Hi {{first_name|dear builder}}!
It’s the middle of the spring conference season…and I have Thoughts. There are some small things I keep noticing that I have yet to see any conference organizer rectify, and at this point I have collated them into a rant I deliver (to myself) on every airplane home. This is that rant.
1: Nametag orientation
If you attach the lanyard to the center hole of the nametag, it will flip around throughout the day without a care in the world. If you have only put someone’s name on one side of the nametag, I can only see their name half the time.
If you insist on using the center hole, you must also have the exact same design on both sides of the nametag. Better - use the two corner holes instead, and the nametag will stay flat and displayed correctly.
2: Nametag design
The purpose of the nametag is to grease social gears and make it easy for people to connect. The full name should be extremely large and legible from at least 10 feet away, ideally 20. Don’t do big first name and smaller last name either…I think people do this because they think it’s more friendly/casual to emphasize just the first name but this makes it harder to really remember someone’s full name to follow up with them later.
Their company name should also be large and legible, and ideally also their title and their hometown. Each of these traits are opportunities for strangers to find something to talk about and get conversation going.
The nametag should NOT
Emphasize the name of the conference. Everyone already knows what conference they are attending
Be too design-y, you don’t need to show your branding skills on a nametag
Include agenda info, people can find that elsewhere rather than squinting at the printout hanging around their neck
3: Food
One day this past fall I woke up on the first morning of a conference in Nashville, in a big old Hyatt. My eyes noticed the blank gray walls of the basic hotel room, and my immediate next thought was: I know exactly what’s for breakfast.
Scrambled eggs in a massive tin pan. Ubiquitous, utilitarian, uninspiring.
Not that your conference food needs to be inspiring…but could we get maybe one or two steps closer to that level? Change it up a bit, make it fresh and different, make it local if possible. The food is one of the few conference moments where 100% of attendees will be participating - how can you make it demonstrate your values and increase the energy in the room?
4: Personal stories > packaged takeaways
If you’re speaking, I want to get to know YOU. Be specific and vulnerable. I do not care for your polished takeaways at the end, each on its own slide. If I wanted a list of takeaways I could stay home and read a blog post (like this one 😎). I do not want you to feel like you have to deliver a complete framework to us about how the world works. Save it for your book. When we are in the room together I just want 15-20 minutes of the deepest personal sharing you can do onstage, followed by 30 minutes of 1-1 or small group discussion based on the resonance of what you just shared.
5: Panels should be about people, not topics
Panels should feel like we are getting to witness some fascinating people have a fascinating conversation. So it must be based primarily on curating a set of genuinely interesting humans who would not usually be in conversation with each other.
Too often organizers pick a topic for the panel and then find a bunch of relevant people to place in the chairs and hope they’ll go somewhere interesting. But fascinating people will make any topic fascinating.
6: Enough with the breweries
Why is every opening reception at a brewery? Or a bar, or a food hall, or some other very loud big room that requires us to shout at each other for the first two hours of the conference?
Don’t make people shout on the first night (or ever). And in general, let’s just not do these big-room free-for-all networking things. They are fun only for the most gregarious of extroverts or the people who already know many others in the room.
Instead, a well-planned “birds of a feather” style dinner with themed tables in a beautiful quiet space would ensure every attendee leaves their first moment with multiple new relevant connections.
7: Optimize for targeted and facilitated connections
I hate the feeling of looking around the big room at all the strangers and feeling like there is at least one person here who would be AMAZING for me to meet right now but my chances of meeting them are up to…chance.
If that kind of connection is the most valuable potential outcome of the conference, why don’t we more actively facilitate making that special connection happen?
Three ideas:
Ahead of the conferences, organizers introduce each attendee to five other attendees. I would enter the conference already knowing five relevant new people and it would ease the social intensity of walking into a room not knowing anyone.
Put up flags/banners around the large spaces where people can go find each other. Things like:
Hiring / Job-seeking
Teaching / Learning
Selling / Buying
“I want to meet someone new!”
That way when you’re in between conversations instead of feeling on the outside you have a place to go to jumpstart a relevant new interaction.
Way way way more facilitated networking time. Speed dating is a great format for this, as are small groups and paired discussions. If it was up to me this would be the majority of the conference rather than a wall of sessions.
Another conference, another “lounge” to wade through and hope I might maybe be able to say Hi to someone who could change my life
8: The last day of the conference should end at 12:00 or earlier.
Anything after that will see rapidly declining attendance because people will go to their flights. Then the energy just dwindles and it is sad. Wrap it up with a strong sendoff in the morning, maybe offer a lunch to-go as a nice gesture, and that’s that.
ALSO to be fair I should note that organizing a conference is difficult and stressful. Even successful healthy conferences are lucky if they break even financially. Having never organized one I am sure there is a ton I don’t know! This is just my list of things I have personally noticed that I can’t stop thinking about.
What did I miss? And what’s your favorite conference you’ve been to?