Nike's simple and direct tagline

The tagline of your conference is responsible for giving the first impression of what it’s all about and this should not be underestimated. An effective tagline will transmit your personality, your mission and your promise. It should capture the essence of your event and help communicate it in a simple and direct way.

There are dozens of online resources to help you build a solid tagline, I recommend the following:

• How to Create a Rock-Solid Tagline That Truly Works
• Wag the Tagline: The Rhetoric of Brand Messaging (TaglineGuru has lots of useful advice)
• How to Write a Tagline that Sticks

Remember not to be captured by the temptation of using too much jargon and -above all- choose a tagline that reflects your real value… The main goal of a tagline is to give a glimpse of what you are, if possible with a memorable phrase, but in the end you will have to prove what you are with facts.

A compilation of taglines from famous events (in no particular order):

• POP! Tech: World-changing people, projects and ideas
• TED: Ideas worth spreading
• SXSW: Tomorrow happens here
• Lift Conference: What can the future do for you?
• Picnic Festival: Not your ordinary Picnic
• Techonomy: A new philosophy of progress
• Thinking Digital: Technology, ideas and our future
• 99% Conference: It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.
• EG Conference: Making information entertaining & entertainment informative
• World Business Forum: New world. New management.
• World Economic Forum: Committed to improving the state of the world
• Le Web: #1 European Internet event
• Frontiers of Interaction: The crossroads of innovation in Italy
  

The Conference Basics Tribune is a free newsletter specifically made for event organizers -> It includes a selection of articles, tips, recommended mobile apps, books and featured event organizers. Want to see how the newsletter looks like? Here’s an example. Sing-up for the newsletter.

A typical mistake of many stage setups is that of hiding the speaker from the audience by adding (or not removing) obstacles between both. The most obvious obstacle on the podium is the lectern.

The TED team is famous for taking care of details that might seem minor but that have a huge impact in creating a positive atmosphere inside a conference room. During TED 2010 in Long Beach, California, the lectern is still there but it has made invisible by using a transparent material. The lectern still has a useful function, that of supporting computers or papers necessary to the speaker, but has disappeared as an obstacle in the line of vision that connects the attendees with the speaker.

Follow some photos from Jamie Oliver’s talk during TED 2010 (watch Jamie’s TED Prize wish presentation, it’s very good, inspiring and courageous too).

The lectern does not obsturct the visual of the audience

The speaker is visible behind the lectern

The effect is the same that Philippe Starck achieved when he designed the “ghost chairs” for Kartell (see photos).

Loui Ghost chair designed by Philippe Starck for Kartell

La Marie chair designed by Philippe Starck for Kartell

David Orban (photo by Joi Ito)

Before the conference: you promote and try to sell. During the conference: you engage with people and generate real-time buzz. After the conference: you disappear… until you will have to promote your next event. This often involuntary behavior is comparable to the refractory period after sexual intercourse or “the recovery phase after orgasm during which it is physiologically impossible for an individual to have additional orgasms” (source: Wikipedia).

To further explore this common symptom of the “after conference” and some possible solutions I met David Orban, Advisor & European Lead of Singularity University and active speaker and delegate in many important international events.

David describes how “conference organizers treat rather symmetric periods of time, before and after an event, very differently”:

• Before the conference “organizers want to pump up the excitement”, invite potential attendees to social networking sites, communicate official hashtags, etc.
  
• After the conference everybody moves on… “the organizers pack up, the venue is deserted, the participants go home and after having been away for 2, 3 or more days of course they have all kinds of things to think about in their private and professional lives” (simply put, their attention is captured by something else).

Which are the negative consequences and missed opportunities for both organizers and attendees?

For the conference organizer there is a big missed opportunity here and that is the possibility of engaging with the attendees as intensively as it has been done with potential participants before the event. A pure marketer would say that you would “capture their attention for longer”. If you let go the conversation, when the time comes to promote your new conference -which might be a year later or so- you will need to re-engage with people whose interests have been stimulated by other stuff (competing or not) and you will have to capture their attention starting from scratch. Notice that I wrote “conversation” and not “communications” -better known as “event spam”- because there has to be real interaction, not just irrelevant content pushed from the top down.

Note: For a conversation to happen both parts must be actively involved. Engage with real value, do not try to fill up your audience with crap just to keep them aware of your event. Give something valuable out and value will come back.

One of the attendees biggest loss is that they are not aware of content they might have missed during the conference, things that inspired or made them enthusiastic or that simply they would like to share with colleagues and friends. Another power item is giving them the means to meet back people they encountered (or missed) at the event and create their own private conversations.

How to reduce or eliminate the event’s Refractory Period?

David suggests to plan beforehand the workflow requirements to keep the same tools in use (email, social networks, etc). Well before the event takes place, when you’re not yet in an emergency state, make a detailed program of  what should happen after the event. Prepare the structure so that it only requires couple of hours to deploy. Keep in mind that we’re talking about a period of time that is not necessarily short (days) but could be long several months or up to your next conference takes place.

Having a clear task list (or better a Gantt chart with tasks and due dates) frees your mind from thinking what to do and let’s you move directly into the execution of the plan. Remember to indicate who is responsible for what and to oversee the whole process. Make all the work possible before the event (e.g. preparing the template for a newsletter, setting up the after-event website leaving the necessary spaces for material that will be produced later, etc).

Note: It’s not just about sending a thank you email (which is often sent). There is a lot of material created during an event (video, interviews, summaries, photos, media coverage, etc) that is worth being shared.

Map all the content related to your conference and help your community find it. It does not have to be all created by your organization. Scout for the best and make it available through your website, social networks, etc carefully crediting the authors. Giving visibility to third parties is often a great way to transform them from mere participants to loyal members of a community and will stimulate them to produce even more high quality stuff the next time.

Mobile Polling Station - Photo by Thomas Schlijper during PICNIC '09

This article deals with some of the alternatives for executing a survey or poll during or after your conference is over. Making a survey to know the attendee’s opinion about your event, its contents and execution, is a straightforward action to obtaining information firsthand (but not the only one, see note below).

There is no “one best method” to make a survey and it depends mostly on the resources available and the type of audience you have, eg: If you’re at a BarCamp or web-related conference where most people might have a laptop and access to the internet, an online form will be the fastest way… but if you’re organizing a traditional event with older people, distributing a paper form with the questions will surely be the best choice.

For events, in general I suggest that you make multiple choice or yes/no questions & answers but also add space for text comments when necessary. People often want to tell you something more about their experience and this is a good moment to let them do so.

The following are some alternatives I have practiced in the past. I encourage you to share your own methods in the comments at the end of this article.

Paper survey

This might sound as “old school” -and indeed it is- but it’s still one of the most successful options in a traditional conference or when you don’t have a direct means of contact with all the delegates after the conference is over (eg: you don’t have their email addresses to send them an online survey). Be sure to format the the survey so that fits in one page, and preferably don’t print double face. Clearly state whom they have to give the survey to (to the stewards, etc) or where they have to leave it (at the info desk, on the chair, etc)  after they have completed it. Remember to instruct the stewards to collect them in one particular place and have someone from your team to be responsible for them. Distribute the survey well before the end of the event so that people that leave early can complete it too. Remind the attendees about the importance of completing the survey to give their opinion and help you improve future ones.

The biggest drawbacks I find with paper surveys are: 1) it’s not eco-friendly and you often end up throwing away many unused surveys and 2) you need to manually input all the results into a database for further analysis. The main advantages are that you obtain feedback while it is still “warm” and you don’t require extra technology to implement it, it is a rather universal solution. Most people will have a pen for filling in the questions or they might have been given one during the conference.

Email & Online surveys

Email/Online surveys are amongst the most effective systems nowadays because almost everyone has an email account (don’t give that for granted though, it depends on who’s your audience). The most important issues when using this method is to have a good timing on the delivery of the email (eg. if you send it at night it might get lost in the inbox under other emails arrived during the morning), a clear message and an attractive incentive for people to fulfill it.  Keep the email with the invitation to the survey short and concise, clearly stating how much time it will take. Remember that even if for you the cost of making an online survey might tend to zero, the time of the person answering has a value too, and for him/her it is much higher than whatever it costs to you to reach him/her.

Incentivize the answering by offering a prize such as a [limited number of] free tickets or a discount for your next event. Clearly state what the prize is, how many are you giving away, etc. If for example you’re rewarding 5 people with a free ticket, offer the rest a nice discount so that everyone is a winner in the end.

If you have a closed community gravitating around a website, you can decide to publish the survey on the homepage. Just be sure to activate the option that tracks the origin of the answers (usually based on the IP number) so that you don’t have multiple answers from the same person.

Create a url shortcut like yourdomain.com/survey09 so that people can input the address directly on the browser.

Read more tips ob Email surveys by Cvent.com here.

I have often used Survey Monkey. It is not perfect or fancy looking, but it does its job. The interface and graphic design options cold be much better or at least more “2.0″ but I guess it’s producing enough money as it is so they don’t see the point in upgrading.

Interactive “live” survey

This is one of my favorite methods for certain kinds of qualitative or “mood” surveys. It requires the interaction of the conference’s delegates with a physical object (like a voting totem) or person (voting aid) to produce the results. A good example of it was recently implemented with success by Mediamatic during PICNIC ’09 using their Mobile Polling Station. This method was based on the fact that every attendee to PICNIC ’09 had an ikTag based on RFID technology that was connected to their user profile on the PICNIC network. The mobile polling stations consisted of a very visible character (see photo) that carried around a voting system based on RFID readers that allowed the attendee to choose one answer by positioning their tag on top of it. The result was automatically transferred to the system and the statistics were updated live on the website. This method is particularly useful to map the “mood” of the people around a specific topic. As an example, some of the questions asked where:

• How do you feel today?
  • Possible answers: Overwhelmed; Bored; Like dancing; Horny and so on…
• Will you attend PICNIC ’09?
  • Possible answers: Yes, I loved it! ; No, but I cannot tell you that ; Maybe, only if it’s as good as this one

Mobile survey

The Mobile Survey -answering to a survey using your mobile phone- will be the killer app when it will finally become mainstream. You can make the survey instantly available by directing people to a url or sending it through a push notification. It could also be embedded in the mobile application of your event so that it automatically appears when you announce it. The Mobile Survey unites the benefits of all three methods explained above:

• Low cost, as email or online forms: the cost of developing the survey or buying a mobile survey system will drop in time.
• Ubiquitous and Instant: almost everyone carries a cell phone nowadays, and in the near future most of them will have internet access by default, as it happens in Japan or Korea. People are able to answer instantly.
• Results are automatically available: no manual input is required, opposite to what happens with paper forms.

Statistical significance and sample size

Making a valid survey is not only about using the right timing, most appropriate delivery method and asking good questions: you must respect some basic statistical principles to make the results of your survey valid from the quantitative point of view. While I don’t intend to describe the required knowledge of statistics here, there are two concepts you should bear in mind:

• Statistical relevance: “the amount of evidence required to accept that an event is unlikely to have arisen by chance”. Read more about Statistical significance on Wikipedia or on Surveysystem.com.
• Sample size: the amount of people you need to interview in order to obtain results that reflect the behavior of  the population being studied (with a given level of precision). This is a useful sample size calculator tool.

Note: Surveys are not the only way to find out what people think of your event. Search for comments and opinions on twitter, blogposts and other sources that talk about your event. Engage in a [positive] conversation with the authors and commentators, even if the they said negative things. Actually, engage into conversation ESPECIALLY if they had negative comments. As Jeff Jarvis says in his book “What will Google do?“, “Your worst customer is your best friend” (because he cares enough about your conference to talk about it).

The Extraordinary makes your event noticeable

It probably happens in many different jobs across various sectors and industries, but it is particularly dangerous in the world of conferences… as today more than ever they should aim to the extraordinary, not just good content and execution (read this previous article for more information on the basics components of a conference).

More often than not, the ordinary routine & bureaucracy drowns the extraordinary things we can deliver.

An event is full of ordinary things that must be made for it to exist, like the website, registration process, logistics, audio/video production, venue, etc. But it’s only the extraordinary things you create and put into action that make it remarkable, noticeable… desirable.

Note: The content of this article reflects the summary of many years of experience, mine and of friends and colleagues, and does not refer to any specific situation in my present or past jobs… so if we’ve worked together and you were my boss, don’t take it personal!

Today’s scenery is filled up by overlapping conferences and -not only in times of economic crisis- resources of attendees and sponsors are limited, so we must be sure that our event stands out before, during and after it takes place.

Don’t get me wrong, “ordinary” is required but not enough and there are lots of people and organizations making a good job in ordinary stuff but very few giving importance to the extraordinary features that make a difference in this business (and don’t believe everything that is written in the conference’s brochure and website).

We are emotional creatures. We [sometimes] want to make great things that fill up our existence. We have ideas -not always good ones- that we want to try and we have enthusiasm we want to spend at work. All of these can suddenly disappear, washed away by a bucked of cold water poured on our heads by our boss.

The importance of having a Chief Extraordinary Officer

It’s important to nail down the ordinary stuff, the basic structure, so that you can build the extraordinary on top of it. Someone inside the organization should be made responsible for the “extraordinary factor”… I call this person the CEO or Chief Extraordinary Officer. His main job is to help his colleagues to express their creativity at full potential and put it into action for the benefit of the event,  saving it from mediocre budget cuts or restricted visions from conservative bosses.

The Chief Extraordinary Officer shouldn’t necessary be the Chief Executive Officer of the company or the event director. Nonetheless, he should have REAL power to make extraordinary happen.

He should inspire and stimulate interaction between colleagues and the event’s community. He should concentrate on how to enhance the event’s experience by taping into his colleague’s ideas, feelings, strengths and desire to be different. Search through your employees for that one who is passionate about your event, with a special connection with everything that’s moving around it and the community of attendees. He must have a global view of what happens and what’s required. Must be a dreamer and at the same time pragmatic about how to have things done. A brave communicator towards the inside and outside of the organization.

It is easy to forget about the “extraordinary factor” during every day’s work. It happens to me often, until something brings me back to the things that matter. What’s important about remarkable conferences is that their differentiation does not rest only on one factor (e.g. a cool brochure or a nice venue), rather on the synergy of each component and it’s coherence with the message your event is willing to transmit.

TED conference Room (photo from The Extendance Blogs)

A typical mistake during many conferences is to barricade the speaker on the stage which creates an obstacle to the creation of a direct connection between the speaker and his audience. Any physical object that obstacles the line of sight between them is reducing the capacity of the presenter to communicate, specially his non-verbal language.

Barriers can be physical (desks, podiums, chairs, etc), environmental (insufficient illumination, room temperature, etc) or psychological (produced by elements that prevent a connection between speaker and audience). In this article I concentrate mainly on physical obstacles.

Physical barriers

If the stage is crowded with furniture like desks, podiums or chairs -in most cases- they will be used!

A desk, specially if big or massive, represents a clear separation between the speaker and the audience. Besides, if the guy on the stage is sitting down during his presentation, his body language is severely crippled, thus reducing his communication skills (it becomes a psychological obstacle). An exception should be considered when the speaker actively needs a desk for his presentation.

Edward De Bono at a Leaders in London Summit

For example Edward De Bono accompanies his speeches by drawing on translucent slides that are projected on the screens, so he needs the table to be able to draw.

Same thing applies to having chairs on stage. If the speaker sits down, his movement around and up&down the stage will be reduced.

An exception should be considered when the speaker has physical problems that prevent him from standing up on stage (because of his age, physical condition, etc) and when you have a discussion between 3 or more people. When 2 people are on stage simultaneously and they have to present together or discuss on an argument, I suggest to have them both standing up. It helps to create better dynamics between speakers. If you do have to have chairs, make them stylish and comfortable.

It might happen that when a speaker is too short he might prefer to sit down because in that way his height is less evident, so provide chair or desks if requested. He will feel more confident and his presentation will be surely better.

Lecterns or podiums are also a physical barrier, specially when they are positioned on one of the sides of the stage. From one part, the speaker will be near just to part of the audience. At the same time, he will be hiding most of his body behind it. A podium is useful for holding a computer that has to be manually operated during the speech (why not use a remote?) or some other stuff that the speaker will grab while he is speaking. If it will be used during all the presentation, then consider positioning it in the center of the stage. If it will serve only as an occasional support, then move it to one of the sides and have the speaker walk towards it when necessary (in this case it can be replaced by a table). Politicians are particularly fond of using podiums, specially because many times it has an attached screen that scrolls the text of the speech.

Most TED conferences have an empty stage, which facilitates communication and interaction.

Help the speaker walk through the audience

Tom Peters walking around the conference room (photo from Tony Jones publish in www.enquirer.com)

Add a central staircase to the stage and create big corridors between groups of spectators so that the speaker can come down and interact or just move around between people of the audience. Make sure that the wireless tools used by the speaker (microphone and eventually the remote controller used to manage multimedia presentations) have enough range and work ok even if the person is moving around the room. If there are limits to his mobility, clearly show the speaker the maximum reach. It sometimes helps to signal the limits of the wireless range by adding tape on the floor. Tom Peters is the kind of person that loves walking around the room while presenting.

A Gantt chart is a key tool for planning and tracking your conference. In its simplest form it works as a schedule management tool that allows to control the milestones and activities related to your conference by tracking the start/end dates and the people directly responsible for each activity.

If you have an engineering or technical background my advice on using a Gantt chart will seem banal but unfortunately in many projects I have seen in the past years, this basic planning tool has been missing. During the last week the Salone del Mobile (or Design Week) took place in Milan and hundreds of events and conferences have been organized all around the city. I have been involved in some of them, specially in the marketing area, and when I asked to see the work-plan of the project the most common answer was “it is all in my head”. It is easy to understand that the risk of having a plan inside someone’s head is that it cannot be shared with others immediately and the amount of complexity cannot be too much.

There are many specific tools for creating and managing a Gantt chart, the most famous being probably Microsoft Project, but for most cases this is an extremely sofisticated software and you can obtain good enough results using a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers or even Google Docs (more on how to use Google Docs’ spreadsheet as a collaborative tool in a further post).

How to createa Gantt chart for your conference using a spreadsheet (like Microsoft’s Excel):

1. Make a list all the main items involved (e.g.: Venue, Speakers, etc.) and milestones (e.g.: Project Kickoff, etc.)
2. Break down each item into the activities required to fulfill it (but keep the level of detail manageable)
3. If possible, order and number each item and subordinate activities in a logical sequence
4. On the horizontal axis of your spreadsheet add the calendar dates from the start to the end of the project
5. Add the start and end date to each activity by filling (with color or a mark) the cells representing these dates. This gives you a graphical representation of the duration of each activity. If you prefer you can add extra columns to specify the starting and ending dates
6. If you manage a group of people, add the name of the person responsible for each task

A sample of a Gantt chart

Once your Gantt chart is ready, make sure you check it out every day to keep control on which activities should be taking place, if they’re on schedule and take necessary decisions.

If you organize conferences frequently, do the extra effort of standarizing your Gantt so it can be easily reused by you or your colleagues.

Each time you update the chart, write down on it the date of the update so that you avoid confusion between different versions.

Share your Gantt chart with members of your team and your superiors. It is important that everyone involved in the project knows the status of his activity and the relationship with the whole entity. Your boss will be relieved to see that you have a methodical approach to the management of your conference and you will also be able to answer faster to his questions on the status of the project. Though it is best to consult the Gantt chart in its digital form (which should be perfectly updated) a printed version helps to see the big picture on how things are proceeding.

I will come back to the Gantt chart in further posts, so stay tuned through the RSS Feed

Here you will find further details and tools to create your Gannt chart:

• David Seah: Manual Gantt charting in Excel
• Excel Gantt chart template
• Create a Gantt chart in Excel

The Conference Basics Tribune is a free newsletter specifically made for event organizers -> It includes a selection of articles, tips, recommended mobile apps, books and featured event organizers. Want to see how the newsletter looks like? Here’s an example. Sing-up for the newsletter.

Any conference is composed by 3 main elements that make it bad, mediocre, good, excellent or memorable. The event manager mixes the right dose of each of them during strategic planning and operations to obtain the desired conference.

Very often a compromise must be reached to comply with limitations in budget, space, time, etc and it is important that the consequences of suppressing something are carefully evaluated: eg. the registration process of the attendees might be slow due to the lack of money to hire more stewards or rent extra hardware but if the content of the conference is outstanding or networking activities are powerful, a participant will forgive such a detail for the benefits he has gained.

These are the 3 elements that make a conference:

A: Basics (taken for granted)

All those indispensable components that constitute the main structure of a conference. The components of A are taken for granted and don’t generate satisfaction on the attendee but a lack of effectiveness or quality in any of them produce dissatisfaction and complaints.

Examples:

• Registration process (length and duration of cueing, easyness of the process, etc)
• Conference room (size, light, temperature, etc)
• Audio / Video (quality, visibility, volume, etc)
• Catering (quality, amount, distribution, etc)
• Support material (workbook, congress bag, pen, etc)
• Basic networking moments or areas (coffee breaks, etc)
• Customer service and information (before, during and after the event)
• Toilets (availability, hygienic conditions, etc)

B: Special effects (make the difference)

These are the ones that transform a conference into a memorable event, one worth promoting between friends/colleagues, that justifies the extra price payed, guarantee the participation next year or make forgive some of the imperfections in the basics. A wise conference planner will spend his creativity and some extra money here.

Examples:

• Innovative solutions that avoid typical conference annoyances (like receiving the event access pass on the mobile phone)
• Advanced communications (free internet wi-fi, live online coverage, etc)
• Special treatment (make me feel like a VIP even though I’m a regular)
• Advanced networking (think of choosing who you’d like meet before attending the event or proximity tools that help people find each other during the conference)
• Catering (extra quality, variety and presentation, etc)
• Exclusiveness (think of TED conferences)
• Recreation (live performers during idle time, etc)
• Style (trendy details recognizable by attendees like a stylish though simple conference bag that you are willing to reuse after the event)

C: Content (no content? no party!)

Content is king! Even having the indispensable elements right and all the special effects of a Hollywood movie won’t save a conference if there is no real/useful content involved… This might not be completely true when networking is the main activity, but in that case it must be considered as part of the content.

Examples:

• It is better to have few but outstanding speakers than a whole bunch of mediocre ones
• The contents of the event are original, a novelty or presented in an innovative way
• You take part in the creation of contents that has the potential to have a strong impact in your environment (like a G20 international summit)

Start your planning from C, get A right and deploy some B to make your event not just good but remarkable! (according to Seth Godin, remarkable things and actions make ideas spread)

In further posts I will list and analyze the components of A, B and C in further detail. Stay tuned through the RSS feed.