 6″ x 8″ Post-it® Brand Super Sticky Meeting Notes for large groups.
Pins
Thumb tacks, if allowed by a venue, are a convenient method for attaching paper and cards to corkboards. Buy map style not flat head pins. At a pinch, you can use straight or safety pins to attach flip chart paper to draperies.
For mounting to fabric-covered walls, use these mounting squares. They provide an adhesive side that attaches permanently to paper or card, and a velcro-like side that provides strong yet removable adhesion to fabric-covered walls.
Cloth panel wall clips provide another convenient method for attaching paper and cards to fabric-covered walls. They are more expensive than adhesive strips, but you can move and reuse them over and over again.
Vinyl dry-erase pads are 27″ x 34″ white sheets, packaged in a roll, that stick to a wall by static electricity. They will not stay up indefinitely, but work fine for temporary use during an event. Because they stick to everything, they are not easy to install. So, put them in place before a session begins. You can write on them with either permanent (preferable) or dry-erase markers. Like most inexpensive whiteboard substitutes they are hard to erase completely. Expect to replace sheets after a few uses.
Ideapaint is a treatment that turns any smooth flat wall into a dry-erase surface. You must apply it correctly and it’s not cheap ($175 – $200 for 50 sq. ft. coverage), though Ideapaint’s price compares favorably to the cost of a high-quality whiteboard.
Steel or corkboard or wooden wall strips
One of the simplest ways to make a venue wall attachment-friendly is to install horizontal strips that can be used to attach flip chart paper. Such strips are available in various materials: steel (use magnets to attach), wood or metal-framed corkboard (use pins), and wood (use appropriately spaced straight pins or nails on which binder clips can be hung). Steel and wood can be painted to match the wall decor, while corkboard strips are generally attractive and unobtrusive
Whiteboards
Whiteboards offer a permanent solution for writing and posting on venue walls. At prices of around $15-$20 per square foot, they are not inexpensive, but they offer perhaps the ultimate flexibility for meeting activities that require a vertical posting or drawing surface. The older (and less expensive) melamine surfaces suffer from “ghosting” of dry-erase markers over time and are not recommended for institutional use. Nowadays, most whiteboards use a hard porcelain finish over steel, which allows the use of magnets to hold materials on the surface.
There are probably other methods available for non-destructive posting on walls that I haven’t mentioned here. What have I missed?
While preparing to emcee my Pecha Kucha session at EventCamp East Coast, I thought it would be useful to collect together in one place my scattered Pecha Kucha posts and videos about the format, as well as a video of one of the Pecha Kucha presentations I’ve made. Enjoy!
Has anyone ever told you, “There are no wrong answers to these questions”?
