Keeping a recurring conference going, alive and fresh every time, is hard enough. Successfully starting a conference from scratch is even tougher.
But if you are courageous enough to start a conference, you have one big advantage.
It’s much easier to succeed with a well-designed new conference than succeed in redesigning traditional conferences that people have attended in the past.
To put this in context, let’s do a quick review of meeting design trends in two timeframes: since COVID and over the last couple of decades.
Lessons learned (or not) on event design by the meeting industry
The impact of the COVID pandemic
The COVID pandemic that began in 2020 was a huge shock to the meeting industry. In-person meetings disappeared almost overnight, and circumstances forced the industry to explore online alternatives. The pandemic, though unwelcome to say the least, certainly had the potential to trigger a fresh look at meeting design. However, as in-person meetings have slowly returned, it’s becoming clear that little has changed. The meeting industry still heavily invests—in mind-share if not in cold, hard cash—in the comfortable old normal of content broadcast to passive attendees.
What we are currently seeing is that attendance at most (but not all) in-person meetings is down from pre-pandemic levels. Some meetings have migrated online and are not coming back. The rise of multi-day online conferences scheduled for a few hours each day has siphoned off attendance at in-person events. Some former attendees are simply more willing or find it more convenient to meet with their colleagues and customers online.
Is the meeting industry eating its own dog food?
Meeting industry conferences have changed their formats more than most, in an attempt to respond to the constant reminders over the last twenty years by people like me to design meetings centered on connection around meaningful content. While there’s a welcome trend towards shorter broadcast sessions, industry conferences rarely feature highly interactive sessions and workshops. Meeting industry conferences are an ideal place to demonstrate and experiment with different meeting formats. (I don’t mean superficial gimmicks.) Frankly, we need to do a better job at educating event professionals on how to truly create maximally useful and engaging events.
The advantage of starting a conference from scratch
Starting a conference from scratch gives you the opportunity to incorporate great meeting design from the start. Your inaugural meeting opens with no expectations carried forward from an earlier conference. You can bake meaningful, copious connection around relevant content into the design.
In the 32 years I’ve been designing participant-driven and participation-rich conferences, I can think of only a few instances out of the approximately 150 inaugural conferences I’ve designed that are not still successfully reconvening regularly. As I’ve shared in my books and this blog, such meetings support building an enduring community that thirsts to meet again. Yes, it’s still hard work to keep these events going. But at least the participants won’t be complaining about the lack of engagement or valuable experiences at subsequent conferences.
In comparison, improving the design of existing traditional conferences is a much harder job. Incremental design changes between one year and the next are certainly possible. Unfortunately, they are often cosmetic; they don’t improve the fundamental conference process design. Established conference stakeholders rarely pivot from lecture-heavy to participant-driven and interactive session formats, and when they do they rarely succeed. The dissonance experienced by returning attendees is nearly always too great. Often, stakeholders drop incremental changes, even if moderately successful, at subsequent conferences. The existing inertia of past events triumphs and the conference slips back to “how we always do it”.
Caveats and conclusions
OK, I’m not trying to minimize the challenges in getting a brand-new conference off the ground. Successfully marketing a new meeting involves more work than convincing people to reattend an existing conference. (Though if you are first to identify a new market that isn’t being tapped or a new angle on a target audience, your job may be easier than you think.) Regardless, there are plenty of inaugural conferences that don’t get repeated for all kinds of reasons.
All I’m saying is that your chances of long-term success are significantly improved if your inaugural conference design is participant-driven and participation-rich. Offering a well-designed conference that provides meaningful connection around relevant content guarantees that participants will experience an event that they co-create and enjoy with their peers. Most will be delighted by this as many will not have experienced such a liberating and effective format before.
Paradoxically, with the disruption of the COVID pandemic still rippling through the meeting industry, it’s a really good time to start a conference. Rather like buying stocks when the market is depressed. So, if you have a great idea and the energy to see it through, I encourage you to go for it! Just ensure your inaugural conference incorporates a participant-driven and participation-rich design. (And get in touch if you’d like some help 😀!)