August 19, 2005
It’s All About the Opening Session
Posted by Kevin | Print This Article
David asked in a comment to the last post how an organization can expect to keep “hitting it out of the park.” All I can do is give my opinion based on our experiences over the last several years. I expect those who read this blog regularly who know a lot more about meetings — Rich and Sue, this includes you — to point out where I’m wrong.
It starts with understanding what the most important thing about a conference is:
– Well-presented workshops with interesting topics are important — but not the most important.
– “High touch” and immersion are important — taking the show’s idea or theme and filling the hotel/center with it from smallest detail to big — is important, but not the most important.
– Customer service; making things easy to understand; high hospitality are important — but not the most important.
– A trade show — well, one can argue that tradeshows are important to organizers, and important to exhibitors. but not necessarily all that important to conference attendees. (Edit: I’m not saying that tradeshows are unimportant. Just that most people who attend conferences are attending for the conference, not the tradeshow. The better the conference, the better the tradeshow.)
The most important thing about a conference is the general sessions. Why? Because they are shared experiences. Most of the people who go to a conference go to the general sessions (as opposed to concurrent workshop sessions). That means everyone is talking to each other about the general sessions. They’re talking about it to people they know. And they’re talking about it to people they just met (because it’s one thing they know they have in common right away).
This means positive impressions are reinforcing positive impressions, and negative impressions are getting reinforced as well. If most people leave with a pretty good impression of a general session, over the next day or so their impression will actually improve — they’ll think it wasn’t pretty good, it was great. And if most people leave with a pretty mediocre impression of a general session, over the next day or so their opinion will get worse — they’ll think it was the worst piece of crap they ever had to sit through.
But … the most important general session is the opening session. The opening session sets the tone of the entire event. The rest of the conference and its success depends absolutely on the impact of the opening session.
And you know what? The most important part of an opening general session is the first ten minutes. You have a limited amount of time to “wow” your audience and grab them. But once you do it, you have them. They will forgive a lot of things after that. We do it with a combination of spectacular video and multimedia presentations, and what I call the “rock star” feel — each year we come up with a stage set that’s more interesting and spectacular than the one before, a more dynamic light show than the year before, a computer graphic-driven video presentation that builds up to an even more dramatic and memorable “punch” than the one before. (A couple years ago we actually “blew up” the ACCA logo during our opening and I was seized with fear wondering how I could top it — people still talk to me about the exploding logo — but we were able to come up with something memorable and exciting just the same.)
In a comment on the ASAE blog, Gregg Balko praised ASAE for recognizing that an association’s “annual meeting is similar to a corporate sales meeting - it is all about getting the audience excited. It is a show.” Absolutely. And part of the first ten minutes ties into that statement in that your goal should be to make the people in the audience feel, not just energized or motivated or ready to learn — but special.
– They should somehow be “told” (using visual means preferably) that they are special just for being part of their industry or profession. But more importantly,
– They should somehow be “told” that they are in fact more special than those in their industry or profession who are NOT in the room.
You want them to spend the rest of the conference feeling as if they are not only individually important but also share a strong and common bond with everyone else at the meeting.
And finally — you can’t have a successful first ten minutes of an opening session unless you have a spectacular walk-in. The walk-in sets the mood and determines how attendees will react to your opening. I actually spend more time planning the walk-in experience than just about anything else — our set, our lighting, the designs around the hall, are all designed based on really one thing: how they are going to look when the doors open. But this post has already gone on way too long so I’ll continue it later and come back talk about the five or six silly things I absolutely insist on during walk-in.
Kevin,
If your general session is Malcolm Gladwell and folks of that sort, I agree, sort of. I don’t know if I’d rank it above learning/networking, but having a “big thinker” type lead things off certainly provides some excitement and is worth the extra effort to do the walk-in extravaganza.
But if your general session features some standard motivational type (e.g. mountain climber, astronaut, TV talk show host) or an event sponsor (notable exceptions: Gates, Ellison, et.al.) then I disagree with you.
I may be the odd duck here, but when I used to attend MPI & PCMA, I was often resentful of how much they spent on opening sessions that didn’t teach me a damned thing or even get my brain working. It all seemed self-serving and to an extent, condescending.
I want to be inspired, engaged and challenged and I think most others do too. If you don’t have a opening speaker who can do that, I’ll be in the lobby making calls and checking email. Doesn’t matter what your first 10 minutes are like.
That’s just my opinion. I’m sure there are chapter leaders who will disagree along with folks who love their association no matter what. That’s not me. You have to buy my attention every single year. Take me for granted, I’ll spend my money elsewhere.
Rich,
That’s what’s most people think. They’re wrong. Oh, the opening speaker has to be right-on, no question … and you need to cut out all of the administrative stuff so many associations stick in the opening (two speakers plus the keynote, max, and don’t bore me with other people’s awards or a bunch of internal association navel-gazing crap).. but a right-on speaker won’t save a piss-poor organization or lack of spectacle.
ASAE’s opening session speaker this year was Judy Woodruff. She sucked. Not a bad speaker but nothing interesting to say and completely irrelevant. They had a 15 or 20-minute dance troupe in the middle of it … talk about irrelevant, strangely homoerotic, and waaay too long. There was a country band singing parodies right after the opening video. They sang three, that was two too many, and only one of them was objectively funny (as in, not just mildly namusing because they replaced regular lyrics with lyrics about non-profits).
And yet while I can rip apart the session piece by piece, overall it was great. Why? Because they nailed the spectacle with the opening. The opening video was fast-moving and well-done. The country band, whatever else you might think of it, was so out there that it grabbed you and knocked you over the head. By the time the speakers started getting up, ASAE had us.
If they’d had the same workshops, same hospitality, same parties, same gifts, same expo, same location as this year — but had the general sessions they had in, say, Denver, this conference would have sucked. (That one opened with some bizarre video of rolling oceans, new age music, and some narrator quietly saying, “Since the dawn of time, man has searched for … community …” I’ve never been so bored in my life. It’s been a joke around our office ever since.)
(And as far as overall speakers go, Kotler was a bore — and an old-school bore at that — and Gladwell was interesting but if you read his book, you know what he said.)
We all like to think we’re not easily fooled by the spectacle of entertainment or groupthink. Most of us are wrong. But even if we’re not, we’re in the minority.
Kevin, if you and Gregg Balko are correct about annual meetings, then I’m going to have to stop attending them. I put myself firmly in Rich’s camp: the obscene amount of money that associations and their sponsors invest in general sessions is simply profligate. I do not attend to those meetings to be entertained or, worse still, “infotained” or “edutained.” I come to learn something and, at ASAE & the Center’s meeting, I got that from listening to Judy Woodruff, Professor Kotler and panel and Malcolm Gladwell. As far as I’m concerned, you could have thrown out the rest of the general session extravaganza and used those dollars in more productive and interesting ways.
On its face, there is nothing wrong with the “the spectacle of entertainment,” but there is a real downside. As the appetite for spectacle for its own sake grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to satisfy it. My fear is that the resource, time and attention investment in general session production will grow as associations try to up the ante each year to try to get their members’ attention. When that occurs, what will happen to the quality of the rest of the meeting, the part that employers are actually paying for in the hope their employees will learn something?
I think we’re getting hung up on the “stuff,” not the substance of what Kevin is talking about. Like the quote from Jim Gilmore on the ASAE blog:
“‘The Set’ or place is not the experience. Experience occurs inside of a person.â€Â
That’s what those first 10 minutes need to get to: This is where you’re going to learn, meet people who can help you and who you can help, and all that good stuff that hopefully will actually happen during the meat of the meeting. Those first 10 minutes need to set the expectation for the experience–better yet, give them an initial taste of what that experience would be. Make ‘em feel it in their gut just how special the meeting–and they–really are.
How you get there depends on your audience, of course, but I think that’s where so many associations fall flat: They depend on a “name” or a band or a dance troupe or whatever to create that expectation, when all they do is entertain. What does that first 10 minutes have to do with the rest of the meeting? Is it creating passion for learning among the audience? Are they getting “experienced?” If not, it’s just bells and whistles.
There’s an old saying in journalism: Show, don’t tell. But all too many opening sessions are just blah, blah, blah, and don’t make people feel why this is where they need and want to be. Use all the senses, involve the audience, make it their show from the very start, and that first 10 minutes will do what Kevin says. As Rich says, “I want to be inspired, engaged and challenged and I think most others do too.” The key word, which so many associations forget, is “engaged.”