A good conference is like an island vacation! As I write this, I’m about to return from a two-week vacation on Anguilla, a tiny rural British West Indies island with some of the most beautiful beaches in the world (you may hate me now). My home is a tiny rural town in Vermont. Still, although the population of the surrounding area is similar to that of Anguilla there’s an interesting difference between my home and island destinations—and I’m not talking about the weather.
At home, there’s no way to know whether someone has a connection to the area. The occupant of a car I see driving on Route 9 near my house might be a businesswoman from upstate New York traveling through Vermont to Maine—or someone who’s been living a mile further down my road for three years who I haven’t yet met.
Commonalities
But in Anguilla, anyone I see has something in common: we are, even temporary visitors like me, residents of an island fifteen miles long and three miles wide. Our individual life stories, no matter how different, all include that we are, at this moment, living on one small island with a unique history and culture. Some of the people I met: the woman who, five years ago, came to work here for a week and decided to stay, the barbecue guy telling us about the tiny mosquitoes that appear at night when there’s no wind, the Danish tourist who collects shells on the beach so the hermit crabs can find new homes—we all have Anguilla to start from, and this gives us a way to connect.
A good conference is like an island vacation; it provides the same opportunities to its attendees. While we are together, we share; not just the conference location, but also the commonality that each of us chose to attend and all this implies, as well as our experiences together. Creating a conference environment where we can easily share these things makes the event richer, engaging, and more memorable. Perhaps, even, as enjoyable as an island vacation…
There are many reasons why you should hold multi-day events.
I have held a number of one-day conferences. One (very full!) day is the minimum time needed to process the essential components of a peer conference: the roundtable, some peer sessions, and a minimal spective. Frankly it’s a rush to complete even these basics in a day. —Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love, Adrian Segar
Occasionally, I’m asked to design one-day peer conferences. When I ask why the event can only be a day long, I hear answers like these:
“Our members are very busy and can’t take more than a day off.”
“Then we’d have to arrange for somewhere for people to stay overnight.”
“Our conference has always been a single day.”
“It’s too expensive to make it longer.”
“Our venue only serves lunch.”
Here are six reasons why you should overcome these objections and make your conferences longer than a single day.
Making connections takes time
Research has shown that people attend conferences for two principal reasons of roughly equal importance: educational opportunities and networking. (Note: I believe networking is becoming more important.) Networking—making connections with people and building relationships with them—takes time. At a one-day event full of traditional presentation sessions, typically, the only opportunities for people to meet each other are during lunch and a couple of short refreshment breaks. That’s very little time to network. Adding the dinner, evening social, and breakfast of a single overnight doubles, at a minimum, the time for connection available at a one-day event.
Getting there
A non-local attendee incurs fixed time and travel costs to get to and return from an event, irrespective of its duration. If your conference’s value to participants increases with its duration—if not, why are you making it longer? —amortizing these fixed costs over a longer event reduces the hourly expense of attending.
Attendees who eat together bond together
Academics may argue as to whether the reasons are biological, cultural, or both, but few would disagree that people bond over communal meals. A one-day conference provides a single lunch plus, usually, two refreshment breaks. Add just an extra half day and we get three refreshment breaks, perhaps an evening social with munchies, dinner, breakfast, and lunch. That’s a big difference!
Something magical happens overnight
In my experience, overnights during a conference facilitate the processing of experiences from the previous day’s events. This is especially important at the start of a peer conference, where the first half day exposes attendees to a large variety of ideas and resources. But the effect is useful at any event. Although we all appreciate the time to consciously process our experience, there’s growing evidence that short-term memories are turned into lasting long-term memories during sleep. I find that the rapid torrent of information shared during the first day of a conference seems to acquire shape and form in my mind overnight—the next morning brings clarity to the dominant themes and interests shared by the participants.
The above multi-day rationales apply to any conference. The following apply to peer conferences.
Reserving enough time for content
The standard Conferences That Work design employs four sessions that wrap around its content heart. For a fifty-person one-day event, a roundtable, peer session sign-up, personal introspective, and group spective consume more than four hours of traditional session time, leaving little time for the peer sessions. This has two consequences. The first is that a one-day peer conference has to drop the personal introspective. The second is that I won’t run a one-day peer conference anymore, and recommend that you don’t either.
The minimum time I now recommend for a peer conference is a day and a half. Even at this length, there really isn’t sufficient time to add a traditional session like a keynote. But participants consistently report that it’s long enough to provide excellent connection and community-building time, as well as four sets of peer sessions tuned to their needs.
Peer session preparation
Many first-time participants are surprised by how well the vast majority of peer sessions are led and/or facilitated when there’s such a short time between the choice of a peer conference session topic and the resulting session. And the volunteer leaders/facilitators themselves are surprised and empowered by how well they fulfill their role, despite sometimes worrying beforehand whether they will do a good job knowing the limited time available to prepare. Even so, a longer conference gives leaders more time to think about their sessions, consult with other peers, and prepare.
What other roadblocks have you experienced when promoting longer events? What other reasons do you suggest for holding them?
Do you have fewer Twitter followers than the folks who follow you?
If so, cheer up, it’s normal, thanks to the magic of simple statistics! You are more likely to be a friend of a popular person simply because he or she has a larger number of friends. So, on average, your followers are likely to have more followers than you do.
When I was living in England in the 1960s, finding a telephone number was cumbersome. Five huge telephone books, each requiring both hands to lift, sat in a cupboard in our hallway, with millions of alphabetized names and associated numbers in microscopic print. The books quickly became out of date and were updated sporadically. And, if you didn’t know the exact spelling, or had only an address, you were out of luck.
Books were a key way to obtain information. Wealthy families (not mine) purchased the Encyclopedia Britannica and proudly displayed the 24+ volumes on sturdy bookshelves. The local free library was a key resource. For current information, I could watch three TV channels and read several rather good print newspapers. For specialized information, I subscribed to, or read in the library, a bewildering variety of magazines and journals.
And, of course, I talked to people. My parents, my teachers, my friends, and, later, my professional colleagues were all valuable resources. I found my friends through face-to-face social events or through my work. Finally, if I needed to know more about a subject of interest, I would attend a conference and listen to papers delivered by experts in the field.
How I find information today
The rise of online has changed everything. I don’t remember the last time I consulted a paper telephone directory. Ten years ago I checked eBay to see if an Encyclopedia Britannica set was worth anything. Reluctantly, I ended up recycling the books, because no one wanted to buy them. Today, apart from a local paper and a few paper magazine subscriptions, online is where I find telephone numbers, email or physical addresses, and information on just about any subject that, in quantity and mostly quality, dwarfs the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
People are still a major resource for me, but the primary way that I first meet new people professionally these days is online, via a variety of social media, rather than an initial face-to-face encounter.
And, of course, these days I am a creator of conferences rather than a passive consumer of them. For me, a good conference is one where I can interact, connect, share, and learn with others, and can influence what happens at the event in a way that is useful and meaningful to me.
How the bountiful availability of online content changes events
Today there is amazing one-way content on the web. The internet is where we go for information about people, places, facts, processes, techniques, and solutions to problems. Our resources have migrated from cumbersome books and broadcast media to browsable indexed data servers in the internet cloud.
For face-to-face attendees, this makes vanilla delivery of content at events far less compelling.
In the future, people are not going to travel to your event to listen to a speaker they could watch streamed live, or as a recording at a time and place of their choosing. Providing a ten-minute opportunity for questions at the end of a presentation isn’t going to cut it either. Viewing one-way content over the internet is cheaper and more convenient for attendees. If broadcast content is mostly what you have to offer people will gravitate to obtaining it online; either from you or a competitor.
As a result, traditional events concentrating on the transfer of predetermined content from experts to a local audience are dying. I don’t know how long it will be before rigor mortis sets in. Perhaps some events will remain viable as training opportunities for novices, or as vehicles for CEUs to be awarded or certifications to be maintained. Over time, however, the majority of professionals who care about their profession and the best use of their time will stop going to face-to-face events that don’t incorporate significant opportunities for connection, peer-to-peer sharing, and participant-driven sessions. And, no, a lunch and an evening social or two aren’t going to be enough anymore. Instead, you need to put opportunities for connection front and center of your events, because connection around content is becoming the most important reason that people attend face-to-face events.
Why you should care
Since my first book on participant-driven conferences was published, I have been amazed and delighted by the flood of interest from meeting professionals, peer communities, and business & association leaders. And I’ve also been disturbed. A common story I hear is of long-running conferences in trouble: conferences where attendance, evaluations, and consequent income are falling. The organizers who are contacting me have realized that the traditional conferences-as-usual models are not working like they used to. Attendees are starting to defect or ask for something different. I’ve heard this story from professionals in many different fields.
In my opinion, it’s only a matter of time before the importance of the shift in emphasis away from content towards connection at face-to-face events becomes apparent and generally accepted by the events community. As usual with industry trends, the people who recognize and respond well to them early will be the beneficiaries. Those who continue doing things the old way will lose out. If you’re not currently investigating ways to restructure your events to significantly increase attendee connections and participation, I recommend you start.
Do you see a trend of increased attendee dissatisfaction at traditional events? If so, why do you think it’s happening, and what are you doing about it?
More value can be gotten out of voluntary participation than anyone previously imagined, thanks to improvements in our ability to connect with one another and improvements in our imagination of what is possible from such participation. —Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky
In his thought-provoking book, Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky reminds us that, until recently, most of the discussion about how to make things happen has focused on two seemingly competing mechanisms.
Private production
The first way to make things happen is private production. Things happen when the cost of doing them is less than what the doers believe the result will be worth. This is how many consumer products and services are created.
Public production
The second way to make things happen is through public production. Society decides that something is worth doing for the common good. An example is the provision of universal health care by a government for its citizens.
There is a third way to make something happen.
Social production is the third way to make something happen
Shirky describes social production as the creation of value by a group for its members, using neither price signals nor managerial oversight to coordinate participants’ efforts. Social production occurs because a group’s members derive benefit from the results of their shared work, and often through their enjoyment of community during the process.
Until recently, the scale of social production was limited. Shirky gives picnics and bowling leagues as examples. What has changed is that internet technologies now give us inexpensive and effective means for group coordination and cooperation. This allows us to aggregate the free time of many people in ad hoc groups that come together for mutual benefit to work on “tasks we find interesting, important, or urgent”. Examples of social production include Wikipedia, Linux, and countless community-run online forums.
How social production will impact meeting design
The rise of social production is important for events such as meetings and conferences. Why? Because the collective knowledge and experience of peer groups normally rivals or surpasses, the knowledge and experience of any one “expert”. When an audience collectively knows more than the presenter at the front of the room (and I’d argue that today this is true more often than not), the question naturally arises: are standard presentations the best way to use attendees’ time?
Traditional conference culture restricts the provider of session content to presenters. Social production culture, on the other hand, supports appropriate openness, sharing, and participation as a norm. When events adopt a social production culture, attendees become participants, involved not only in their own learning but also in the learning of their peers. Everyone benefits from the increased pool of resources, and the opportunity to shape what happens during the event. This adds real value to each attendee’s experience and also to the event’s civic value, i.e. the effect of the event on the world outside it.
As social production becomes an increasingly common way to create value, we need to recognize and acknowledge its ramifications for events. Attendees are going to be less willing to put up with conferences that are designed to make money for the organizers or put on as a public service. Instead, they will go to events where they can participate and shape what happens.
What are you doing to facilitate social production at your events?
We need to change how attendees come together at events.
“…if we do not change the way citizens come together, if we do not shift the context under which we gather and do not change the methodology of our gatherings, then we will have to keep waiting for great leaders, and we will never step up to the power and accountability that is within our grasp.” —Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging
Change citizens to conference attendees and you have a good description of what continues to happen at traditional conferences, where attendees listen to session leaders, rather than collectively reaping the benefits of co-creating an event and associated community.
That’s why we need to change how attendees come together at events.
A good conference is like an island vacation! As I write this, I’m about to return from a two-week vacation on Anguilla, a tiny rural British West Indies island with some of the most beautiful beaches in the world (you may hate me now). My home is a tiny rural town in Vermont. Still, although the population of the surrounding area is similar to that of Anguilla there’s an interesting difference between my home and island destinations—and I’m not talking about the weather.
