Archive for August, 2005
August 19, 2005
By the Way …
Posted by Kevin | (3) Comments | Print This Article
ASAE, I love ya, but I think you should know that you’re never, ever, ever going to be called “ASAE & The Center” by anyone who isn’t on your paid staff. It’s just never going to happen.
August 19, 2005
It’s All About the Opening Session
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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.
August 17, 2005
The Power of a Meeting
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As I wrote this morning in the ASAE conference blog, they really pulled it off, creating an experience (to use a buzzword I’m already growing tired of) that worked on the two levels it needed to work:
1) Creating an impact on the people who were there, and
2) Making that impact so hard that it created “buzz” like shockwaves that will emanate from the center of the meeting to the rest of the association community
Oddly enough, that second level is really the priority level we should be aiming to hit as associations. ASAE’s annual meeting is like most (including mine) — only a small minority of the organization’s members attend. Yet we can never underestimate the power of a buzzworthy conference to effect profound change on an association’s performance and “brand.”
It happened at ACCA — the first meeting under our CEO came both after a wrenching and politically touchy restructuring that followed years of declining membership, AND just a few months after 9/11. Paul understands the fundamental importance of conferences as symbol as well as education, and though we expected attendance to be down following the terrorist attacks, he forced us to pull out all the stops, create new programming and production that our members had never seen before, and produced a conference that didn’t just “wow” the people that were there but sent a huge message to our industry nationwide.
That meeting was the real turning point of the organization’s fortunes, and since then, not only has our meeting attendance continued to grow, but our membership has grown. Is it all because of the annual conference? Of course not. But without that symbol looming so large — without the buzz we get every year and all year long — it would have been a lot harder to make the changes we’ve made.
Many association meetings fall into a routine — ASAE’s had prior to this year — of a solid and competent educational program, the same “networking” social functions, the litany of officer speeches and awards. They’re well-organized, professional, useful and enjoyable to those who attend.
That’s nice. That hits level 1. But it doesn’t create buzz, and it doesn’t hit level 2. Level 2 is a lot harder to hit — and it gets harder every year.
August 15, 2005
Get Over Yourself
Posted by Kevin | (1) Comments | Print This Article
The anonymous blogger who posts at Corner Office has gotten her posts down to a fairly predictable rhythm. She’s either whining incessantly or taking potshots while avoiding responsibility for her comments by being afraid to list her name and affiliation.
It’s not that I have any particular problems with the opinions she expresses (although I could do without the whining … yeah, travel’s a bitch, meetings take their toll, get over it).
In fact, I’d like to care about her opinions. I really would. But I don’t.
I enjoyed watching Tom Kuhn ride in on a motorcycle — we did the same thing at our conference a few years ago. It’s a brief minute of fun in a general session. I thought the dance troupe, however, was overlong (not to mention irrelevant), and that’s what I said about it in a post right here on my blog.
My blog — where my name is listed, as is the name of the organization I work for, and even my email address. Disagree with me about the dancers or anything else? Great! Hit comments and let your opinions fly. Say, “Kevin, I disagree with you because …” Or see me in the hallway and grab me and tell me you think I’m all wet.
You can do that because my opinions are my own, and I take responsibility for them. The Mystery Blogger, though, she doesn’t have to take any responsibility for them. She can just say whatever she wants.
Of course, because I don’t know who she is, I also feel free to flame her like this in more stark terms than I ever would someone who actually exists as a real “person” and not just someone hiding behind a TypePad interface.
For example, I can say things like, “Gee, doesn’t the way she dismisses something as innocuous as a motorcycle in a general session make it seem like her meetings must be as boring as the posts she writes about them?”
Anonymous blogging. For those associations considering entering the blogosphere, it’s not the way to go.
August 15, 2005
How Weird Is It …
Posted by Kevin | (1) Comments | Print This Article
… that as association executives huddle and worry that for-profits are “eating their lunch,” Rich Westerfield of Trade Show Marketing Report frets that those association executives might have more interesting things to say than for-profit show promoters?
August 14, 2005
Grand Opening
Posted by Kevin | (0) Comments | Print This Article
I love to watch and learn from opening session productions at various conventions because one of my hats at ACCA is managing the productions at our annual conference. ASAE seems to have learned its lesson from past sessions and greatly improved this time around — there was no endless parade of various officers making remarks. The opening video was pretty good, and they made good use of multimedia. They had a dance troupe in the middle of it that displayed some pretty amazing feats and was really fun to watch for about ten minutes (but it went on for about twenty). And they limited the number of speakers to just the chairman, CEO, and the keynote — perfect.
Judy Woodruff spoke well and, toward the end of her remarks, gave a good “journalistic” perspective on the next round of elections (god, already?). Unfortunately, up to that point her speech contained a decided leftward tilt. I have no problem with that, but find it unusual that nowhere else on the agenda is a speaker who will counterbalance it with a more rightward tilt. There’s nothing wrong with bringing in speakers who have an opinion, obviously, but when it comes to politics, an association leaves itself open to criticism if it does not recognize the spectrum of opinion within its ranks.