Reducing No-Shows at Free Events: A Bold Approach

Back view of people sitting in rows of chairs in a conference room. One of the chairs is empty and has a sign "No-Show Fee" hanging on the back.Liz Latham, co-founder of Club Ichi and a brilliant event marketer, recently shared an intriguing idea she plans to test to increase attendance at her free events.

Having registrants not show up has become a big problem for the meeting industry, especially for free events. Not long ago, registrants would reliably attend events they signed up for, barring unforeseen circumstances—a far cry from today’s reality. Price incentives for early registration worked, and predicting attendance rate and attrition was a science, not an art.

Those were the days!

Today, with the multiple impacts of easy online registration, FOMO rivalry, and more choices for events than ever, it’s far more likely that registrants don’t appear on the day.

For event conveners, this is at best dispiriting and at worst financially disastrous.

So anything we can do that might reduce the uncertainty and percentage of no-shows is worth considering.

Liz’s idea

Liz noticed a relatively new trend, that you may have experienced too. Some restaurants, fitness programs, hair salons, dentists, doctors, and other types of businesses have begun to charge a fee if a customer doesn’t show up for an appointment.

So Liz is considering taking credit-card information at registration time, and charging a “no-show fee” to the card if the registrant doesn’t attend.

Although this idea may be new to the meeting industry, the above links show that many appointment-based businesses routinely use this approach.

No-show fees aren’t needed for paid events, which can have cancellation policies that offer partial refunds, compensating, at least financially, for no-shows. Rather, Liz is thinking of testing no-show fees for the many free events she organizes, where attendance rates are often well below 50% of registrations.

Could no-show fees work for the meeting industry?

Pros: From a meeting organizer’s perspective, the implementation of a no-show fee may deter folks registering who only expect to attend if nothing better shows up at the time of the meeting. This minimizes waste by better aligning logistical preparations with actual attendance. Implementing no-show fees can also benefit registrants who do show up, since the promoted event size (including, optionally, a list of registrants) is more likely to be accurate.

Cons: Requiring credit card information at registration may frustrate those confident they’ll attend and adds security and logistical challenges for organizers. In addition, the organizers will need to create a refund policy for no-shows with a defined and legitimate reason (such as a death in the family, travel disruptions, etc.), and implementing this could be cumbersome.

Your thoughts?

Do you think implementing no-show fees at free events is an idea worth exploring? Have you tried or experienced no-show fees at a meeting? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!

Fake women event speakers? We need to think bigger!

illustration of the OpenAI logo dreaming up a fake eventFor heaven’s sake! Fake women event speakers? Fake articles by fake writers in Sports Illustrated? Meeting professionals: this is a golden opportunity! We need to think bigger! Yes, friends, it’s now obvious that what our industry needs is…fake events!

Think about it for a moment.

Fake speakers

Creating fake women speakers is just one tiny step in the right direction. Think big! How hard is it to make all your speakers fake? OK, so some intrepid journalists took the time to discover that a few women speakers featured on a conference website don’t exist. Well, no one’s going to bother to do that for your male speakers, because everyone expects that men will be the vast majority of your headliners. So you have nothing to lose! Make all your speakers fake!

Fake attendees

The next logical step: create fake attendees! Lots of them! We are all impressed by those huge events that everyone who is everyone has to attend for FOMO. And getting people to register and actually attend events these days is a ton of work. Hard work! Instead, simply have ChatGPT generate a long list of impressive attendees. Be sure to ask for a good mix of ethnic names, genders, and geographical regions, together with impressive job titles at big-name companies. Ten minutes work, tops! Your event is already a success! And it hasn’t even happened yet!

Fake events

At this point, the final step should be obvious. Putting together a successful event, in-person, online, or, heaven-forbid, hybrid is HARD! It takes time. It costs money!

Give yourself a break! Stop running yourself ragged designing, preparing, and running real events.

Instead, create fake events!

Here are some of the advantages of fake events over real ones.

  • No pesky people to hire, fire, and pay!
  • Ditto, contractors! Goodbye, logistics! No more negotiating with F&B suppliers, transportation services, in-house production, etc. (Don’t get me started on in-house production.)
  • Zero expenses! The only tool you need is ChatGPT—and it’s free! (For now.)
  • High status! Post about your well-attended and prestigious fake events on X and LinkedIn and see your stature in the #eventprofs community soar! Don’t forget to have your fake attendees rave about their experiences (again, think ChatGPT) too!

It’s a no-brainer—right?!

A final word

If everything I’ve said still hasn’t convinced you to sit down at your computer, or even your phone, and start pumping out fake events, here’s one more point to bear in mind.

We may all be living in a simulation! Yes, I know it sure seems like we’ve been laboriously creating amazing events for years. But what if we’re just ones and zeros in a supercomputer, programmed by some teenage wunderalien who has nothing better to do?

In other words, you may have been designing, preparing, and running fake events your whole (simulated) life!

Now you’re aware of this, is there any reason not to create fake events?

Unless of course you, dear reader, are fake too.

Hello? Is there anybody there?

Hello?

The Audacious Meeting Industry Offer of a Lifetime: I Get to Pay for the Privilege of Sharing My Expertise!

Offer of a Lifetime: screenshot of an email sent to Adrian Segar asking him to pay for the privilege of shaing his expertise at a meeting industry conference. 9/29/23 Subject: Are you a [TOPIC] Expert? Hi Adrian Segar, How are you doing? I wanted to let you know about Meet the Experts, a new initiative for [MEETING INDUSTRY EVENT] in [DATES] at [VENUE, LOCATION] which I think you will find interesting as a way for you to participate in the show and generate valuable leads. Attendees to [MEETING INDUSTRY EVENT] genuinely need the help and expertise of companies and advisors just like yourself. That's why we have introduced a new format, "Meet the Experts" for our 2023 show. [MEETING INDUSTRY EVENT] will bring together the brightest minds in the events industry, and this [DESCRIPTION OF OPPORTUNITY] will feature experts such as yourself creating the ideal platform for you to showcase your knowledge and connect with a highly engaged audience…A [MARKETING PERSON] has invited me to share my expertise at a meeting industry event. Well, there’s nothing unusual about that; it happens frequently. BUT THIS TIME I GET TO PAY FOR THE PRIVILEGE!

Pay me? No, you pay us!

I’m regularly asked to speak, present, or run a workshop at meeting industry events. While I love to do this, the requests are often silent about something important.

Namely, any mention of compensation for my appearance.

Here’s what I wrote about this in 2021:

“Tip: If you…want to get someone like me to speak at your meeting, try including what you will offer for fee and expense reimbursement in your initial request. Initial offers of payment are so rare, your inquiry will immediately rise to the top of my pile.”
—Adrian Segar, January 2021, Why people continue to speak for free at meeting industry conferences

Someone I’ll call [MARKETING PERSON] clearly read this and decided to go the extra mile. A [LARGE AMOUNT OF MONEY] was indeed featured in their email, after explaining why they were anxious for me to be there.

‘Attendees to [MEETING INDUSTRY EVENT] genuinely need the help and expertise of companies and advisors just like yourself. That’s why we have introduced a new format, “Meet the Experts” for our 2023 show.’

In a genuinely innovative twist, however, I would get to pay the [MEETING INDUSTRY EVENT] so people could meet me, the expert, to “share your insights and advice with attendees”.

Here’s the emailed pitch, anonymized to protect the guilty.

The Letter


9/29/23

Subject: Are you a [TOPIC] Expert?

Hi Adrian Segar,

How are you doing?

I wanted to let you know about Meet the Experts, a new initiative for [MEETING INDUSTRY EVENT] in [DATES] at [VENUE, LOCATION] which I think you will find interesting as a way for you to participate in the show and generate valuable leads.

Attendees to [MEETING INDUSTRY EVENT] genuinely need the help and expertise of companies and advisors just like yourself.

That’s why we have introduced a new format, “Meet the Experts” for our 2023 show.

[MEETING INDUSTRY EVENT] will bring together the brightest minds in the events industry, and this [DESCRIPTION OF OPPORTUNITY] will feature experts such as yourself creating the ideal platform for you to showcase your knowledge and connect with a highly engaged audience.

This is more than just a networking experience; it’s a golden opportunity for you to share your insights and advice with attendees seeking guidance in their businesses.

By joining “Meet the Experts,” you’ll gain access to registered attendees who are actively seeking solutions to their business challenges and [TOPIC].

As an expert, you will have a  dedicated meeting space within the [VENUE LOCATION] complete with a table and chairs, where you can have focused meetings with individuals who need your services.

Attendees will apply for a meeting with you in the leadup to the event and once you have pre-qualified them will be able to schedule a meeting on [DATES].

After the event, attendees will have the opportunity to provide feedback and rate their meetings with you. This feedback will help you focus on hot leads post-show.

Each company participating in the program benefits from the following:

  • Featured in a “meet the experts” email to registered attendees to drive meeting requests
  • A dedicated meeting space within the [VENUE LOCATION]
  • Branding, logo and messaging incorporated into the [VENUE LOCATION]
  • A table and chairs to conduct meetings
  • A link for attendees to apply for a meeting with you (ability to accept or decline)
  • Dedicated Meet The Experts profile on the event website, event platform and event app
  • Included in our pre-event marketing campaign for Meet The Experts
  • A lead scan licence for scanning attendee badges

Price [A LARGE AMOUNT OF MONEY].

The Meet the Experts Program is limited to just 6 experts, Do let me know if you would like me to secure one of those spaces for you.

Kind regards

[MARKETING PERSON]


The Offer of a Lifetime

Truly this is the offer of a lifetime! Though, surprisingly, not everyone agrees. A colleague of mine who received the same pitch sent it to me with the comment:

“All I can say is Ewww”

I’m not sure whether to admire or be disgusted by [MARKETING PERSON]’s chutzpah.

Regardless, apart from sharing it here, I am ignoring their remarkable offer.

An alternative to Twitter for #eventprofs

An illustration of a mastodon towering over a group of people in conversation, suggesting that the federated social media Mastodon may be an #eventprofs alternative to TwitterLast week I wrote about alternatives to Twitter, sparked by the rapid changes to the platform under its new billionaire owner. Focusing on our own professional community—the meeting (and hospitality) industry—I’d like to make a modest proposal for a social media platform that might meet our needs better. In other words: an #eventprofs alternative to Twitter. (And LinkedIn and Meta, too.)

Mastodon

Mastodon turns out to be an excellent social media platform that can connect you with your tribe while still giving you full access to posts and conversations over the entire network.

“[Mastodon’s] free and open-source software enables anyone to run a social media platform entirely on their own infrastructure, entirely under their own control, while connecting to a global decentralized social network.”
from a Mastodon blog post

Think of Mastodon as a “galaxy of interconnected social networks based on a common platform”. To recap key points from my recent post:

  • No one owns Mastodon, it runs on free, open-source software. There are no ads. The platform has currently about 8 million members, with more arriving daily.
  • Anyone can set up a Mastodon server (aka instance) that focuses on a specific community of any kind. (For example, as I write this, journalists are flocking to Mastodon after Musk banned some, apparently for writing critically about him. Already, people have set up a number of instances for journalists.)
  • Mastodon works like Twitter but with longer posts (up to 500 characters) and important design differences that discourage those who are trying to build their followers and influence by any means possible.
  • Each Mastodon server has its own community, rules, admins, and moderation. Mastodon’s structure and moderation tools permit a series of efficient and immediate actions against “bad” accounts or instances, where “bad” is defined by the instance administrators and community.
  • Running a Mastodon instance requires some work and a fairly modest amount of money. The cost rises with the number of users, so you can start small and see how popular your instance becomes. A server with five thousand users currently costs ~$150/month for hosting and bandwidth. Many Mastodon servers are crowdfunded, though server admins are free to come up with other ways to cover costs. Some organizations set up their own instances for their employees and associated community.

The last bullet point leads me to my modest proposal. What if an industry leader like Freeman, RX, Cvent, PCMA, or MPI, to name a few, set up a Mastodon server for the event and hospitality industry?

Mastodon: An #eventprofs alternative to Twitter?

“Mastodon is my favorite alternative to Twitter, and I’m spending more and more time on it. It feels like the early days of Twitter: a fresh, relatively uncrowded, environment where I’m continually meeting new interesting folks. I’ve had many more personal interactions on Mastodon than any of the other alternatives I’ve tried. If the future of Twitter worries you, I think Mastodon is the place to go.”
—Adrian Segar, Alternatives to Twitter

Up to now, the event and hospitality community has no single logical place to exist online. Communities are fragmented over Twitter, LinkedIn, Meta, and thousands of niche platforms and spaces. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have our own instance (or a few perhaps) where industry members could meet, connect, post, and converse?

The beauty of implementing such a community on Mastodon is the platform’s flexibility. Mastodon doesn’t lock you into one instance once you’ve joined it. For example, in the future people might decide to have separate servers for events and hospitality folks. Users are free to move their accounts, with all their posts and followers, to a new instance. Or even join both instances if they want.

That’s my case for creating an #eventprofs alternative to Twitter. I think that Mastodon offers just the right balance of a place for our tribe together with natural connections to a much larger Fediverse of communities. I hope this short post stimulates people and organizations to build a better place than Twitter, LinkedIn, and Meta for the #eventprofs community to meet, convene, and converse online.

The four meeting professionals you meet in heaven

essential characteristics meeting professionals

The essential characteristics of meeting professionals

If there is a heaven on earth in the event industry, there are four essential characteristics of successful meeting professionals you’ll meet there.

These four characteristics are essential because event professionals who possess and embrace them have what’s needed to thrive in our industry. And, perhaps even more important, they will love what they do.

Attention to detail

essential characteristics meeting professionals
Every successful meeting involves thinking about, planning for, and executing countless details. You can create the most original, beautiful event in the world, but if there’s no coffee available on the first morning, attendees are going to complain and remember. Late buses, missing or confusing signage, poor quality A/V, and a thousand other annoyances will mar an otherwise superb event.

Details matter.

So, good meeting professionals obsess about details. Obviously, we make big detailed lists of things that are supposed to happen. But we also think about details of things that could happen. We even think about circumstances that are very unlikely—but they have happened before, so we keep them in mind. We plan for planned and unexpected eventualities.

Good event professionals are seldom late, because they hate to be late. Our lives are sometimes crazy, but we mostly have things together. (Even when they’re not, we have plans on how we’re going to get back on track.) The one career my parents tentatively suggested to me I might want to consider was…wait for it…accountancy. Because they could see I was a detail person.

We are detail people. Paying attention to details is vital to creating and executing successful events. It’s an essential characteristic for meeting professionals. But attention to detail is not enough…

Creativity when things don’t go according to plan

essential characteristics meeting professionals
Any experienced meeting professional will tell you that the chances that everything will go according to plan A — what was supposed to happen — for an event is minuscule.

That’s why good event professionals have plans B, C, D… that cover the things that they know from experience might go wrong.

Many times, when things don’t go according to plan A, a backup plan is put into place, and the event goes on smoothly (at least as far as the participants are concerned).

And then there are the times when something completely unexpected happens. The wrong winner for Best Picture gets announced at the Oscars. A hurricane prevents the timely delivery of your beautiful signage. A Thanksgiving Day Parade giant Barney balloon explodes.

A pandemic.

However much we plan, experienced event professionals know that completely unexpected “stuff” will happen.

And that’s why good event professionals need to be creative when things don’t go according to (any) plan.

It’s not a coincidence that a surprising number of folks in the meeting industry have a theatrical background. Live theater, whether you’re on or behind the stage, provides a nightly opportunity for things to go wrong; things that need to be fixed or smoothed over right now. The show must go on.

I am rarely responsible for the logistics of the meetings I design or facilitate. And I have been awed and impressed by the creative solutions devised by the poor souls who are responsible in the moment for fixing something out of kilter. I surprised myself with the creative approaches that popped into my head when a session I was facilitating went wonky. But the brilliant ways I’ve seen event professionals respond when faced with the unexpected — well, I’m glad it wasn’t me in charge.

Attention to detail and the creative ability to solve unexpected problems get you a long way toward being a great event professional. But there’s more…

Great communication skills


I’m indebted to the late veteran event professional Dan Cormany for adding “great communication skills” to this set. He was kind enough to tell me I possessed this quality when I spoke to a class he was teaching at the Florida International University’s Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management. He also said he thought it was essential for good meeting professionals.

I agree.

To have great communication skills, you need to be able to listen well and have empathy for the people you’re with. You have to pick up on the verbal and non-verbal clues they provide about how your conversation is going. And you need to be able to respond appropriately, in ways they can hear you. People have written books about how to do this. It’s a difficult skill, but one that can always be improved with practice.

And it’s a great skill that will positively impact every aspect of your life.

I’m still working on it.

We’re almost there, but there’s one more characteristic that is, in my opinion, the most important of all…

Love being with people


If you don’t love being with people, all sorts of people, it’s going to be hard to be a great event professional.

Yes, everyone is flawed. We all have personality aspects that are sometimes hard for others to deal with. And there are people around whom it’s best to avoid if you have a choice.

Although many meeting professionals are extroverts who get energy from interacting with others, there are many who need introvert-style downtime in their lives (including, during meetings). Regardless, both extroverts and introverts can love being with people.

Our industry, by definition, is people-centric. People can be amazing, frustrating, fascinating, challenging, delightful, and, once in a while, frightful. Good event professionals are capable of finding and connecting with the positive aspects of even the most difficult folks they meet. And, yes, loving them as people, even in the midst of turmoil.

I try to do this.

I don’t always succeed, but, nevertheless, my heart is there. And I know many great meeting professionals who strive to wear on their sleeves how they love being with people.

Yay for us!

My journey is our journey

Twenty years ago I was a successful, independent information technology consultant. If you had told me then that I’d leave that career (my fourth) to write a book about meeting design that would catapult me into the heart of the meeting industry, I’d have said you were crazy.

What has surprised me during this journey is meeting so many meeting professionals I like along the way. Those of you who are passionate and committed to this industry will know what I mean. I am like you, and I like you, because we share the fundamental joy of the experience of bringing people together in ways that work.

We don’t usually enjoy all the backbreaking preparation needed to make the meeting happen. It’s the excitement and pleasure we get from creating a great experience for people, in the moment, that makes it all worthwhile.

You folks who share this joy with me are my tribe. We are lucky to be in this heaven-on-earth community of meeting professionals.

I’m glad I know some of you and am always happy to meet more. Feel free to reach out to me if you feel the same way.

Do you agree with this set of qualities? Are there other essential characteristics of meeting professionals you’d like to add? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

How eventprofs are feeling during COVID-19

eventprofs feeling during COVID-19How are eventprofs feeling during COVID-19? Over the past few weeks amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, I’ve listened to hundreds of people share their feelings at online meetings I’ve led and joined. Though everyone’s response has been unique, three distinct sets of emotions stand out. Here they are, from the perspective of the many meeting professionals I’ve heard.

Anxious

eventprofs feeling during COVID-19I estimate that about 85% of the event professionals I listened to shared feelings of fear, compared to about 65% of the general population. The most common description I heard was anxiety/anxious. But strong expressions like “scared”, “terrified”, and “very worried” were more common than I expected (~5-10%).

This is hardly surprising. Every event professional who spoke had lost essentially all their short-term work and event-related income. In some cases, they were attempting under extreme time and resource pressures to move meetings online. The meeting industry has been struggling for years to understand and develop online meeting models that provide traditional face-to-face meetings’ desired outcomes and are both technically and financially feasible. To have to pivot to such modalities overnight — assuming they are even feasible for the specific meetings in question — is having a huge impact on every aspect of the meeting industry.

When your present circumstances and potential future dramatically change, feeling fear is a normal and healthy response. And fear of anticipated upsetting change leads to the next set of emotions…

Unsettled

eventprofs feeling during COVID-19About half of event professionals, and slightly less of everyone I heard, shared feeling unsettled. “Unsettled” is a mixture of fear and sadness we may feel when we experience the world as less predictable and our sense of control or comfort with our circumstances reduced.

Feeling unsettled is a natural response to perceived chaos, as illuminated by Virginia Satir‘s change model.

Above is a diagram of Satir’s model of change. An old status quo (the event industry before COVID-19) is disrupted by a foreign element (the COVID-19 pandemic). Then we begin to live in chaos and do not know what will happen next. This provokes our feeling unsettled. Such chaos continues for an unknown period. Eventually, a transforming idea or event (in this case, for example, perhaps the development of a vaccine) allows a period of transition away from chaos towards a new status quo (hopefully, a post-pandemic world).

Hopeful

eventprofs feeling during COVID-19I was surprised that about half of the general populace mentioned feeling some form of hopefulness about their current situation. Event professionals were far less likely to share feeling this way. This discrepancy is probably because some of the non-event industry people were retirees, and others have escaped significant professional impact.

It makes sense to me that meeting professionals aren’t feeling especially hopeful right now. If/when the chaos and destruction of the COVID-19 pandemic subsides, we don’t know how much delay there will be before face-to-face events are scheduled and run. And we also don’t know how our industry will change for good, and what our new roles in it will be.

My experience

These days, I feel all the above emotions (though not all at the same time 😀). Clients have canceled all my short-term design and facilitation work. I love to facilitate connection and feel sad about not having face-to-face interactions with clients and meeting participants. I am anxious about the health of my family and myself, and unsettled about an unknown future for my personal and professional life.

Yet I am also hopeful.

I have reached out to connect in real-time online. Although I have created and facilitated hundreds of online meetings over the last ten years (from the days when video chat was a buggy and bandwidth-limited experience) I am continuing to learn more about facilitating connection around relevant content online. And I’m thinking about how online meetings can be significantly improved, using technology to create better implementations of the many in-person participation techniques I’ve developed and championed for decades.

What’s your experience of how eventprofs are feeling during COVID-19?

Please share your own experience and what you’ve heard from others in the comments below!

Eventprofs Happy Hour — Feelings Edition

eventprofs happy hour

Because we are struggling in a covid-19 world, I’m hosting a special Feelings Edition of the Eventprofs Happy Hour this coming Friday, March 27, 12:00 – 14:00 EDT.

From 2011 – 2017 I hosted a weekly online Eventprofs Happy Hour, first on Twitter and then on Google Plus. We used the #ephh hashtag and announced meetings via the @epchat Twitter account. It was an opportunity for meeting professionals from all over the world to meet and connect. To share what was happening in their lives and the day’s issues.

Right now, you may not be feeling happy. However you’re feeling, I am offering this special online meeting as an opportunity to meet, connect, and share with other event professionals. This will be a place to talk about how you are feeling and be heard by others, share your circumstances, meet new people, and reconnect with old friends.

Try to join at the start (Friday, noon EDT). But feel free to arrive later if that fits better for you. I will facilitate and guide what develops.

Complete instructions for joining this online Zoom meeting can be found here.

I hope to hear and see you there.

With best wishes,

Adrian Segar

 

Three creative event design tools that all #eventprofs should use

The creative event design tool that all #eventprofs should use: a photograph of an array of Dixit cards

I’m about to share three powerful creative event design tools.

You can use these tools for every aspect of event design. Stylists working on the look and feel of an event often use it to stimulate fresh thinking about the venue, the décor, the lighting, the food and beverage, entertainment, and so on.

Rarely, however, are these tools used to design events that creatively incorporate, illuminate, and support core desires and outcomes for the meeting.

With them, you can generate something truly original — like in 2009, when Jill and Kevin Heinz invented a brand new trope: the wedding entrance dance.

What are the tools? Seth Godin gives us a clue.

What does this remind you of?

What does this remind you of?
That’s a much more useful way to get feedback than asking if we like it.

We make first impressions and long-term judgments based on the smallest of clues. We scan before we dive in, we see the surface before we experience the substance.

And while the emotions that are created by your work aren’t exactly like something else, they rhyme.

It could be your business model, your haircut or the vibrato on your guitar.

“What does this remind you of” opens the door for useful conversations that you can actually do something about. Yes, be original, but no, it’s not helpful to be so original that we have no idea what you’re doing.
—Seth Godin, What does this remind you of?

Seth is talking about getting feedback; we’re interested in being creative so let’s flip the focus. The word “remind” is the key; how do we remind ourselves to come up with something new?

Guided visualization
It turns out that guided visualization (aka guided imagery) is one of the most powerful modalities for tapping our creative and unconscious wisdom. A wide variety of visualization techniques exist and they can be customized to provide creative insights into specific challenges — like event design.

Surprisingly, there are few resources available on how to sculpt guided visualizations for exploration of a specific creative challenge. Most books and posts describe how to use guided visualizations for meditation, health, mental state change, and artistic creativity. Once you’re familiar with the basic principles, however, it’s not hard to adapt these methods for creative event design.

So here are three creative event design tools to use guided visualizations to take a fresh look at an existing event or create a vision for a new one.

Resonant imagery

One technique I’ve used is to display to clients a large number of the fantastical cards (sample shown above) from the popular game Dixit and ask them to pick a few that speak to them in some way about their current event and a few that say something about what they would like the event to become. I encourage people to pick cards without trying to analyze the attraction. We then look at the chosen cards in more detail and explore and uncover what the chosen cards reveal about the current and future potential of the event. Invariably, my clients discover powerful and enlightening perspectives and objectives they weren’t aware of. They are fertile beginnings for a fresh and relevant design.

Drawing

My colleagues Eric de Groot & Mike van der Vijver use another guided visualization approach: they ask a meeting owner to think of the meeting content as some kind of material and describe the “motion” of the meeting content. Clients draw pictures of their answers, which can then be mined for insights. A variant is to ask clients their answer to the question: “If your event had a mouth what would it say?” I’ve used this approach as well and highly recommend it.

Guided journey

Alternatively, an event designer can guide clients on a journey to and through the event in their mind. You can adapt scripts like this one to your needs. Replace traveling to a private garden with a journey to the event venue (if it’s already known and familiar) or an ideal venue that appears in your mind as you walk along the path. Guide your clients through the venue where your future event is in full swing and ask questions. If you are working with a single client, they can answer aloud, which may spark clarifying questions. Multiple clients on the journey mentally note their answers.

What does it look like? What does it sound like? Who is there as you enter the lobby? The meeting rooms? The social areas? What are they doing? How are you feeling? How are the attendees feeling? What are you experiencing that isn’t in your current event? What else are you noticing during your journey?

When the guided journey is over, lead a retrospective to discuss what the clients experienced and learned. In my experience, there will be at least one key insight on how to create or improve the event.

Conclusion

Besides the power of creative event design tools to uncover great ideas for an event, another big benefit is that they generate persuasive client buy-in for the ultimate meeting design. Why? Because the clients “dream up” the ideas themselves! Anything that eases the adoption of a fresh approach to event design makes my (and your) job easier.

Happy to Seize the Throne from King Content

MeetingsNet’s annual Changemaker list: photograph of Adrian Segar in front of the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen, DenmarkI’m honored to be included on MeetingsNet’s annual Changemaker list, which “recognizes 20 outstanding meetings professionals for their efforts to move their organizations and the industry forward in unique and positive ways”. Here’s the description of my “quest to topple outdated models, including the one based on the idea that ‘content is king’.”

Making Change

I’ve spent 33 years working on changing outmoded mindsets about what we should be doing in meetings. Historically, topics were determined in advance. The meeting format was mainly lecture and did not encourage interaction. And content was king. To stay effective and relevant today, meetings must:

  • Respond to what participants actually want and need to learn
  • Adapt to the reality that we primarily learn from our peers rather than experts
  • Provide appropriate opportunities to connect with relevant peers in the sessions around content

And it is changing. The meetings industry is far more aware of the importance of treating and supporting attendees as active participants rather than passive consumers of education. You see this in the increasing number of industry articles about good meeting process, and the rise of the term “meeting design” being applied to the group process we use in sessions as opposed to, say, F&B or production design.

I don’t take full credit, of course, for these changes, but I feel proud to have been an instigator and passionate promoter of them through speaking, and authoring Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love and The Power of Participation: Creating Conferences That Deliver Learning, Connection, Engagement, and Action. I moderated the #eventprofs Twitter chats for several years. And, until recently, I ran the weekly #Eventprofs Happy Hour Hangout for meeting professionals.

What’s Next

I am writing another book, Event Crowdsourcing [update: now published!] I’m offering workshops where meeting professionals, designers, and stakeholders can learn first-hand about the power of participatory techniques. And I continue to design and facilitate meetings. That’s the most effective way to change mindsets: exposing participants to what meetings can be like when you adopt a participant-driven and participation-rich approach.

Best Business Advice

One of my mentors taught me to trust my intuition. She helped me see the power and joy that is possible when I respond to opportunity rather than what I used to think of as taking a risk by trying something new—and scary. Like much of my most important learning, that change of perspective happened experientially, rather than from a piece of advice.

Got a Spare Hour?

I would do yoga and meditation if I haven’t yet fit them into my day. I like to read a wide variety of nonfiction, mysteries, and science fiction. And I am active in my local nonprofit communities. I’ve been running and on the board of multiple associations continuously for over 40 years.

I’m happy to appear on MeetingsNet’s annual Changemaker list. I love my work. Such honors are a nice acknowledgment that what I do and continue to do matters to the industry I’m proud to be part of.

22 great Apple apps for event professionals

great Apple apps for event professionals

Two years have passed since the last update of my great Apple apps for event professionals. Apps continue to be born, evolve, and, sometimes, die—so it’s time for my latest list of event professionals’ great apps!

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