The people behind Dribbble, the website for discovering the world’s top designers and creatives, also host the Overtime podcast.
One episode that they recently posted discusses all things design and conferences. Throughout, the conversation covers which events to attend, gender representation on stage, and tips for giving a good talk.
To find the episode you can simply use this link.
Cramer has recently published an updated article outlining some compelling experience design trends the industry is adopting to exceed audience expectations and transform approaches.
Among them, they’ve written about the rise of swag-less events, unexpected venues, pet-friendly events, and more.
For the full article and a deeper dive into what each of these trends means for organisers, simply head here.
In one of their latest articles, Event Industry News have put together a sample of suggested improvements that individuals in the sector can make to their events in the spirit of creating a more sustainable world.
Based on the UN agenda for sustainable development, they’ve outlined changes such as prioritising plant-based meals, curating gender balance among speakers and panels, and donating food waste.
You can read the full article here or you can get an ungated copy of their buyer’s guide here.
Learn Inbound is one of the most highly anticipated marketing conferences on offer in Ireland. However, in this post, the conference’s organiser, Mark Scully, shares how he came to the decision to postpone the conference this year to prioritise his well-being.
His honesty is highly admirable, and his story is one that anyone who’s known the pressures of organising conferences can relate to.
All of us at Tito would like to share our best wishes with Mark for a well-deserved year off from Learn Inbound and hope you enjoy hearing his thoughts.
We recently caught up with our friends at Phrase to share our experience using their all-in-one, web-based localisation platform.
Our CEO, Paul, shared how their solution helped us streamline our process for adding new translations to Tito. He also shared the story of how we’ve come to offer our checkout in 17 different languages.
You can check out the full post here.
The start of the year is the perfect time to get inspired. However, as we all know, events are multi-faceted and demanding, so it can be hard to find time to check in on what other organisers are doing. Thankfully, there are resources out there like this one from EventMB.
They’ve gone to the trouble of putting together a showcase of over 100 stage design options to get excited about and potentially experiment with. This means you can skip hunting down sources to kick start your creative process and get straight to discovering the event community’s slick ideas. Enjoy!
It’s easy to think that sending out a post-event survey is enough to gather the data you need to know about how your event went. And while, yes, it certainly can be, sometimes there are specific areas or aspects of an event you’d like to look into in more detail in order to gauge its success.
In this article on EventMB, the authors go through the differences and applications of active and passive data collection. In brief, active data collection refers to involves soliciting info from attendees who are actively providing it. Conversely, passive data collection involves unobtrusively tracking attendees’ position, participation, and engagement in real-time during the event.
For more insight into the roles these types of data collection play, and where they come in in the flow of your event, you can find the full article here.
Audience feedback is one of the best ways to make sure that your events are continuously improving and delighting your audiences. However, not every organiser wants to reinvent the wheel when it comes to their approach to collecting feedback from their attendees.
Resources like this one from Explori are a great touch point for organisers who want to know what they should include and how to ensure the experience of giving feedback is as enjoyable as the event itself.
Some of the key takeaways I found compelling were the notes on words to avoid sending in emails that trigger spam filters and best practices when it comes to the number of questions included per page. For the full list of tips, simple click here.
Event organisers have a thousand questions rattling around their minds at any given time. Breaking it down a little, this article, originally posted on magicboxla.com, focuses on questions to ask about your venue.
This article is a good reference point for those who are just starting out in events as well as folks who have some experience. It gets granular enough to share some considerations that anyone could miss as well as sharing some solid information organisers should get at every potential venue viewing.
Beginning with basic questions you should always consider around things like budget, capacity, and parking, the added value in this is their “specific questions” section.
What about traffic flow? Or staff rooms? Or even cleaning fees? Between these consideration and more, a quick read of this could save you from some headaches and save you a chunk of time.
Zach Holman self-describes as someone who’s spoken at more technical conferences than anyone else on the planet, aside from those who’ve spoken at more conferences than him.
From samples of the speaking.io copy like that alone, it’s easy to get drawn in to what he has to say. Thankfully for us, his distilled the skills he has into practical ways to help people improve at public speaking.
The site itself is broken up into five areas with sub-sections that go deeper and deeper into tactics and best practices that can help anyone get better at communicating with audiences.
Whether you want to hone your prep skills, your design skills, calm your nerves or simply improve the talks you already have under your belt, this site is a goldmine.
Writing for Entrepreneur, Don Mal, CEO of Vena Solutions has put together a pretty decent framework for potential organisers to tell if they, or indeed their customers, are ready for a user conference.
The rise in popularity of user conferences as tactics to engage communities and inform them about the products they love is easy to see when we look to events like Dreamforce, Microsoft Ignite, and OpenWorld, as Mal points out.
When determining whether you should go down a similar route, though, he highlights the importance of examining the benefits you can offer to your customers and your readiness to commit, among other insightful considerations.
Finding a tip article like this that only provides ideas you’ve never thought of before is becoming a rarer and rarer occurrence, but here we are. This is far from a simple list of things like “make eye contact,” “give firm handshakes,” and “join the first circle of people you see even if they’re all colleagues and you’re potentially interrupting a sensitive business conversation.”
Instead, Dave Buzanko has put together a blow-by-blow of his first-hand experience of what works and what doesn’t when it comes to networking in the real world. I highly recommend you give it a read.
“One study found 69% of professional speakers globally are male. However, less attention has been paid to how too many events also lack racial diversity.”
Writing for Harvard Business Review, Ruchika Tulshyan has produced a remarkable collection of practical ways to bolster diversity at conferences, with a particular emphasis on racial diversity.
From the most basic forms of encouragement (paying your speakers) to more sophisticated approaches (use your sponsorship privilege), if you’re committed to improving diversity at your events, this is a must-read.
I love a free pastry as much as the next person, and I hate a wasted pastry as much as them too.
All croissant tomfoolery aside, today we’re sharing a serious piece of new research published by the Lime Venue Portfolio about the food we consume at conferences and events. Or, rather, the food we don’t consume that goes to waste.
The survey of 60 organisers shows an admission of the staggering levels of waste produced in our industry. As just one example, around 30% of event professionals throw away 15% of the food they order for events. 18% of those say that number is closer to 20% for them.
We’d encourage you to give the report on the research by Event Industry News a read and to consider the findings when you’re placing your next catering order.
“Only 53% of event planners actually have an emergency plan in place.”
In an interview with Endless Events, Lori Pugh Marcum, manager of global education and event production at MPI shared this somewhat concerning statistic.
Sharing yet more insights on the subject of event safety, the takeaways from the conversation with MPI make up the recent post by Endless Events which we’ve linked above. The discussion covered what percentage of organisers’ budgets should go towards health and safety, how to become a safety advocate, how to establish a crisis communication strategy and much more.
Packed with actionable insight, this is a great read for organisers who are eager to put their community’s welfare first at all of their upcoming events.
The transparency of JSConf EU is such that you simultaneously want to applaud everything they publish and send it to everyone else to tell them to do exactly as they are, too.
In this article, they’ve provided a breakdown of the gender, underrepresented demographics, countries of origin, and employers of those who applied to speak at their conference in 2019. Every number is worth a read.
“Some people are not women. We can agree on that, I think. And you want them to come to your events, work at your company, speak at your conference, lend their expertise, their time, their energy, I assume.”
Perry Eising is a non-binary person who’s felt left out, confused, and compelled to do something about that. In this article on Medium, they have written a breakdown of how tech events can move towards being more inclusive when it comes to the language we use, planning and promoting events.
Generally speaking, the MYWorld 2030 survey is a global citizen survey about global sustainable development goals. The aim is to bring people’s voices into official debates to help define and ensure goals are met.
Recently, I found the specific survey of this kind for the event industry. If you’re interested in filling it out or simply reading more about SDGs, you can find it here.
“Picture this: it’s 7:30 a.m., and conference participants are barely awake. Coffee in hand, they blink sleep away as they enter the room. Rows of chairs lead to a distant stage, and large monitors display the speaker’s slides.
One hour of information-packed slides rolls into the next, and attention begins to wane.”
Hannah Tuberville & Ruth Gotian, writing for Nature.com paint a familiar picture. All talk and no play makes attendee a something something, after all.
In this article, they share several options from seating design to anonymous feedback procedures to timings to revive the interactive feeling at conferences.
It’s pretty refreshing to find an article about trends that admits “not everyone thinks it’s wise to follow trends.”
I’ll also sprinkle that pinch of salt on these recommendations, but I thought they were quite inspiring, though they may not be absolutely necessary.
Some themes in the article in question, published on EventUP, include easy participation, nostalgia and fun. Those are pretty universal desirables for any event organiser, and I’m sharing the post today since the authors add practicality ways to help them flourish. Hope you enjoy.
Male-dominated design events are not just exclusionary: they cannot properly represent the full scope and power of design through the people who work within it.
If you’ve ever witnessed or heard of someone curating an all-male panel or, worse, entire line-up at a design conference, please send them this.
Bonnie Abbott and several contributors have put together a simple Google Doc filled to the brim with talented, nominated female speakers whose expertise is design. At the last published count, there are 300 speakers listed across 32 countries. And, thankfully, no excuses.
So much thought goes into events in their build up, and so much work goes into controlling all the spinning plates on the day that it can be hard for event organisers to take a second to step back and see if their attendees are actually engaging with the production they’ve created.
Aside from walking up to random guests and asking, “Having a nice time?” it can be hard to gauge what’s working and what’s not until after the event has come to a close.
I’m sharing this article today as it proposes an interesting alternative. Thales Teixeira, in conversation with Kait Shea from Event Marketer describes the Attention Quotient framework which he’s developed as part of his role at Harvard Business School. In it, he proposes that we should look to three sources (word of mouth, length of attention and quality of that attention, and impressions by third parties) to come to a more scientific solution.
There are a few tell-tale signs of burnout, but because event planning is known to be such a stressful profession, too often people in the industry try to shrug warning signs off as normal. This post goes through a few of the symptoms you should be aware of including; exhaustion, a lack of concentration, and some more shocking examples like interpersonal and health problems.
In case you missed it, we also recently interviewed a veteran conference and meetup organiser to ask how he deals with burnout and how it’s affected him throughout his career. You can read that here.
I know this post is aimed at first time speakers, as was the original tweet that sparked the conversation behind it, but there are so many pearls of wisdom in it, that I’d venture the most tenured talk-givers would also finish it with fresh perspectives.
The three tips I found most intriguing were:
The original post was penned by Sophie Koonin. You can find her on Twitter here.
