Tag Archives: engaging

June 29, 2011

Meeting Design: It’s all about the experience, not the info.

By Peter Straube

“If it takes a lot of words to say what you have in mind,
give it some more thought.”      – Dennis Roch 

Lately I’ve been writing about something I call Events 2.0, which is a nod to the term Web 2.0.  By that I mean events that go beyond just a passive TV-style experience and build in not only audience participation, but also make it possible for every participant to contribute to the experience and, ultimately, the value everyone takes with them when they leave.  That can take a lot of forms, depending on the type of event.  But if we’re talking about meetings or conferences, here are two fundamental principles for improving the impact of any meeting: 

1)  Minimize The Presentation Time. Get on, get to the point, and get off!
2)  Ramp Up The Interactive Time.  Spend at least half of the time facilitating interaction among participants, rather than just telling them stuff.

If a one-way information dump is needed, that can be accomplished a lot more efficiently through other means besides meetings.  Send out an e-newsletter.  Record a YouTube video. Distribute an old-fashioned memo.  Include background info in the event program.  Get yourself a bullhorn.  Those are all effective and reliable ways to distribute information to lots of people.


The whole point of bringing people together is to give them the opportunity to experience something that wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t shared with others, in the physical (or online) environment you’ve created for them.  And ideally, that will include interactions between the participants, whether it’s just swapping ideas, collaborating on a project or sharing a group physical activity–or even better, all three.  It doesn’t matter what scale of meeting we’re talking about: 6 people around a boardroom table or 3,000 people in a general session at the convention center. Same rules apply.

I get some pushback on this when I’m in a position to determine how much time a presenter will be given to show their stuff.  It might be a professional who is used to doing 45-minute stand-ups and I’m asking them to limit their presentation to 10 minutes.  Their first reaction is that they couldn’t possibly cover their topic with any depth; they would only be able to give it “lip service”.  (I’ve learned that lip service, if done well, can actually be pretty powerful.)   I see the same thing with groups of my students preparing presentations of their semester projects and, when I tell the four of them that they will have 12 minutes to present, they sometimes protest with, “We can’t possibly present our whole project in that much time!”   And you know what?  They’re right.  But there’s always enough time to present what’s most important.

The hard part?  Figuring out what the most important points are and finding a way to get them across in a compelling manner.  You might only be able to impress 1 or 2 or maybe 3 significant takeaways on your audience.  But that’s okay…as long as those few lessons will be lasting and useful.  If they only remember, accomplish, or learn how to do one thing when your time together is over, what do you want it to be?  If you’re not clear on that, you’re probably not designing the experience for maximum impact and ROI, or Return On Involvement. 

Of course, there are a lot of people working or experimenting with creative approaches to these challenges, and some of them have actually been doing it for a long time.  Next time out, I’ll give you a great list of examples of event techniques that are getting better and better at this.  In the meantime, make sure you’re getting right  to the point!  Your attendees—or better yet, “participants”—will thank you for it.  (And they’ll also get a lot more out of it.)

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June 12, 2011

Events 2.0: The 4 Secrets of Fully Engaging Your Attendees

By Peter Straube

Yes–I’m going to share some secrets with you!  So remember, this is all just between me and you and your colleagues, Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, Facebook friends/fans, kids, neighbors and anyone else you feel like chatting up.  Of course then it won’t be much of a secret, but that’s okay with me.  The more, the merrier!

But let’s start with a question: What is it that makes great live events better than just getting the same content some other way?  Think of some examples–like the difference between a truly memorable dining experience and the thought of just having the meal delivered to your home or hotel room. Or watching a DVD of a music festival compared to actually being in the middle of it all.  Or reading the minutes of a business meeting vs. participating in it.  How about watching a well-produced YouTube video of a keynote speaker instead of being there?  (Hmm…I bet that last one was not so obvious. But you get my point.) Why do I suggest that the last example is the weakest?  Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of dynamic and inspiring keynote speakers out there.  But the question is: what do you really get out of the experience of attending an event that can’t be substituted with some kind of copy? 

For some reason, this reminds me of that term “Web 2.0”.  Now, for those of you who haven’t been indoctrinated to this terminology yet, Web 2.0 refers to the second “version” of what we call the Internet.  If you’re old enough to remember as far back as the Clinton presidency (yes, that includes you, Millenials), Web 1.0 was pretty much a new form of one-way information distribution.  When you visited someone’s webpage, you could read whatever information they had prepared for you, sort of like an online brochure.  Heck—they even had photos and stuff.  But it was pretty much a static experience; you viewed it and moved on.  There is still tons of Web 1.0 content out there, and it’s not likely to go away. It’s flexible, convenient and it definitely serves a purpose.

Not too many years later, Web 2.0 took things to a different level: now, instead of being limited to whatever the webmaster of each site puts on display for you, much of what you see on the Internet is “user-generated” content—and the “users” are us.  Pretty big paradigm shift, actually.  Easiest example?  Facebook. Think about how much of what you see on Facebook has been created by Mark Zuckerberg and the massive staff down at FB Headquarters.  Other than the ads on the sidebar, the correct answer is “very little”.  It’s just a shell created in order to allow people to share their knowledge and creative ideas.  By definition, every social media tool does pretty much the same thing.

So what is Events 2.0?  Same idea, basically.  Any time you go to an event and just sit there and take it in, you’re in Event 1.0 mode. Nothing wrong with that necessarily; you can still enjoy and maybe learn a few things from it.  But take it up to V2.0 and now the participants are not only involved, they’re actually contributing much of the content.  And that’s engaging—just as much as going to that amazing restaurant or contributing your ideas and solutions at a business conference.  But like Facebook, someone has to design the structure of the event so that it will get people engaged in the first place. And that’s where the secrets come in!

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a sponsor trying to build relationships with your target clientele, or a corporate trainer bent on raising the skill level of your employees, or an activist trying to inspire people to your cause.  To fully-engage your audience, you’ll need to build these four components into the experience you provide:
   

  1. THE HOOK. To get people engaged, first you need something that initially attracts their attention and draws them in.  This doesn’t just distract them; it also gets them into a receptive state by shifting their attention, so they can leave behind whatever else they were focused on before.  A slightly goofy (but effective) version of this: Flash Mobs.  Take a look at the example below and see what I mean. Notice how the “attendees” respond towards the end.
     
  2. CONTENT RULES!  Of course, you need to present something that’s relevant or otherwise fascinating to this particular audience; otherwise, their attention will quickly move on.  Ideally you’ll have something that answers a question, need or opportunity they have or–even better–introduces them to one they didn’t know they had.  In any case, none of these secrets apply if you don’t have something that will be of significant value to your audience.  So plan on spending a big chunk of your time on this one. Otherwise, none of this matters.
     
  3. DESIGN FOR INTERACTION.  This is really the Events 2.0 part. Getting someone’s attention and delivering fresh content is just getting started: you also want to create an experience where everyone needs to participate on some level, whether it’s physically, intellectually, emotionally, or all three.  That’s the main thing that interactive events can provide that can’t be substituted by one-way communication.  Put people in a situation they’ve never been in before.  Provide the opportunity to experience and respond to something new and learn from not only the “expert” presenters, but from each other. This is the power of bringing people together. In the end, engaging experiences usually leave us changed in some way, but it doesn’t happen by itself–you need to create the context.  And remember that in many cases, your presenters will not have the skills and experience to create this, so you may have to help (or get help). 
     
  4. CLOSE THE DEAL.  Here’s the Big Finish: it’s not enough to get people thinking.  In order to convert the event experience into useful take-aways, it’s critical to build in time for participants to individually process, reflect on and plan how they might use these new ideas and experiences.  This is the real work, but it’s the part that will lead to concrete results.  People need some time to think on their own, but it can help to provide the opportunity for discussion, collaboration or even hands-on group activity. We know enough about how our brains function to expect that, without this step, most of what we’ve encountered during the event will dissipate fairly quickly.  This is also the time for committing people to action, to ensure that the event has a lasting impact.

If any of these steps is missing from the design of your experience, you’re probably stuck back in the time of Events 1.0.  And I would bet that your event is not getting the impact it could, or should. 

In future posts, I’ll be expanding and providing specific examples of how people are really applying these principles to take their events up a notch and you’ll have the opportunity to share your own stories and secrets.  For now, feel free to leave a comment about anything that this post brought to mind!

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May 3, 2011

“Are we making any difference?” Engaging Events Series, Episode 2

By Peter Straube

What can an event planner learn from a couple of physics professors? 

In his book What the best college teachers do,  Ken Bain tells the story of two physics professors at Arizona State University who wanted to find out if all of the time and effort they put into planning and delivering their courses was really making any difference in the way their students thought about things.  So they set up a very simple experiment: they would choose one fundamental physics concept and measure whether their physics course made a significant impact.  They decided to focus on the principles of “motion” and their students’ understanding of how motion actually works.  They pre-tested their students, did their normal 15-week semester gig and then re-tested everyone at the end.  And guess what? They found that, despite all of the time and effort expended by all, when it was all over their students thought about motion pretty much the same way as they did before they took the course. 

As a professional trainer and college professor myself, that story scared me half to death.  If you’re in the business of planning events, you should be, too.  Because it suggests that much–maybe even most–of the event experiences we create (and a classroom is definitely an event) may not be making much of a lasting impact and, if that’s the case, then we’re wasting a whole lot more of our time than we are aware of–not to mention forfeiting tremendous opportunities to make a meaningful difference in people’s lives while we have them gathered together. 

What can we do to help ensure we’re having an impact? Well, it appears that one key element of effective event experience design is a variation on the “less is more” rule: make sure you’re focusing on just a very few critical points or objectives—or maybe even just one.    Of course, this requires some consideration of what your most important outcomes are.  What do you want to be different once the event has concluded?  Which goals are must-haves, and which are just nice-to-haves?

Now back to that physics class: one lesson learned, according to Ken Bain, is that it’s better to focus on just two or three main concepts or competencies and hammer the hell out of them, and not worry so much about covering everything in detail.  Often the mistake we make is to try to cover too many bases at once, because we’re afraid of leaving out something important.   In the case of a college course, this can take the shape of trying to get to the end of the textbook before the semester is over, even if it means that we don’t fully lock in the most important ideas or skills along the way.  There’s nothing wrong with accomplishing multiple objectives at the same time, but not if it means failing to nail the most important ones.

We live in a world where it feels like there is never enough time to do what we need to do.  But remember that old time management adage: “there’s always enough time for the things that are most important.”  The next time you’re planning an event program or experience, don’t worry too much about doing as many things as you can with the time you’re allowed.  Instead, start by making sure you get the most important outcomes really right.  Because in the end, that’s what will make it worth the time and money you’re investing!

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