No doubt you will have attended many business conferences in your time where you’ve struggled to stay awake or even left early. It is such a shame that so many conferences are wasted opportunities because not enough thought has gone into making them interesting or exciting enough.
Unfortunately, human beings are just not designed to sit all day in one room listening to one person after another drone on and on, even if they are droning on and on about the latest, most exciting smartphone.
It is a real challenge, when planning a conference, to ensure the entire day is engaging and interesting to your audience. To ensure a successful conference, you’ve got to make sure the conference location itself is stimulating, however, not so much that your audience is distracted from the main events (i.e. speeches and demonstrations).
Organisation is absolutely key and unfortunately many businesses fail to put enough planning into their conferences. This is not to say they don’t have amazing speakers or products to show, merely that they miss out on a lot of guest interactions and the little details that really help to make conferences successful.
Therefore, here are a number of handy ideas to help make sure your conferences always go off without a hitch:
Be different from the very start
It is a good idea to start off as you mean to go on. So if you can make the way your conference attendees sign in, different from what they would have experienced at other conferences, do so.
Name tags are a very useful tool and can be utilised to make things more interesting. For instance, you can colour code the name tags and set up a conference challenge where the person who manages to exchange the most business cards with people of the same name tag colour gets a prize.
You can also get people to describe themselves in one sentence and write this sentence on their name tag. This then provides people with an extra topic of conversation when they are interacting throughout the conference.
Keep in touch with attendees in the weeks leading up to the conference
So many people sign up to attend such events months in advance and then forget about them when it comes to the actual day. It’s therefore really important to keep in touch with those attending your conference in order to keep them engaged.
You’ve no doubt got the email addresses of those who have expressed an interest in attending, so make sure you send out regular, appealing and interesting countdown emails to keep them engaged and remind them of when the conference actually is.
Make sure your attendees are organised
There’s nothing worse than turning up to a business conference and realising you’ve forgotten something. It may be the attendees’ responsibility to make sure they don’t forget anything but there’s no harm in you giving them a helping hand, since it will help to ensure your conference flows as smoothly as possible.
Therefore make sure you send out a list of ‘suggested item to bring’, such as the usual pens, note paper and business cards. It’s also important to inform them of anything else they might need, such as lunch, if you are not providing it. Make sure people also know if they need cash or if card is ok, as well as informing them of whether there are cash points at the conference location.
Booking your guest speakers
This is one of the most important elements of a conference, since guest speakers can literally make a conference, or destroy it. You really need to do a lot of research into your guest speakers before finalising the booking.
Make sure you ask them for references and follow these references up. Don’t ever just take someone’s word for it. Talking to others who have hosted the guest speaker will give you a good idea of how engaging they are and if they helped make other conferences a success or not.
All work and no play makes a very dull conference
Even though you will have a range of set business objectives for your conference, it is still important to recognise your attendees will need a mental, as well as physical, break from work every now and again.
Make sure you have enough time built into the day, which will allow your attendees to get up and stretch their legs, as well as interact with others. Try setting up ‘speed networking’ areas. ‘Speed networking’ is similar to ‘speed dating’ and nearly as much fun but obviously more focused on business instead of personal.
Conference packs are also absolutely essential, so make sure these are packed full of goodies such as pens, sweets, stress balls and other novelty items. Always try to ensure there’s a little bit of frivolity as well as the more serious stuff, otherwise you’ll find people get bored and leave early and definitely won’t attend your next conference.
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James writes for Cranfield Tech Park. When not writing about conference venues in Milton Keynes, he can often be found planning conferences for himself and everyone around him.