Expert insights. Personalized for you.
At a recent conference consultation with a client, a millennial made me think that I wasn’t keeping up with the times. I voiced my strong opinion that conference organizers should embrace inbound marketing (pull) over traditional outbound marketing (push). MORE
These mental models are deeply embedded in our conference planning and management practices. Savvy conference organizers realize that their mental models have much more influence over their outcomes than their decisions and actions. Surfacing our cognitive conference constructs. MORE
But when it gets to “go time,” does that culture manifest at your conferences and meetings? Her boss apparently thought she should spend all her time out “doing meeting planning” and not hanging out in a hotel conference room. Conference staff are not able to do everything! MORE
It is much more effective to provide opportunities for conference participants to solve their own problems, then telling them how to solve it. Conference organizers automatically assume that if someone is attending their event, they expect the conference to help them solve their problems. MORE
Too often conference and meeting professionals assume that their role is best suited to planning and executing the conference. I get that from the education section or the conference technical teams.”. They own designing the conference customers experience journey. MORE
However, a conference at rest, tends to die. The enemy of most conferences is the way it’s always been. Cognitive and organizational inertia keeps an association on its current conference course even when facing disruptive or rapid external changes. MORE
Your association, annual conference, and governance are all institutions. One of the sacred cows for associations and their annual conference is attributing notoriety to the office of the president, board chair or annual conference committee chair. MORE
Once you’ve observed the conference through the lens of your target customer and gained insights from conference data, you can move to the next steps. These steps are critical for you and your conference planning teams to embrace, enlist and employ. MORE
Applying a story arc to the conference can activate participants’ brains. You can use the story arc concept to carefully craft the messages and issues you want your conference participants to explore, experience and learn. So exactly how do you use a story arc for your conference? MORE
A Momentous Catalyst To Conference Attendee Behavior Change. I am often asked how to get conference attendees to adopt 21 st Century learning habits. The majority of conferences treat attendees as consumers of information. Conference Planning Registrants Relabel MORE
One of the strongest intangible attributes of a healthy conference is how much sharing takes place. Conversely, conferences that have a higher deal-making quotient tend to hold their cards closer to their chests. The post Conferences Need More Sharing appeared first on Velvet Chainsaw. MORE
It’s as if Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore’s Experience Economy is just now hitting its stride—for conferences at least. The word is out: we’ve got to create conference experiences, not just conferences that feel like a patchwork quilt of our great grandmother’s dresses. MORE
Your real conference competition is not that event held six months after yours. Today’s technology driven, hyper-connected, instant gratification, real-time world puts you as a conference organizer in a difficult position. Have you normalized conference mediocrity as acceptable? MORE
Conference organizers and their planning teams should understand, identify and quash organizational debt. Refactoring As A Metaphor For Conference Improvement. Thus we refactor to improve the conference experience for our customers. Consider it as your conference source code. MORE
As conference organizers, we frequently ignore the evidence all around us of what’s working and what’s not. Often our conference planning teams and volunteer advisors follow our lead as we give more precedent to what feels right. MORE
Are 50%-80% of your conference attendees in your programming at any given time? One thing is certain, if your conference attendees are not fully engaged in the experience you provide, there is little, if any, chance that they will leave your event with any real ROI. MORE
To paraphrase Hoffer, you can never get enough of conference fads, gimmicks and trends. Unless your a conference participant and we often have had enough!). They also want access to your conference budget. You can never get enough of what you really don’t need says Eric Hoffer. MORE
Everything we take for granted about conferences, and planning them, faces disruption. Participants from all generations and cultures increasingly expect conferences to mirror their work and personal lives. Savvy conference organizers meet these disruptions head-on. MORE
In physics, the second law of thermodynamics says all things—bodies, businesses, conferences, energy, organizations, relationships—move toward chaos and disorder. As your conference matures, it experiences entropy. As a conference professional, you know this to be true. MORE
Do your conference learning opportunities—from the general session to networking to breakouts to deep dive workshops—empower registrants to participate in their own learning journey? Or do your conference education sessions motivate participants to see the finish line? MORE
As conference organizers, why can’t we also have a fun, fulfilling, and collaborative experience planning and designing the conference? Here are six ways to focus on designing your team’s experience during your next conference planning process. MORE
Many conferences are stuck in the rut of legacy routines, age-old rituals and cloned programming. Conference organizers and its advisors replicate the past maintaining the traditions and well-established procedures of yesteryear. Conference Reform Requires These Leadership Traits. MORE
As you embark on a new vision of conference renovation and reform, you may feel that you are crossing from a comfortable, familiar space to one that is unknown and unsettling. Conference Improvement As Your Threshold To New Growth. What’s your favorite room in your home? MORE
The first peer conference I convened and designed was held June 3 – 5, 1992 at Marlboro College, Vermont. So, as of today, the community of practice that eventually became edACCESS has enjoyed 27 years of peer conferences. Twenty-three people came to the inaugural conference. MORE
Who wants to attend a common, ordinary, ho-hum, everyday , I’m-just-like-all-the-others traditional conference? Your conference growth and revenue depends upon repeat paying attendees year after year. And your customer loyalty is built upon making your common conference uncommon. MORE
The North Star is the perfect metaphor for your annual conference purpose. When your conference purpose serves as a North Star, it guides all decisions, tasks, behaviors and strategy. Uncovering Your North Star Conviction To Find Conference True Target Market. MORE
The future success of your conference will depend on changing your culture to be one of inclusiveness. Want to know more on how you can infuse your conference culture with Radical Hospitality? However, conference radical hospitality welcomes all people, just as they are. MORE
Why not make your entire conference a braindate? I like the braindate approach , but it doesn’t have to be something that’s grafted onto a conference. Because good event design is about how a conference works. Instead make your entire conference a braindate! MORE
Likewise, many conference professionals have no idea what embracing the long-tail, pull benefits of content marketing even means. Most marketing and communications teams agree that content marketing serves as the foundation to their conference marketing strategy. MORE
A recent Wired article argues that “ Science Conferences Are Stuck in the Dark Ages “ Unsurprisingly, I agree — but there’s some light in the darkness! Read the full article at Conferences That Work The post Are science conferences stuck in the Dark Ages? MORE
Here’s my article “ Five Reasons to Change Conferences “ , published in the December 2018, NSA Speaker magazine. But our conference programs still focus on lectures, where a few experts broadcast their knowledge to passive listeners. MORE
It’s hard for conference organizers to stick to planning the essential elements of their events. As a conference professional, it is your mission each day to keep your focus on the essential elements of your event for your customers’ sake. What is the essence of your conference? MORE
Traditionally teams from organizations attend a conference with a divide-and-conquer game plan, as they split up and attend as many different sessions as they can. Yet conferences are lagging in meeting the needs of team learning. MORE
Now imagine someone asking your conference participants that question. Then they would launch into a passionate description of your event’s annual Party with a Purpose, its pre-conference feel-good community service projects and its ongoing student scholarship fundraisers. MORE
Most conference and meeting professionals want the coolest, hippest, latest ideas and trends for their events. We want to know what unique things other conferences are doing so we can borrow their ideas. We pursue fads, gimmicks and trends as the silver bullets of our conference woes. MORE
Here’s what has changed: I’m convinced that “something for everyone” programming — including basic content for the novice or intermediate practitioner — is no longer the right strategy for positioning your conference as a can’t-miss experience. How Conference Sessions Can Deliver on Wisdom. MORE
The mass-personalization wave that is dramatically changing what and how we buy as consumers has application to conferences. Application to Conferences. In my opinion, the first item — individualizing a conference experience for every attendee — isn’t scalable today. MORE
If there’s something strange in your conference-hood. Our cognitive frameworks—our mental models and paradigms—shape our thinking, behavior, operations and success of our conferences. We falsely believe that future conferences are just an extension of the past. MORE
Impact on Healthcare Conferences? Here are four questions (and tips) for your conference committee to consider as they navigate this changing landscape: 1. Tip: have each conference committee member reach out to five to ten key attendees to understand their pressing priorities. MORE
The Association for Software Testing (AST) has just issued a free guide to creating peer conferences. I believe the software testing community adopted my term “peer conference” for their get-togethers after a conversation I had with pioneer software tester James Bach in 2004. MORE
Who owns the overall experience that customers have at your conference? Who oversees and manages the conference customers’ journey? Or perhaps no one is considering the holistic experience of your conference customer? Do you know what your conference target market customer wants? MORE
Conference Related Topics Velvet Chainsaw
JANUARY 21, 2019
In physics, the second law of thermodynamics says all things—bodies, businesses, conferences, energy, organizations, relationships—move toward chaos and disorder. As your conference matures, it experiences entropy. As a conference professional, you know this to be true.
Velvet Chainsaw
JUNE 17, 2019
But when it gets to “go time,” does that culture manifest at your conferences and meetings? Her boss apparently thought she should spend all her time out “doing meeting planning” and not hanging out in a hotel conference room. Conference staff are not able to do everything!
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Velvet Chainsaw
JULY 27, 2018
Who wants to attend a common, ordinary, ho-hum, everyday , I’m-just-like-all-the-others traditional conference? Your conference growth and revenue depends upon repeat paying attendees year after year. And your customer loyalty is built upon making your common conference uncommon.
Velvet Chainsaw
JANUARY 31, 2019
However, a conference at rest, tends to die. The enemy of most conferences is the way it’s always been. Cognitive and organizational inertia keeps an association on its current conference course even when facing disruptive or rapid external changes.
Velvet Chainsaw
JUNE 21, 2018
The North Star is the perfect metaphor for your annual conference purpose. When your conference purpose serves as a North Star, it guides all decisions, tasks, behaviors and strategy. Uncovering Your North Star Conviction To Find Conference True Target Market.
Velvet Chainsaw
SEPTEMBER 18, 2018
To paraphrase Hoffer, you can never get enough of conference fads, gimmicks and trends. Unless your a conference participant and we often have had enough!). They also want access to your conference budget. You can never get enough of what you really don’t need says Eric Hoffer.
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Velvet Chainsaw
NOVEMBER 8, 2018
Applying a story arc to the conference can activate participants’ brains. You can use the story arc concept to carefully craft the messages and issues you want your conference participants to explore, experience and learn. So exactly how do you use a story arc for your conference?
Velvet Chainsaw
MAY 22, 2019
Traditionally teams from organizations attend a conference with a divide-and-conquer game plan, as they split up and attend as many different sessions as they can. Yet conferences are lagging in meeting the needs of team learning.
Conferences that Work
JANUARY 20, 2020
The Association for Software Testing (AST) has just issued a free guide to creating peer conferences. I believe the software testing community adopted my term “peer conference” for their get-togethers after a conversation I had with pioneer software tester James Bach in 2004.
Velvet Chainsaw
APRIL 26, 2018
One of the strongest intangible attributes of a healthy conference is how much sharing takes place. Conversely, conferences that have a higher deal-making quotient tend to hold their cards closer to their chests. The post Conferences Need More Sharing appeared first on Velvet Chainsaw.
Velvet Chainsaw
JANUARY 25, 2018
Too often conference and meeting professionals assume that their role is best suited to planning and executing the conference. I get that from the education section or the conference technical teams.”. They own designing the conference customers experience journey.
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Conferences that Work
DECEMBER 24, 2018
Here’s my article “ Five Reasons to Change Conferences “ , published in the December 2018, NSA Speaker magazine. But our conference programs still focus on lectures, where a few experts broadcast their knowledge to passive listeners.
Velvet Chainsaw
JUNE 4, 2018
As conference organizers, why can’t we also have a fun, fulfilling, and collaborative experience planning and designing the conference? Here are six ways to focus on designing your team’s experience during your next conference planning process.
Conferences that Work
JUNE 3, 2019
The first peer conference I convened and designed was held June 3 – 5, 1992 at Marlboro College, Vermont. So, as of today, the community of practice that eventually became edACCESS has enjoyed 27 years of peer conferences. Twenty-three people came to the inaugural conference.
Velvet Chainsaw
JULY 12, 2018
These mental models are deeply embedded in our conference planning and management practices. Savvy conference organizers realize that their mental models have much more influence over their outcomes than their decisions and actions. Surfacing our cognitive conference constructs.
Conferences that Work
NOVEMBER 25, 2019
Why not make your entire conference a braindate? I like the braindate approach , but it doesn’t have to be something that’s grafted onto a conference. Because good event design is about how a conference works. Instead make your entire conference a braindate!
Velvet Chainsaw
JANUARY 7, 2019
Many conferences are stuck in the rut of legacy routines, age-old rituals and cloned programming. Conference organizers and its advisors replicate the past maintaining the traditions and well-established procedures of yesteryear. Conference Reform Requires These Leadership Traits.
Velvet Chainsaw
JANUARY 10, 2019
It’s hard for conference organizers to stick to planning the essential elements of their events. As a conference professional, it is your mission each day to keep your focus on the essential elements of your event for your customers’ sake. What is the essence of your conference?
Velvet Chainsaw
OCTOBER 17, 2018
Your association, annual conference, and governance are all institutions. One of the sacred cows for associations and their annual conference is attributing notoriety to the office of the president, board chair or annual conference committee chair.
Velvet Chainsaw
OCTOBER 2, 2019
Here’s what has changed: I’m convinced that “something for everyone” programming — including basic content for the novice or intermediate practitioner — is no longer the right strategy for positioning your conference as a can’t-miss experience. How Conference Sessions Can Deliver on Wisdom.
Velvet Chainsaw
JULY 13, 2018
If there’s something strange in your conference-hood. Our cognitive frameworks—our mental models and paradigms—shape our thinking, behavior, operations and success of our conferences. We falsely believe that future conferences are just an extension of the past.
Velvet Chainsaw
SEPTEMBER 15, 2016
It is much more effective to provide opportunities for conference participants to solve their own problems, then telling them how to solve it. Conference organizers automatically assume that if someone is attending their event, they expect the conference to help them solve their problems.
Velvet Chainsaw
JUNE 29, 2018
Conference organizers and their planning teams should understand, identify and quash organizational debt. Refactoring As A Metaphor For Conference Improvement. Thus we refactor to improve the conference experience for our customers. Consider it as your conference source code.
Velvet Chainsaw
JANUARY 26, 2018
Once you’ve observed the conference through the lens of your target customer and gained insights from conference data, you can move to the next steps. These steps are critical for you and your conference planning teams to embrace, enlist and employ.
Velvet Chainsaw
OCTOBER 12, 2018
At a recent conference consultation with a client, a millennial made me think that I wasn’t keeping up with the times. I voiced my strong opinion that conference organizers should embrace inbound marketing (pull) over traditional outbound marketing (push).
Velvet Chainsaw
JANUARY 30, 2017
Everything we take for granted about conferences, and planning them, faces disruption. Participants from all generations and cultures increasingly expect conferences to mirror their work and personal lives. Savvy conference organizers meet these disruptions head-on.
Velvet Chainsaw
JUNE 14, 2017
The mass-personalization wave that is dramatically changing what and how we buy as consumers has application to conferences. Application to Conferences. In my opinion, the first item — individualizing a conference experience for every attendee — isn’t scalable today.
Velvet Chainsaw
JULY 23, 2018
Likewise, many conference professionals have no idea what embracing the long-tail, pull benefits of content marketing even means. Most marketing and communications teams agree that content marketing serves as the foundation to their conference marketing strategy.
Velvet Chainsaw
JULY 31, 2018
As conference organizers, we frequently ignore the evidence all around us of what’s working and what’s not. Often our conference planning teams and volunteer advisors follow our lead as we give more precedent to what feels right.
Velvet Chainsaw
MARCH 6, 2017
Your real conference competition is not that event held six months after yours. Today’s technology driven, hyper-connected, instant gratification, real-time world puts you as a conference organizer in a difficult position. Have you normalized conference mediocrity as acceptable?
Velvet Chainsaw
JANUARY 26, 2017
Impact on Healthcare Conferences? Here are four questions (and tips) for your conference committee to consider as they navigate this changing landscape: 1. Tip: have each conference committee member reach out to five to ten key attendees to understand their pressing priorities.
Velvet Chainsaw
JUNE 13, 2018
Now imagine someone asking your conference participants that question. Then they would launch into a passionate description of your event’s annual Party with a Purpose, its pre-conference feel-good community service projects and its ongoing student scholarship fundraisers.
Velvet Chainsaw
JUNE 9, 2016
A Momentous Catalyst To Conference Attendee Behavior Change. I am often asked how to get conference attendees to adopt 21 st Century learning habits. The majority of conferences treat attendees as consumers of information. Conference Planning Registrants Relabel
Velvet Chainsaw
JANUARY 24, 2018
Who owns the overall experience that customers have at your conference? Who oversees and manages the conference customers’ journey? Or perhaps no one is considering the holistic experience of your conference customer? Do you know what your conference target market customer wants?
Conferences that Work
JANUARY 6, 2020
A recent Wired article argues that “ Science Conferences Are Stuck in the Dark Ages “ Unsurprisingly, I agree — but there’s some light in the darkness! Read the full article at Conferences That Work The post Are science conferences stuck in the Dark Ages?
Velvet Chainsaw
OCTOBER 20, 2016
The future success of your conference will depend on changing your culture to be one of inclusiveness. Want to know more on how you can infuse your conference culture with Radical Hospitality? However, conference radical hospitality welcomes all people, just as they are.
Velvet Chainsaw
JULY 24, 2018
As you embark on a new vision of conference renovation and reform, you may feel that you are crossing from a comfortable, familiar space to one that is unknown and unsettling. Conference Improvement As Your Threshold To New Growth. What’s your favorite room in your home?
Velvet Chainsaw
JANUARY 9, 2019
Do your conference learning opportunities—from the general session to networking to breakouts to deep dive workshops—empower registrants to participate in their own learning journey? Or do your conference education sessions motivate participants to see the finish line?
Velvet Chainsaw
JUNE 28, 2017
It’s as if Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore’s Experience Economy is just now hitting its stride—for conferences at least. The word is out: we’ve got to create conference experiences, not just conferences that feel like a patchwork quilt of our great grandmother’s dresses.
Velvet Chainsaw
SEPTEMBER 16, 2016
Are 50%-80% of your conference attendees in your programming at any given time? One thing is certain, if your conference attendees are not fully engaged in the experience you provide, there is little, if any, chance that they will leave your event with any real ROI.
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