When putting together a conference meeting the hardest part is to put together is a meeting that is engaging and meets your expected objective.
The key to a conference meeting is engaging your guests from the beginning; if your guests are not engaged from the start it will be more difficult to reach your expected objective.
Here are a few things to take into consideration:
1. Review the agenda with your attendees and get their feedback before you post the agenda for the conference. In this day and age use social media (Twitter, Facebook and text message) to communicate with your attendees.
2. Start the conference with information that is relevant to your attendees, starting with information that has nothing to do with the conference will ensure that your attendees won’t be engaged.
3. Disperse the information in smaller sound bites rather than having your speakers speak for a long period of time. This will allow your attendees to receive the information, absorb and use the information during later discussions.
4. Make sure the content you are providing is focused and of high quality; providing a lot of information doesn’t mean it is valuable to your attendees.
5. Allow your attendees to use their own experiences when trying to solve an issue. If your attendees are using their own experiences it will be closer to their reality than studying a case study.
6. Either minimize or don’t use PowerPoint, the use of PowerPoint has become such big part of providing information in a presentation form but often way too much text is used and it causes your attendees to read ahead and lose focus on the presentation.
7. Ensure that you have built time into your agenda for discussion and questions from your attendees
8. Make sure that your provide time for breaks; make sure they are long enough for your attendees to respond to text messages, emails and voicemails. Without these breaks your attendees will become distracted.
9. Avoid setting the room in a classroom setup, use round tables and break the attendees into groups. It will allow for easier discussion.
Until Next Time
Amalia Ward
Talen Events your vision, your experience