[Update] Now released! Purchase here!
Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Meetings People Actually Want and Need
I’m happy to announce that my third book Event Crowdsourcing will be released this Fall. It covers a fundamental yet neglected topic: creating meetings people actually want and need.
My research has shown that over half the sessions offered at traditional preplanned conferences are not what attendees actually want! Event crowdsourcing allows you to create meetings where attendees want and need every session.
Who should buy this book?
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- Are you a meeting planner/designer who wants to create the best possible meetings for your clients? Then you need this book!
- Are you a presenter who knows the importance of meeting the wants and needs of your audience? Session crowdsourcing ensures that your sessions will reflect the real-time needs of those who attend.
- Are you a conference stakeholder eager to grow an event by making it the very best it can be? When attendees are enthusiastic about your event because it meets their wants and needs, they recommend your event to their peers and return year after year. As a result, your event grows, continually adapting to the changing desires of your participants, and your event and organization communities strengthen over time.
- Are you an attendee who tires of events full of irrelevant pre-planned sessions? Event crowdsourcing ensures that you will be enthusiastic about the content and value of events and sessions.
To summarize, event crowdsourcing is an essential strategy and practice for creating effective and successful sessions and conferences. My book Event Crowdsourcing clearly explains everything you need to know to successfully integrate effective real-time event crowdsourcing into your meeting programs and sessions.
With 32 years of participant-driven conference program design experience, I know that event crowdsourcing can fundamentally improve just about any meeting. This book will convince you to try event crowdsourcing, and show you how to do it through a clear comprehensive set of implementations that support your success every step of the way.
What’s in the book?
Event Crowdsourcing includes a clear succinct explanation of event crowdsourcing: what it is and why you need to use it.
It also contains a comprehensive set of process tools for three types of event crowdsourcing:
- Program crowdsourcing: Uncovering meeting participants’ interests, wants, and needs and using them to create all or part of an event program;
- Session crowdsourcing: Enabling attendees to influence and guide what happens during a single session, allowing the session to reflect and maximally satisfy participants’ in-the-moment wants and needs; and
- Future crowdsourcing: Leveraging the learning, connections, and community building that has occurred during a meeting to consolidate learning for both individuals and the event community, and to create valuable specific individual and group outcomes.
Like my previous two books, Event Crowdsourcing will be available in a large format (8½” x 11″), easy to read paperback, and as a downloadable ebook (readable on all devices), available instantly on purchase.
Chapters
Part One: The Conference Program is Dead! Long Live The Conference Program!
- Meetings that aren’t
- Why you need to crowdsource meeting content
—An event crowdsourcing success story
—What event crowdsourcing is and isn’t - The three types of event crowdsourcing
—Is program crowdsourcing always successful? - Why we shouldn’t try to predict in advance what attendees want to learn
—Traditional meetings’ key problem
—When is predetermined meeting content appropriate? - The pros and cons of high-tech crowdsourcing
- Wishes
Part Two: How To Crowdsource Programs And Sessions Right
Crowdsourcing techniques overview
- Introduction
- How to use this compendium of crowdsourcing techniques
- Techniques by goal
- Techniques by conference phase
- Techniques by group size
- Techniques by time needed
- Techniques glossary
Program crowdsourcing
- Important design considerations for event crowdsourcing
—The biggest event crowdsourcing mistake you can make - Badgesourcing
- Crowdsourcing ideas
- The Three Questions
- Human spectrograms
- Reminders, Sparks, Questions, Puzzles
- Peer Session Selection and Sign-up
- Post It! For Programs
- The Solution Room
- Preparing for and running crowdsourced programs
Session crowdsourcing techniques
- Post It! For Sessions
—Post It! inspiration - Pair share
- Guided discussions
- Fishbowls
- Fishbowl sandwich
—How a fishbowl sandwich can really get your attendees talking - Open Space
—Why I don’t like unconferences - World Café
—World Café Lite
—Using World Café when strong differences of opinion are present - Affinity grouping
- Participatory voting
—Hand/stand voting
—Roman voting
—Card voting
—Table voting
—Dot voting
—Anonymous voting
Crowdsourcing techniques that consolidate learning and move to outcomes
- Personal introspective
- Plus/Delta
- Group spective
- Pro Action Café
Appendices
[Updated] Event Crowdsourcing has been published!
Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Meetings People Actually Want and Need has been published! You can purchase it here.