So she’s wondering: “Where did my audience go? We are getting satisfactory evaluations. When we ask the attendees what [they] think of our confer- ences, the response is, ‘It was good; it was nice.’”
So why is she losing attendees? Because other conferences have apparently siphoned her participants off. There’s some solid customer-service research out of Harvard point- ing out that 75 percent of people who leave a business (or conference) never to return again were “satisfied.” They weren’t mad. They weren’t disappointed. They just weren’t engaged. And some other conference producer dangled another conference and they jumped ship.
So what’s the solution? The only solution to this situation is to innovate. To change the way she and her team of confer- ence producers think about creating value in an increasingly competitive space. Satisfactory evalu- ations are not giving her insights into her attrition problem. So she needs to get closer to her popula- tion’s unarticulated needs and expectations, and develop new metrics of attendee ROI and engage- ment. This was a big topic at the retreat.
Okay, let’s say a conference planner’s key conference is losing steam. What should he or she do? One option would be to just copy the TED format. After all, TED conferences are hotter than hot right now, and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But from a practical standpoint, what they do a poor job of is [providing] the latest tools, strategies, and insights that busy professionals can actually apply to their work once the conference is over. In other words, they don’t really “take on the custom- er’s problem” in any significant way, because that would require knowing the audience’s pain points. It would require the conference producer recruit- ing speakers who could address those needs. So what I’m saying is, build on your strengths. Don’t try to mimic someone else’s model.
What did the Elite Retreat’s participants want to spend the most time discussing? We spent the most time wrestling with the issue of how you innovate to create a more powerful expe- rience overall, and a more compelling educational experience in particular. In this over-communi- cated world, how do you gain people’s attention
106 PCMA CONVENE DECEMBER 2012
‘In this over- communicated world, how do you gain people’s attention and inspire their future loyalty?’
and inspire their future loyalty? The overarching response to these issues is the need to begin with the end in mind. There is a compelling need for conference producers to redefine their role and see themselves not solely as meeting planners, but as orchestrators, or architects, of conferences. The planner role is so linear, left-brain, so reductionist. If you define yourself as a meeting planner only, then it’s all about execution, checking things off your to-do list.
But what if that’s your title and what’s expected of you? Even if that’s part of your job description, what the Elite Retreat really brought out was that if you are in the meetings role in your organization, you can empower yourself to enlarge your scope and view yourself in a larger context. If you begin to see yourself as conference architect, then innovative thinking is central to everything you do. And every decision you make. You’re really an artist, and you’re creating more compelling experiences. The conference industry is the experience
economy and the social-networking economy per- sonified. People come to meetings from different ages, stages, places, and hopes, most of which are hidden from us. So conference orchestrators need to meet a very diverse set of needs, especially the nonlinear, human component. We were fortunate to have the seven-time Emmy-winning composer Gary Malkin join our discussion [at the retreat]. Gary was kind enough to not only perform for us on opening night, but talk to us about music’s role in creating what he calls “multisensory” experi- ences, as he did for [TED curator] Chris Anderson, at a recent TED conference in Beijing. Gary’s lifework is about the dire need to rejoin heart and head, logic and intuition.
You say that everyone who has taken a shower has had an idea, but the innovator is someone who dries off and goes on to implement the idea. You point to the “knowing” and “doing” gap. Why is this so wide? We all know we need to do these things to become indispensible, but somehow we don’t do what we know we need to do. The details drag us down to fighting fires and continuing longtime routines. What the Elite Retreat really highlighted is the need to nurture the visionary component of meet- ings and not allow ourselves to get beaten down. After putting on [my own] small conference, I am in awe of what planners do! They must put