Conferences that Work

FEBRUARY 12, 2024

For over thirty years I’ve been making clients’ conferences significantly better, for about the cost of a conference coffee break. I make conferences better by dramatically increasing attendee satisfaction. Since 1992, I’ve designed and facilitated hundreds of conferences and thousands of meetings.

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Conferences that Work

NOVEMBER 8, 2021

What are the fairest rules to use when running meetings? ” I think it’s reasonable to concentrate on fairness to participants : the majority of those involved with the meeting. All meetings have rules, whether overt or covert, conscious or unconscious, that influence how they proceed. Status and power at meetings.

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Conferences that Work

FEBRUARY 20, 2017

And yes, I admit it, during the second day of my vacation while enjoying the harmonies I hear, I’m jolted to think about religious meeting design…. Religious services are thought to be around 300,000 years old — by far the oldest form of organized meeting that humans have created. Breaks aren’t communal activities.

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Convene by PCMA

MAY 19, 2023

Amsterdam’s well-connected infrastructure means attendees can easily jump between venues, hotels, attractions, and restaurants. After all, when event organizers choose host cities that embrace innovation and forward-thinking ideas, those values inevitably set the tone for their event programs and become part of the attendee experience.

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The MICE Blog

JULY 27, 2022

One of the presentations that highly inspired me to think differently about event design took place in 2019 at the MICE Forum at ITB Berlin (Organised by VDVO ). The conference programme was designed to highlight the importance of the individual who is the centre of every live event.

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Conferences that Work

SEPTEMBER 11, 2023

Events and media consultant Julius Solaris shared at the Unforgettable Experience Design Summit that he was initially very enthusiastic about unconference format events. He thought conferences would eventually adopt unconference models. Closing sessions that meet personal and group wants and needs are often absent.

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Conferences that Work

APRIL 25, 2022

Hosted by CSAE Manitoba , this free one-hour online Participate Lab will introduce you to the design of participation-rich events through the direct experience of participatory meeting techniques and formats. Today’s attendees are no longer satisfied sitting and listening to people talking at them. Where & When.

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Conferences that Work

MARCH 25, 2024

Since 2005, I’ve written three successful books on meeting design and facilitation and over 800 weekly blog posts on a wide range of topics. My books continue to sell, and this blog is the world’s most popular website on meeting design and facilitation. Attendees loved my events! ” Jerry was right.

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Conferences that Work

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

Traditional conferences focus on a hodgepodge of pre-determined sessions punctuated with socials, surrounded by short welcomes and closings. Such conference designs treat openings and closings as perfunctory traditions, perhaps pumped up with a keynote or two, rather than key components of the conference design.

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Conferences that Work

MAY 11, 2020

I’ve been designing and facilitating participant-driven and participation-rich in person meetings — aka peer conferences — for almost thirty years. Because participants love these meetings ! Now the covid-19 pandemic has forced meetings online. In person meetings have vanished overnight.

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Online Conference Platform Attendee 150

Conferences that Work

MARCH 29, 2021

The essential characteristics of meeting professionals. If there is a heaven on earth in the event industry, there are four essential characteristics of successful meeting professionals you’ll meet there. Every successful meeting involves thinking about, planning for and executing countless details. Details matter.

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Conferences that Work

MARCH 13, 2017

How do we get people to participate at meetings? We know that participants — people who are active learners — learn more, retain more, and retain more accurately than passive attendees. Seth Godin describes a desirable meeting mindset: What would happen… if we chose to: …Sit in the front row. Seth Godin, What Would Happen.

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Brightspot Incentive Events

MARCH 18, 2021

Transforming an In-Person Sales Kickoff into a Virtual Meeting. Face-to-face events, conferences, and meetings were postponed or cancelled for the near future. One important client of Brightspot’s hosts an annual Sales Kickoff, which brings together 200-400 of their sales associates to attend an in-person conference.

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Conferences that Work

FEBRUARY 7, 2022

Companies bombard me with offers to check out online meeting platforms. Butter is an online meeting platform that is designed to support the facilitation of great interactive meetings. So here’s my review of Butter, a meeting platform for facilitators to shine. The usual caveats. Butter — the big picture.

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Conferences that Work

JULY 3, 2023

Back in 1992 , I developed The Three Questions as a fundamental opening process for participant-driven meetings and conferences. Answering it gives every person present, in turn, an opportunity to share what they would like the ensuing meeting to be about. Those who offer it are usually first-time attendees.

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Conference Attendee Meeting Design Booking 62

Conferences that Work

APRIL 9, 2018

Over the last five years I’ve heard increasing concern from the meeting professionals community about the deterioration of the quality of our national industry conferences. I’ll illustrate with the area where I have most experience: providing education at these meetings.

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Conferences that Work

MARCH 14, 2022

Meetings of every kind offer these opportunities. Personal meetings like these, whether brief or extended, between good friends or strangers, are fundamental. Someone to tell it to at conferences. Conferences, whether in-person or online, are also potential arenas for conversations. No conversations occur during lectures.

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Convene by PCMA

NOVEMBER 6, 2023

We’re tapping the talent of PCMA’s staff so they can share the design thinking and process behind the innovative experiences they create for PCMA events. Most meeting designers know that beginnings and endings matter, but struggle to craft meaningful experiences that resonate with attendees.

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Events Attendee Audience Conference 72

Conferences that Work

JUNE 18, 2018

CoffeeGate One sunny morning in 2105, two hundred of us arrived for the opening breakfast at a Canadian conference to discover There Was No Coffee. I’ll bet that even today, if you asked attendees what they remembered about the event, most would immediately recall the There Was No Coffee moment.

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Conferences that Work

APRIL 1, 2019

This (slightly edited) interview by JT Long appeared in the March 2019 issue of Smart Meetings Magazine. What led to writing the book, Conferences that Work ? I invented the format by accident 26 years ago when there were no expert speakers to invite for a conference on administrative computing issues in small schools.

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Conferences that Work

JUNE 13, 2016

Why mention this on an event design blog? Well, the most effective aspect of China’s online censorship regime illustrates what happens when you don’t incorporate covenants into your meetings. When such freedoms are agreed to individually and as a group at the start of a meeting, ambiguity about meeting behavior dissipates.

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Conferences that Work

AUGUST 24, 2020

Here are five meeting design books I especially recommend. Into the Heart of Meetings: Basic Principles of Meeting Design ( ebook or paperback ). Into the Heart of Meetings: Basic Principles of Meeting Design ( ebook or paperback ). The story is told in the book’s preface.)

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Conferences that Work

SEPTEMBER 16, 2019

Let’s look at these three conclusions in the context of meeting design. Most meeting presenters still lecture. And most meeting session presenters resort to lecturing as their dominant session modality. Attendees learn more when presenters use active learning modalities. Conclusion.

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Conferences that Work

APRIL 16, 2018

(Fun fact: the testing community often uses my term “peer conferences” for their get-togethers, due to a chat about meeting design I had with tester James Bach at the 2004 Amplifying Your Effectiveness conference.) Most meeting conveners concentrate on feedback about meeting content (“great speakers!”)

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Social Tables

OCTOBER 14, 2016

But you’ve forgotten one important piece of the puzzle: how do you plan on engaging your attendees? Attendee engagement is an oft-overlooked component that is just as important as the venue or food and beverage. When you incorporate the event hashtag into a live tweet, it makes it easy for other attendees to join the conversation.

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Conferences that Work

SEPTEMBER 14, 2020

Under pandemic conditions, former alumni, faculty, staff, and other friends of the institution cannot even meet in person to grieve. So I decided to design and run an online memorial service. I decided to design the wake as a three or more hour event. This timing is not great for potential European attendees.

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Conferences that Work

NOVEMBER 29, 2021

There have been many times when I’ve been understandably silent/disengaged/distracted during meetings, and I’m sure everyone else has too. Luckily, this is typically part of good meeting design — it’s not something that you need to awkwardly or artificially introduce. People who are distracted or disengaged.

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Manufacturing Meeting Design Conference Online 67

Conferences that Work

APRIL 8, 2019

1992: I organize a conference where there are no expert speakers available (it’s a new field, there are no experts). Invent a way to make the conference successful based on the collective needs, wants, and experience of the attendees. The conference has run continually for the last 27 years.) This is something new.

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Publishing Consulting Manufacturing Conference 58

The MICE Blog

MARCH 11, 2021

Now, after one year of hosting and attending virtual events, the events industry is facing the challenge of how to engage attendees and combat ‘zoom fatigue.’ We used meeting design to do that, which already had some gamification elements to it. Gamifying a conference – ShipCon case study. Why use gamification?

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Conferences that Work

MARCH 25, 2019

Though it’s clearly sensible to keep a conference running on schedule, we’ve all attended meetings where rambling presenters, avoidable “technical issues”, incompetent facilitation, and inadequate logistics have made a mockery of the published program. Ultimately, the attendees are the losers when this happens.

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Conferences that Work

AUGUST 29, 2016

Whenever I’ve had the pleasure of meeting David (not often enough!) There is nothing in the 2016 BizBash Design Issue that explores the heart of event design: what will happen at the event? 2 — Elementary Meetings. 3 — Conferences That Work. Read the full article at Conferences That Work.

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Conferences that Work

AUGUST 8, 2016

For over 25 years, I’ve been designing and facilitating Conferences That Work : successful, innovative, highly interactive, participant-driven events that leverage attendees’ expertise and experience to create just the conference that participants want and need. The attendees are still here talking to each other!

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Education Conference Social Network Logistics 88

Conferences that Work

JUNE 26, 2017

I’ve spent 25 years working on changing outmoded mindsets about what we should be doing in meetings. Historically, topics had to be determined in advance, the meeting format was mainly lecture and did not encourage interaction, and content was king. Read the full article at Conferences That Work. And it is changing.

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Meeting Tomorrow

FEBRUARY 19, 2019

Tracking event industry trends is a favorite activity here at Meeting Tomorrow. As a bonus, this format also seems to encourage much higher usage of digital engagement tools as a unifying platform which means as a planner, there is more data to help you improve the next meeting. Rising: AR/VR at events. Final thought.

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Travel Daily Media

AUGUST 16, 2020

Marina Bay Sands has launched a state-of-the-art hybrid event broadcast studio at Sands Expo and Convention Centre in a first for the industry, as the award-winning venue paves the way to redefine the future of meetings. Collaboration with PCMA.

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Conferences that Work

JULY 19, 2021

Ever since my first encounter with the hybrid hub and spoke meeting topology at Event Camp Twin Cities in 2011, I’ve been a big fan of the format. Yesterday [see below], I realized that hub and spoke is a great format for purely online meetings too. What’s a hub and spoke meeting? But first…. A terminology reminder.

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Endless Events

JULY 27, 2018

You can also ask the potential attendees to pay a sort of “attendance deposit”, which will be returned when their attendance has been confirmed. Up Your Learning and Event Networking Experience at Meetings. That’s why it is important to design your meetings for event networking. Make Your Check-In Process Smoother.

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