Meetings as an experience

What was your favorite meeting or conference that you have attended? Why was it your favorite? Did you have an “ah-ha” moment? Make a lifetime memory? Build an incredible relationship? How did these things happen?

Everyone is getting busier. Time is a highly sought after commodity. Attention spans are getting shorter. Attendees are going online instead of going in person. To stay in the game, meeting planners are finding new ways to make meetings not just about information or education, but about the experience you have while you are there.

Here are three key reasons to make your next meeting or conference more of an experience:

VALUE

Attendees increasingly value interaction over information. We remember experiences. Studies have shown that we are more likely to recall information when it is attached to a sense, whether it is touch, sight, smell, taste, or sound. Incorporating full sensory experiences into a conference goes beyond the passive learning in lectures where information is king to creating lasting memories through those experiences and thereby giving the event the true value attendees are looking for.

ENGAGEMENT

Millennials demand genuine experiences where they can be full participants. Hours of lectures and PowerPoint presentations need to be replaced with live demos, hands-on sessions, live expert interviews by the audience, etc. Attendees want to feel like they are a part of the conference, not just a spectator. Social media has changed the way we engage with the world by creating open dialogs and opportunities to be engaged at any given time in any given place. Conferences need to mirror this change to stay relevant.

TECHNOLOGY

Technology has drastically changed the world in almost every way. Stephen Spencer, a notable customer experience specialist from the UK, sums up this change for conference planners his blog post on Eventbrite, “For conference organisers this means designing events to facilitate sharing, as widely as possible, in real time. It also means acknowledging that your delegates’ focus will often be outside the room, as they share the virtual experience with their networks. Your challenge is also your opportunity – to leverage this trend to maximise value – to clients, delegates, partners, sponsors and to far wider, dispersed audiences.”

Don’t forget to use your destination to its fullest potential to create new and unique experiences for your event. Bring in local cultural demonstrations, feature the area cuisine in the meals, or take your audience to an extraordinary venue for an out-of-the-box learning experience. Incorporating the destination is one of the easiest ways to bring value, engagement, and technology into your meeting.

Adrian Segar, author of Conferences That Work – Creating Events That People Love describes the power of experience at a conference: “I have seen so many useful, important, and long-term connections made through relevant, experiential, participatory conference activities. The resulting connected souls become champions of your event: the core of an engaged and loyal conference community that returns year after year and encourages other peers to attend.”

When planning your next event, step outside your normal process and concentrate on how to make it more memorable by providing value, engaging to incorporate the audience, and shareable to take advantage of all the technology available. Taking the time to create an experience, not just plan a conference, will have a profound, lasting effect on your attendees and keep you and them in the game!

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