“For the starter, pork rinds hung on strings from balloons,” says Mette Fisker.
The event was about something completely different than food, but the gimmick made an impression and will be remembered for years to come.
WOW effect is one powerful ingredient for a great event, but you have many more spices on the shelf to choose from.
I interviewed Mette Fisker, owner of ConferenceCare, which organizes events for everyone from the UN to Salesforce to ministries.
Here’s our conversation boiled down to five tips on getting attendees to show up, making it a great event, and how to get the most out of organizing the event.
1: Set a goal – and measure it
Ask yourself the question:
“What do I want to achieve?”
A little more concrete:
1: What are the success criteria?
and
2: What should participants say afterwards?
Then you can set a SMART goal on the two. Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, Time Related. More about SMART on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria
Once your purpose is clear, you create the event around it and set up a measurement:
1) “80% must be able to reproduce our goals and strategies for next year.”
2) “80% must answer yes to having spoken to someone they didn’t already know.”
This can be measured with a questionnaire, and you can build the content of the event around people being engaged – and knowing that they will be asked afterwards.
If the goal of your event is to sell your product, calculate the contact price in relation to the budget and compare the costs to the expected sales:
Calculate what one participant is worth: $200? 600 DKK? 10,000 DKK? Just as if it were a Google Adwords campaign.
Now you know why you’re hosting an event, how to assess whether it’s been a success, and how to budget wisely.
Better a small, packed room than a large, half-empty venue.
2: Press coverage: Is your event PR-ready?
Many people come to Kemp & Kjær asking if we can create some press coverage at their event.
We can do that.
If the event has press potential.
Press potential is when there is something that a journalist wants to tell readers. Something topical, significant, identifiable, sensational and of consequence – something that matters to someone.
A speaker giving a presentation is interesting if the speaker is well known and/or talks about something new and groundbreaking. That’s why the press comes to Bjarne Riis’ doping admission, but it’s harder to get press coverage on a launch of a new feature for a B2B cloud service.
The launch can be interesting for industry media, especially if you combine the launch with an industry expert and the opportunity to meet other industry pings. The attendees at the event can be interesting for journalists who want to meet them. But be aware that they may only write about the celebrities if the event isn’t interesting enough – or the connection between them and the event isn’t obvious.
Many events have professional content with external speakers, which is great branding for the company. But for journalists to write about it, there needs to be a launch of new, groundbreaking knowledge: If you can already find the content online, it’s rarely enough to have a researcher speaking.
The event can also be so spectacular in form that it attracts journalists:
If you want to jump out of an airplane (without a parachute?) or blow up a building – the images can be so good that TV stations will come – without the celebrity effect.
Tip 3: Activate participants – that’s what people want
Mette Fisker’s best “cheap” trick to engage participants:
“Allow people to introduce themselves at the tables or to the person next to them. It creates energy: it forces people to think and focus. It’s liberating, and participants put parking hassles and institutional snoozes out of their minds.”
“You can help people on their way by telling them to greet each other and talk two by two about a topic for two minutes.
It creates energy in a very short time.
Then you can see that people go to break together and hang out together. Bonds are formed,” says Mette Fisker.
Another easy way to promote the networking effect is to ask people to change seats three times during the event.
“If you do a measurement after the event, say so at the start, so people know that they are being measured on meeting new people or how much they remember from the presentations. Then the participants will be more aware of being involved,” says Mette Fisker and continues:
“I believe that in the future people will want to talk to each other. It challenges those of us who organize events, because there has to be time to talk to each other. You have to think about it in your event during the program. Speakers are competing with YouTube, where people can often find the content beforehand.”
4: Create a WOW effect
What makes us say “WOW”?
The unexpected and sudden.
But how hard is it to surprise your audience?
Mette Fisker participated in the VL Day at the Opera a couple of years ago:
“At one of the entrance doors, smiling, pretty women stood and greeted us. At the other door there were men. The majority of the participants were men.
At one point the emcee asked: “How many people went through that one door?” It turned out that most people had chosen the door with the women.
Throughout the day, measurements were also published of people’s behavior at the buffet, among other things.
Participants were nudged into different types of behavior and were immediately presented with measurements of how the nudging affected their behavior.
It was truly a WOW experience,” says Mette Fisker.
WOW makes people remember the event, gets their brain going, wakes them up. Everyone has a good experience and people have something to talk to each other about, so the networking element works better.
5: Marketing: You’re in tough competition
When you’re trying to get people to come to your event, it can be tempting to think about PR, but in most cases, journalists will be more interested in covering the event itself – not promoting it up front.
In business events, you need to invest in marketing your event. Time – and probably money too.
Create hype about the event by sharing related content on social media – where your event audience is located. Write regular newsletters that tell you what’s happening and gradually reveal the program.
People come if they can see a personal benefit, especially if they can meet interesting people. To legitimize the time commitment to the workplace, there must be relevant professional content that benefits the job.
“We are more emotionally affected than we realize,” says Mette Fisker, and continues:
“The material – invitations, website and everything else – has to be sleek and beautiful. If it’s not professional, it gets deleted because it’s competing with everything else in people’s inboxes and social feeds.”
“You compete with many other events, with time at work and with family time,” Mette Fisker emphasizes.
It’s a beauty contest, and it’s all about winning.
So put on the right makeup, tighten your bow tie and get into the race for attention.
Bonus advice: Minimize dropouts
#1: If you’re doing a short event, hold it in the morning. In the afternoon, you’ll experience a lot of drop-outs as people will be busy with other things and have to do something – and they’ll opt out of your event at the last minute. In the morning, nothing gets in the way (apart from institutional snoozing – but that happens in the afternoon too!)
#2: Make sure people commit to coming if it’s a free event. Good tools are for example:
- “No show” fee.
- Create a public attendee list.
- Make people aware of their personal role and who they will be doing something with as a participant.
In short: Make it difficult and/or embarrassing/expensive to stay away.
Have fun with your event!
