Yes, yes, yes, we’re 17 days into it, but Advent is here, and Christmas is nearly here.
To mark the holiday, here’s an advent calendar full of short programming puzzles (one for each of the 24 days of advent) to get stuck into. Eric Wastle made it.
If you get through them at lightening speed, here’s the 2017 version.
This post won’t tell you how to sell out your tickets or get funding. Nor will it tell you how to mingle, or the jokes to tell to make strangers like you.
What it will do, is give you a friend.
In this case, someone who tells the story of the nerves and intrusions that are our plus-one for most of us at conferences: Fear.
Bonnie Abbot asks hard questions and gives honest answers.
She’s organised conferences, attended them, and found both endeavours wanting, but also puts forth the case for making design events better.
Here, she showcases a six point dissection of reasons as to why some conferences are crappy, from a lack of consideration for people with children to speaker line-ups that are regurgitated year on year.
Refreshingly, she highlights the virtuous attempts by certain conferences to thwart these disappointments, namely XOXO, DjangoCon, and Úll, among others. She also goes into what we can all practically do to rectify the state of design conferences; the advice is also applicable to the conference industry at large.
For the full article, go here. And please read to the end: https://uxdesign.cc/does-your-design-conference-suck-c008b42ab447
I’m always a little wary of business advice articles that promise quick wins or tips. I get more wary with each number the writer adds to the title, most of the time.
For this list, I’ve made an exception. Aside from being shared over 5,000 times on social media, the team at Small Business Trends didn’t pull their tips from thin air, a sin that a lot of publications are guilty of. Instead, they asked people behind successful events to contribute, and so curated their event management tips from such veterans as Julius Solaris of EventMB, two event agency CEOs, and the Managing Director of event consultancy, Doubet.
The list goes through specific ways to organise contingency plans, affordable promotion activities, and the benefits of writing down specifics, as well as what those specifics should be.
CW: Harassment
The post we’ve linked below refers to breaches of Code of Conduct at Learn Inbound and, in turn, references issues of harassment.
Mark, founder of Learn Inbound, took some time to write up their latest conference. There, a number of women were harassed, despite the best practices they had in place. As such, the post discusses what happened, the prevention measures they had in place, and their practical commitment to improving on those for future conferences.
Upon finding this resource and deciding to share it on the Tito blog, I immediately Googled “German word for wishing you’d thought of it first.”
Peter-Paul Koch founded QuirksMode, self-described as the prime source for browser compatibility information on the internet.
That’s interesting and all, but my prerogatives make me far more drawn to his extensive, and damn useful conference organiser handbook, the full text of which is right here:
If you’re interested in a (more niche) guidebook for conference organisers, we’ve got you covered too:
In a wonderfully honest portrayal of the high-octane emotional state we get in to when we come together at a conference and discuss all that goes into what we do, why we do it, and what we do when we don’t, Virginia Roberts suggests that we should all cry.
Could I get the same sense of excitement and social interaction that I’d normally get at one of these big tech events, without even having to go there?
Since staying at home would save me about four hours of driving in Bay Area traffic, I hoped the answer would be yes.
Rachel Metz is the senior editor for mobile at MIT Technology Review. In this article she explains the benefits and limitations of attending a keynote in virtual reality.
We all forget something when we go to conferences.
Usually it’s a charger, or contact lenses, or a pair of comfortable shoes for the return journey, but more often we forget to make sure we’re prepared to get as much as possible out of the event. Here, I’ve put together some resources from around the web to help with that. So, with them, I present to you:
And how to best go about each step:
Choosing Which Conferences to Attend:
Convincing Your Boss and Getting Funding:
Choosing Business Cards:
Finding Accommodation and Booking Travel:
Preparing Takeaways:
Finding Your Way Around:
Packing:
Networking:
Listening:
Decompressing:
Networking is a lot like dating. If you were seeking a spouse, you wouldn’t go up to a stranger in a bar and ask “Will you marry me?” Instead, you’d take the time to get to know the other person. And that requires listening to them and getting to know them.
Debbie Madden is the CEO at Stride, an Agile software development consultancy in NYC. In a recent post on Medium, she explains her one networking rule to rule them all: “Focus on the conversation, not on the outcome.”
Therein, she shares some advice she gave to a colleague about navigating networking conversations by providing value, and discovering what interests the person you’re talking to has, as opposed to diving right in by trying to get what you want out of them for personal gain.
For the full article: https://medium.com/newco/youre-networking-wrong-2b9231c1bc6e
It’s disgraceful that someone should be made to feel unsafe at an industry event where they went to learn, or speak. But if that happens, why not just contact the conference organizer, contact the police, contact the venue, and contact their employer. Just zero fucking tolerance. That seems pretty straight forward, right? Turns out it’s not.
Mike Monteiro, here, acknowledges that he’s a man. What’s more, he acknowledges that there have been men at conferences that have intimidated and ruined the experiences of colleagues and friends at conferences.
It’s not the cheeriest read, until you get to the solutions he calls out.
A number of women from the Women Who Tech community feel like large startups admit there are diversity issues, but not enough action is being taken to address the problems. Conferences can be a great venue for attendees who are in positions of management, including founders and future founders to get concrete advice.
The fact that this post was published two years ago brings about mixed feelings in me. A) It’s reassuring to think some of these tips have been repeated a million times and b) it’s disheartening to think that they need to be repeated again.
In any case, they’re true, honest, and well-founded. Here, Allyson Kapin, Founder of Women Who Tech, gives her feedback and recommendations of how to welcome and engage women to your conferences in the most effective ways.
Don’t forget the comments section as well!
Though I don’t strictly agree with all of these, we’re more than halfway through the year, and almost all of us are past our summer holidays (if we were lucky enough to get one).
Most everyone who reads this blog either runs events, or works with them in another capacity, meaning you’ve all had some exposure to the high-stakes orchestration and organisation that goes into making sure that no-one and nothing to do with the event goes on fire (literally and figuratively).
Yeah, some of that is concepting, design, ideation and fun stuff, but a lot of it is straight-up admin and menial tasks. Dropbox have put together a list of counter-measures to make sure that admin doesn’t dull your shine. It’s not strictly written for event organisers, but I’ll be damned if it’s not something they can relate to.
The first is about shoving some of those tasks into your commute, on which I call B.S. Anyone who’s ridden an 8am subway, underground, or Luas will understand. But the fifth is something I’ll begin implementing for myself the second I’m finished writing this.
We’ve previously written about what makes functional, beautiful design for conference badges, but now we want to share a new easy, practical way to produce those designs.
The folks over at Laracon EU have given their attendees the option to design their own badges to be worn to their upcoming conference. The tool allows you to choose from three pre-set styles, different gradients, font colours, lines and frames. While I’m no designer, here are some examples of badge styles that you can whip up in a matter of seconds:
Lauren and I often share what one might loosely call CEO-bro articles with one another: tone-deaf screeds on the profound personal joy of waking up at 4 a.m. to answer emails or holding six-person conference calls from the venue lobby of a wedding they’re attending.
Lauren and I have never felt this desire, never considered waking up at 5 a.m. to tackle projects or beat competitors, never aspired to a life where the growth of our company was more important than the growth of our personal happiness. And this has meant redefining entrepreneur for ourselves and actively deciding that there is no one personality type we must aspire to or path we must follow for us to take pride in what we do.
From a Tumblr blog, to a 5 person business, The Financial Diet is one of those welcome stories of resilience that those going from start-up fever to start-up fatigue need.
As a company, you should support your employees and pay for them to attend or speak at conferences not because you’re looking for a quid-pro-quo ROI. Don’t expect an employee to collect resumes or yield hiring “leads” — if that is your objective, sponsor the conference, hold a social event, have a vendor booth.
Jan Schaumann may write longer-form posts that break down the intricacies of DNS hacks in 2000 words or more, but here, in around a tenth of that time, he consicely explains the case for employees attending conferences on the company dime.
At the beginning of 2018’s Brighton Ruby, during the introduction, I wanted to ‘get into’ what having a Code of Conduct means. I hadn’t seen anyone do this, and it’s a topic I’d been thinking about a lot this year.
It’s important to be introspective, as an organiser, about the impact of your event and your own responsibility to include people into our communities. We all have responsibilities and expectations about our behaviour toward each other, this is my take on what it mearns, for Brighton Ruby at least.
Andy Croll is deservedly well-liked in the Ruby-sphere. Aside from curating the ever-popular Brighton Ruby, he has a weekly blog/newsletter containing one useful piece of Ruby just because he can and thinks it’s a nice thing for people.
This year, he spent some time welcoming people to Brighton Ruby and explaining what a code of conduct is for. Experiencing it will be the best four minutes and thirty-one seconds you spend today.
Panels are almost always awful. “Let’s just go down the line and say a few words about ourselves” – and half an hour of everyone’s life is duly destroyed.
It’s rare to see an honest, comprehensive breakdown of what’s wrong with conferences. It can be seen as disrespectful when, in fact, it comes from a place of constructive criticism that aims to make the industry more beneficial and enjoyable.
Here, Andrew Betts breaks down, in no uncertain terms, the steps he took to use Edge conf as a vehicle to ameliorate some of the stressers on the tech conference scene, successfully.
Many introverts are highly curious, and have a great love of learning. For every person you meet, tap into that character strength and think:
“There’s something interesting about everyone. What can I learn from this conversation? What can I give? What am I curious about in terms of what makes this person tick?”
In an interview with Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, HBR uncover strategies and goals that even the shyest conference attendee can put into practice to gain the connections that we all go to events seeking.
Mondays are hard, so there’s no better time to read something on the lighthearted side.
Brandwatch have compiled a gallery of some shambolic events that over-promised and under-delivered. Whether that was by failing to feed the crowds, or doing anything that made up the proceedings of Fyre Festival, it’s a pretty hilarious compendium.
The best thing? This is only part one.
tl;dr: fabulous team + great attendee experience.
Matthew Skelton has orchestrated 5 PIPELINE conferences to date alongside his extraordinary team. In the post linked below, they extend their generosity yet further by granularly explaining their path to success down to who is delegated what tasks, and how they got sponsorship.
(And, full disclosure, he does give Tito a little shout-out, which we’re immensely thankful for.)
When planning corporate events, planners are most concerned about finding innovative ideas (81%), good venues (65%) and marketing their event effectively (48%).
Trends are all well and good, but the research that solidifies how valid or not those trendy predictions are is all the more compelling.
EventMB have put together a list of 100 event statistics (and updated them for relevance in 2018) that cover every area of the event industry from marketing to virtual conferences to technology.
Team Tito has dipped into how to get more content from your conference experiences before, but it’s pretty rare that a listicle actually contains new methods, at least in the cynical mind that I’ve acquired since clickbait became a thing. So, you can imagine my delight (once you read it) when I discovered that Heidi Cohen’s piece on it.
Though not in order, the three I was most intrigued by were:
It’s Monday morning.
Whether you’re one of those people who can hit the ground running and accomplish every task on your plate within seconds of your first sip of coffee, or you’re someone who can only grunt at colleagues until after lunch, you might need something to take the edge off the death of the weekend.
With that in mind, instead of something long-form this week, here are just 30 (genuinely) beautiful business cards for you to get inspiration from, lust over, or just wish you could touch the lovely paper they’re printed on.
Plus, as a person in events, it still counts as actual work.
