Facilitating an online participation-rich workshop in Gatherly

Screenshot taken during an online workshop in Gatherly, showing Adrian Segar and two other people talking in a Gatherly huddle.

Earlier this month, the folks at Gatherly kindly invited me to host an event of my choosing for their clients and potential users. I decided to facilitate an online workshop in Gatherly that took full advantage of the platform. This coming June will mark my 30th year of designing and facilitating participant-driven and participation-rich meetings. So I designed the workshop as an “Ask Adrian Anything” about meeting design and facilitation.

I’ve shared the why? and the details of how I typically run this format here. In this post, I cover the additions I made, issues that arose, my impressions, and the feedback the workshop received.

An experiment: I try something I’ve never done before!

I like the Gatherly platform and have reviewed it a couple of times (1, 2). Gatherly’s best feature, in my opinion, is its user interface for online social interaction. The platform uses a birds-eye view of rooms (there can be more than one of them on different “floors”). Each participant is shown as a named icon. Deciding to talk with someone is as easy as clicking on their icon, which moves you to their position in the room and puts you in video chat. The two of you then form a “huddle”, shown as a circle with the number of people talking at its center.

Moving your mouse cursor over a huddle shows you the names of the people there. Others can join a huddle by clicking on it; you can leave a huddle at any time by clicking on the floor outside it. Gatherly currently supports huddles of up to fifteen people.

Because Gatherly allows you to see where people are in a room, it can support a fundamental technique I use at almost all in-person events I design and facilitate: body voting, aka human spectrograms.

So I was excited to see whether I could implement body voting online, something I’d never tried before.

Incorporating body voting experiences into the workshop

I ended up incorporating four body voting experiences into the workshop:

  • “How did I get here?” (run in trios)
  • If this workshop was really great for you, what one thing would you want to learn about/discuss/happen?” (run in pairs)
  • Where do you live?” (See the map we used below.)
  • “What industry/job role fits you best?” (See the floor plan we used below.)
online workshop in Gatherly
Body voting map for “Where do you live?”
online workshop in Gatherly
Body voting map for “What industry/job role fits you best?”

Read on to find out how I implemented these exercises in Gatherly and how they worked out.

Designing an online workshop in Gatherly

The first decision we had to make was how long the workshop should run. Since the event was participant-driven, the Gatherly staff and I agreed to let it run as long as it seemed people wanted, with a 2½ hour limit.

Up until now, I have used Gatherly as a pure platform for online socials. For this workshop — indeed for any workshop — I needed to provide separate whole-group-together and small-group-work environments. Just like every other meeting platform, Gatherly has developed a broadcast/stage mode (see the first image in this post), where one or more speakers can broadcast to everyone else. When you start a Gatherly broadcast, the room map is still visible but huddles are disabled.

So in this workshop, we frequently switched between broadcast and map (huddle) modes. In broadcast mode, I provided short segments of content and instructions for upcoming group work. We also used broadcast mode for fishbowl discussions and the core “Ask Adrian Anything” session.

All meeting platforms that have a small-group/breakout mode pose a communication problem for the meeting host or facilitator. Small groups meet via video chat, so messages from the meeting host to everyone can’t be sent through audio — the standard communication mode when in broadcast.

In Gatherly, the tool I had to address this issue was text chat. I asked everyone to select the Event chat option (the red Event button in the first image in this post) and to monitor text chat for exercise instructions during their huddle small group work. I also asked participants to also use text chat for important issues, so this communication channel wouldn’t be filled with distracting messages.

Leading folks through small group work in Gatherly

Before the workshop, I prepared a text document with step-by-step instructions needed to lead participants through all the exercises I had planned.

Here’s a sample:

For each small group exercise, I did the following:

  • In broadcast mode, verbally explain and go through the exercise steps.
  • Switch to map mode. Cut and paste each prepared prompt into the Event text chat at the appropriate time.
  • Provide a final prompt that we’d be returning to broadcast mode.
  • Switch back to broadcast mode.

Once I’d practiced this flow beforehand for a while, it was easy to run.

Using raise hands during the workshop

I chose to use Gatherly’s raise hands tool in a couple of ways during the workshop.

  1. During the geographical map and industry/role body voting exercises, I asked people who lived outside the United States, or who placed themselves in the “Other” area of the industry/role floor map to raise their hands. When you do this in Gatherly, your name rises to the top of the participant list, so you’re easy to spot. In broadcast mode, we brought these folks briefly onto the stage and asked them to share their name and where they lived/their role. This is analogous to walking around and interviewing such individuals at in-person meetings. Recognizing people who are a little outside the main group’s geographical focus/job descriptions is interesting and helps to bring them into the group.
  2. During fishbowl-based group discussions, including the Ask Adrian Anything segment, we asked people to raise their hands if they had a question or wanted to add their voice to a current conversation. Only Gatherly admins can remove people from the stage, so we asked people to lower their hands when they wanted to leave the current discussion.

A major issue that arose during the workshop

While facilitating this online workshop in Gatherly, I made heavy use of Gatherly’s broadcast mode for the first time. Unfortunately, the broadcast mode did not work reliably for some people. At times, the video stream for some participants on stage (including me) was blank. When this happened to me, I wasn’t aware of it since my screen showed my own camera-direct video, and I was only made aware of the problem through text chat.

I’d seen this problem while testing the workshop platform beforehand, using two computers in my office on different ISPs and networks to join the session. At the time I assumed it was a temporary glitch or technical issue involving the OS/Chrome version used by one of my machines. This turned out not to be the case. Most people showed up fine, but functionality like this — a basic feature of pretty much every meeting platform these days — should be rock solid. (I’ve never seen this happen on Zoom, for example.)

Given that I’ve found the video chat provided in huddles (map mode)  by Gatherly to be more reliable than any other platform I’ve tried, this deficiency is puzzling. I hope it’s eliminated soon.

My thoughts and impressions of the workshop

Almost everyone stayed for the whole workshop!

I had no idea who would show up for the workshop or how long it would run. When we did the geographical map exercise, a substantial proportion of participants were from outside the US, which I did not expect. But what really surprised me was that almost everyone stayed for two hours, until after the Ask Adrian Session was over. (And a few people shared at the start that they weren’t going to be able to stay the whole time.)

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve found that when you create meetings that allow and support engagement at any time on participants’ terms, people stick around.

A small group remained for informal discussion and feedback, and we reluctantly wound up when we reached our  2½ hour hard limit.

Guiding participants through small group activities

Before the workshop, I wondered how well using text chat to prompt small group activities would work. Would participants, busily engaged with each other, follow the prompts? (This can be a problem when in person too, but it’s easier to see when it’s happening.)

I needn’t have worried. Participants responded to my directions to form groups of various sizes much more quickly than I expected. In fact, they divided into groups of the right size faster than in an in-person workshop! The Gatherly birds-eye view of everyone in the room, plus the displayed count of each huddle size makes it easy to see who’s not yet in a group, and which groups are too large or too small.

Feedback on the workshop

The Gatherly staff were impressed that so many people stayed so long, (and I was pleased)!

Several people commented that although they could not see me during portions of the broadcast segments, my audio feed was all they needed to stay engaged. Yes, it’s nice to see people at online meetings. But it’s worth remembering that for those who aren’t hearing impaired, audio beats video every time.

The small group exercises were popular. And people thanked me for showing the value of what we did, not only by experiencing it but also by learning how to facilitate the formats for their own communities.

Conclusions

I learned that I can successfully run body voting online, at least on Gatherly. (Wonder will probably work too.) Body voting is perhaps the best way for a group to quickly learn important information about who’s present. To have this capability online is valuable. (See my book The Power of Participation to learn more about body voting.)

One suggestion I have for Gatherly to improve its product is to provide a better way for meeting hosts to broadcast instructions when participants are in huddles. This could be done with text messages that are displayed more prominently than at present to all huddle members.

Would I facilitate an online workshop in Gatherly again? Absolutely! (As long as the broadcast video problem is fixed.)

Control versus freedom at meetings

control versus freedom at meetings: illustration of a knob that can be turned to the left to a value of 100 (Freedom) or to the right to a value of -100 (Control) How can we design the optimum balance between control versus freedom at meetings? First, let’s get one misconception out of the way. As I wrote in 2010:

The reality is that you never had control to begin with, just the myth of control. You’ve been kidding yourself all these years. Unless your constituency is bound to your event via a requirement to earn CEUs, members can withhold their attendance or avoid sessions at will.
The myth of control

Note that I’m not suggesting meeting professionals give up any attempt to control what happens at their events. Maintaining control of vital logistics, and having and executing backup plans when unexpected developments occur are core requirements and responsibilities of our job.

It’s when we try to tightly control every aspect of our meetings that our events suffer. Surprisingly, clinging to control is the easy way out. As Dee W Hock, founder and former CEO of VISA, put it:

“Any idiot can impose and exercise control. It takes genius to elicit freedom and release creativity.”
—@DeeWHock

To “elicit freedom and release creativity”, we need to recognize that participants are stakeholders in the event, rather than “just” an audience.

Why are they event owners?

“…participants are event owners because, to some extent, they control what happens next.”
—Adrian Segar, Who owns your event?

Creating events that truly meet participants’ wants and needs

To create events that truly meet participants’ wants and needs, we need to provide three things:

  • Appropriate meeting logistics that meet participants’ bodily and sensory needs.
  • Content and experiences that participants actually want and need.
  • Maximal opportunities for participants to connect around the content and during the experiences.

Our traditional work

The first bullet point describes the traditional work of meeting professionals. Our logistical designs control the environment that participants experience. They include flexible, support (plans B – Z) when the unexpected happens. In this arena, we are in control through our careful planning, which includes resources for a wide range of contingencies.

Giving up control where and when it’s not needed

To satisfy the remaining bullet points, we have to give up control. Why? To give participants the freedom to satisfy their wants and needs! To do this, participants need the freedom to choose what they talk about, and whom they talk to and connect with, when it suits them. Our job is to support these activities as much as possible by providing appropriate:

  • Structure [participant-driven and participation-rich formats and sessions]; and
  • Resources [flexible physical and/or online spaces, facilitators, and a schedule that can be developed, as needed, at the event].

Notice that providing these improvements over traditional meetings doesn’t mean that your meeting will turn out to be wildly different from what took place before. Your event may include sessions that look very similar to what you might have scheduled for a tightly controlled program. The difference is that your participants will have chosen these sessions and formats themselves, not you.

Instead of control versus freedom, choose control and freedom. Assign both to the appropriate characteristics of your event.

That makes all the difference.

A bonus

For a discussion of control versus freedom in the context of event leadership, you may find this post useful…

Scenes from a Participate! Workshop and Solution Room

40 seconds of highlights from the Participate! workshop and Solution Room I recently facilitated for the New York State Bar Association.

One of the most rewarding aspects of my work is training associations how to create powerful and effective participant-driven and participation-rich conferences. I love facilitating the learning that occurs. The training equips the organization with the tools needed to transform its events. Do you want to significantly improve your meetings? Then please don’t hesitate to get in touch!

How to create amazing conference programs that don’t waste attendee time

How to create amazing conference programsDo your conference programs include pre-scheduled sessions you belatedly discover were of little interest or value to most attendees? If so, you’re wasting significant stakeholder and attendee time and money — your conference is simply not as good as it could be.

Now imagine you could learn how to routinely create conference programs that reliably include the sessions attendees actually want and need. Imagine you could create amazing conference programs that don’t waste attendee time. How much value would that add to your event; for your attendees, your sponsors, and your bottom line?

If you’re serving up a program that’s 100% pre-determined, if you’re not crowdsourcing part or all of your conference program at the meeting, I guarantee you are not creating the best possible conference program.

In fact, my research has shown that at least 50% of the sessions you’re offering are not what attendees actually want.

It doesn’t have to be this way!

I’ve put everything I’ve learned from 33 years of participant-driven conference program design experience into my new book Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Meetings People Actually Want and Need which covers all you need to know and do to successfully integrate effective real-time program crowdsourcing into your events and sessions.

Event Crowdsourcing will teach you how to create conference programs that are what your attendees actually want and need.

Every single time.

You’ll learn that to build the perfect program, every successful conference requires the following components:

  • Discovering in real-time attendee needs, wants, and resources.
  • Uncovering the most important topics and issues to include by:
    — efficiently obtaining suggestions and offers.
    — cleaning up potential topics.
    — selecting the most highly rated topics.
  • Determining the right sessions to hold.
  • Scheduling sessions to create an optimum conference program.
  • Designing sessions that meet attendees’ needs and wants.

You’ll learn how to select the best techniques to crowdsource all or part of any event. Whether it’s a one-day meeting with thirty participants or a four-day conference with thousands.

You’ll learn, detailed step by step, how to apply these techniques to successfully crowdsource your event.

Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Meetings People Actually Want and Need is now available! Buy it here!

The Conference Arc — the key components of every successful participation-rich conference

Traditional conferences focus on a hodgepodge of pre-determined sessions punctuated with socials, surrounded by short welcomes and closings. Such conference designs treat openings and closings as perfunctory traditions, perhaps pumped up with a keynote or two rather than key components of the conference design. Unlike traditional conferences, participant-driven and participation-rich peer conferences have a conference arc with three essential components: Beginning, Middle, and End. This arc creates a seamless conference flow where each phase builds on what has come before.

Participant-driven and participation-rich peer conference designs improve upon traditional events. They don’t treat openings and closings as necessary evils but as critical components of the meeting design.

Let’s examine each phase of the peer conference arc in more detail.

An illustration of The Conference Arc — the key components of every successful participation-rich conference. Beginning: —Uncover needs, wants, and resources in the room —Build program that matches desired needs and wants with the available resources Middle —Run the program End —Consolidate individual learning and determine desired changes & next steps —Publicly evaluate the conference and uncover new initiatives

Beginning

Conferences are full of sessions where attendees know as little about each other as when they arrived at the event. In contrast, peer conferences allocate time to introduce participants to each other through a discovery process. Then, they build a conference program that truly meets their wants and needs.

Allocating discovery time at the start pays rich dividends over the entire remainder of the event. Investing in such beginnings enriches even a one-day event. Longer event designs allocate more time — up to half a day — to produce detailed programs that are optimized to provide the best possible conference experience for each individual participant.

Though there are numerous ways to implement beginnings, all peer conference designs include the following.

Discovery — uncover the needs, wants, and resources in the room

This is the piece most meetings ignore entirely. And it’s the most important component of creating meetings that really work. In this post, I explain the importance and implementation of discovery.

Topic suggestions and offers

Discovery exposes participants to a smorgasbord of possible conference topics, issues, and ideas. They’ve also discovered others present who are potential resources. This phase employs various methods for participants to request or offer sessions to hold in the Middle of the peer conference.

Topic cleanup

Over the years, I’ve found it helpful to do some topic cleanup on the suggestions and offers that participants make. This involves using a small group of conference subject-matter experts and any interested participants to cluster suggestions appropriately, combine duplicates, and carefully discard any suggestions that are clearly impracticable (e.g., too broad) or unclear.

Topic rating

Participants now rate the cleaned-up topics using one of several methods. When the rating is complete we have all the information needed to build an optimum Middle for the event.

Session determination

The small group of subject-matter experts now uses the gathered information to decide on the sessions to run and one or more facilitators/presenters/panelists/moderators to lead them.

Session scheduling (leadership, time, and place)

Now, scheduling the resulting sessions into a conference program can be done, taking into account any programmatic and logistical constraints.

Middle

The middle of a peer conference corresponds to the program segments of traditional events, with two important improvements. First, thanks to the beginning process, the scheduled sessions genuinely reflect the wants and needs of the meeting participants. So they are almost always very well attended and appreciated. Second, the earlier scheduling process allows the scheduling group to consider the flow of sessions. This allows, for example, the scheduling of general sessions before specialized drill-downs on aspects of a popular topic.

Because it’s unlikely (though not impossible) that session leaders will give a carefully prepared standard presentation, sessions created via the beginning process are likely to be facilitated discussions focused around the expertise and experience of one or more leaders and incorporating additional expertise and experience of all those present. Thousands of evaluations over the years have shown that participant satisfaction with such informal facilitated formats is significantly higher than that reported for conventional lecture-style presentations.

End

Rather than closing a conference with a banquet, keynote, or other social event, peer conferences provide two vital and important opportunities that traditional conferences omit.

Guided introspection on learning from the conference and planned professional/personal change

When you attended a conference and nothing significant changed in your life, was it worth going? You might have had fun, a rest, or time hanging out somewhere nice, but was that really the point?

Most attendees learn something valuable at meetings and make new connections, but often, this value doesn’t translate into future useful outcomes because it isn’t reinforced in a timely fashion. The notes you made of new things to try at work get forgotten in a drawer, along with the business cards of the interesting people you met.

Yes, change is hard. To increase the likelihood that conference experience translates into appropriate positive change, peer conferences provide a structured opportunity for participants to determine what they want to change in their professional or personal lives as a result of their experiences at the event. This process is called a personal introspective.

Public evaluation of the event and exploration of improvements and new initiatives

During the personal introspective, attendees review their conference experience and learning and create a plan for future individual change. The last session at a peer conference, a group spective, provides the same opportunities for the entire conference community collectively.

The group spective starts with a simple public group evaluation of the entire conference experience. No “smile sheet” evaluations that only conference organizers see. Instead, participants share — via a structured, facilitated process — what was great about the event and how to make it even better. The information gleaned is, of course, immensely useful to the conference organizers, but it also does something even more important: it gives every participant a collective overview of the group’s conference experience, building a conference community around the shared experiences.

The group spective also offers the possibility to create something enduring, something more than an intense, one-time experience. During the session, participants begin to explore their future together.

The Conference Arc

The conference arc contains everything necessary for participants to discover, learn, connect, and engage with the topics or issues that brought them together. By its close, it has planted the seeds of future meetings built around the commonalities, learning, and connections that participants have uncovered and appreciated in each other.

In this way, the conference arc perpetuates itself.

The Secrets Behind Conference Engagement

Secrets Behind Conference Engagement: Screenshot of Adrian Segar being interviewed by Brandt Krueger

So you’re holding a conference. How are you going to get your audience tuned in and engaged?

I shared my thoughts on this topic on a 2017 episode of the weekly #EventIcons interview with good friend and host Brandt Krueger. Our hour together was packed with useful information, so feel free to watch the whole thing (scroll down to view the video) or check out the timeline below for the main themes we discussed.

Enjoy!

3:00 Adrian tells the unlikely story of how he got into the events industry.

8:10 What would Adrian be doing if he wasn’t in the events industry?

9:10 The one driving passion shared by so many event professionals.

10:10 Why event planners and stakeholders should care about engagement.

11:20 Why traditional meetings don’t meet attendee needs very well.

12:10 How building participation into meetings creates engagement that significantly improves learning, connection, and outcomes.

14:20 Why lectures are so ineffective.

15:50 How to work with speakers and attendees who are introverts.

18:50 How to create a safe environment for attendees to share, learn, and connect.

20:15 An explanatory journey through the stages of participant-driven and participation-rich meetings that use the Conferences That Work model.

26:30 The positive aspects of supporting engagement at events, and the neglected need to evaluate events’ long-term impact.

29:10 The value of incorporating white space into events and several ways to do it.

34:50 How to work with speakers to make sessions more participatory.

37:20 How to market participant-driven conferences.

42:30 Three examples of simple participation techniques you can use to improve meetings: body voting, large facilitated fishbowl discussions, and The Solution Room.

50:30 The biggest mistake meeting planners make when attempting to improve participation and engagement.

54:30 Where to find all kinds of ideas about meeting design — and Adrian’s next book on crowdsourcing events.

The Secrets Behind Conference Engagement

Healthcare professionals want participant-driven events too

healthcare professionals want participant-driven events: a photograph of an attendee sleeping during a boring meeting. Photo attribution: Flickr user markhillary

Healthcare professionals want participant-driven events. 75% of healthcare professionals want to have input into the content of meetings they attend. Yet 36% have never been asked to provide input into any agenda or program. These disconcerting statistics are two of the research findings in a February 2016 report The Future of Meetings [free download] commissioned by Ashfield Meetings and Events.

Healthcare meetings ranked just behind professional journals (92%) as the second most popular (87%) regular channel for learning. But the survey of 237 healthcare professionals from 11 countries across the Americas, Asia, and Europe found:

“nearly 40 per cent of those interviewed have not had a positive delegate experience at the meetings they have attended.

So remember, healthcare professionals want participant-driven events!

I expect these findings, from a relatively well-funded meeting sector that can certainly support high-quality meeting design, apply to most conferences. And yet, the majority of conferences still rely on a small group to preplan a fixed session program.

Meeting owners and planners: It’s time to supply what your attendees want!

A hat tip to MeetingsNet‘s Sue Pelletier for making me aware of the report via her article “Research Puts Some Science Behind Scientific Meetings“.

Photo attribution: Flickr user markhillary

Why I don’t like unconferences

Why I don't like unconferences

“Why I don’t like unconferences.” If you know me you’re probably scratching your head at the title of this post.

“Adrian,” you’re thinking, “unconferences are what you do! How can you not like unconferences?”

Well, it’s the word “unconference” I object to, not what it represents. Unfortunately, “unconference” has come to mean any kind of conference that isn’t a traditional conference. Originally the word “unconference” was coined to describe a participant-driven meeting. However, in recent years — rather like the encroachments on “counter-culture” and “green” — people use “unconference” to imply that their conference is cool in some way, even if it still employs the programmed speaker-centric event designs that we’ve suffered for hundreds of years.

What “conference” once meant

The meaning of the word “conference” has been corrupted to virtually the opposite of its original intent. As I describe in Conferences That Work, “conference” was first used around the middle of the 16th century as a verb that described the act of conferring with others in conversation. Over time, the word’s meaning shifted to denoting the meeting itself.

Regrettably few of today’s “conferences” provide substantive opportunities for conferring: consultation or discussion. Instead, they have become primarily conduits for the one-to-many transfer of information on the conference topic.

I believe that participant-driven event designs are a response to this drift of meeting process that has occurred over the years. In a sense, participant-driven events are the true conferences: events that support and encourage conferring.

To be accurate, we should be calling traditional conferences “unconferences”, reserving the word “conference” for the participant-driven event designs that are slowly becoming more popular.

Sadly, that’s unlikely to happen, so I talk about “participant-driven events” and avoid using the term “unconference” whenever possible.

In the end, I know my thoughts on the meaning and use of a word carry little weight. With rare exceptions, our culture, not the pronouncements of an individual, determines the meaning and usage of words. But if you agree with me, feel free to follow my example and spurn unconferences—but just the word, not the concept!

Do conference attendees know what they want?

Do attendees know what they wantHow 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.

Do conference attendees know what they want? Photograph of a puzzled woman holding a camera lens to her ear.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.

Your choice.

Photos by Flickr users nycarthur, wererabbit

How to add participation into a traditional conference and market it

A common question people ask me is how to add participation into existing events and market them effectively. The Medical Group Management Association did just that at their 2011 PEER conference (estimated 800 attendees).

Even MGMA’s choice of name for the conference echoes the event’s theme of “directing the conversation”: PEER, a neat acronym for Participate, Educate, Experience, Relate.

Conference marketing

Take a look at how the conference brochure carefully incorporates PEER themes (click image to view).

The cover of a brochure for the 2011 PEER conference for the MGMA association that added participation. It's title: "Where you and your colleagues direct the experience".

What do you think of MGMA’s design and marketing?

Full disclosure: MGMA is a client of Conferences That Work.