Event Content Development Sessions - Who Does the Talking?

I never really thought about this before until I came across some research from the Kellogg School of Management their research
indicates that in a typical six-person meeting, two people do more than 60 percent of the talking.

This is a fact that is sometimes not seen as an issue – just ask yourself now what two people during your event development meetings speak the most, I bet you can name at least one person.
From my experience it’s usually the more senior members or designated event champions who do 60% of talking. Of course it’s great that these people contribute and allocate their time but this can prevent other members of the group from contributing their ideas and opinions during the content development stage. This is a critical stage in event development and if it’s in anyway jeopardised by poor planning or one-sided opinions then it is doomed for failure.

So how can we overcome dominant contributors taking over event content meetings?

Brain writing – a term coined by Leigh Thompson, J. Jay Gerber Professor of Dispute Resolutions and Organizations (Kellogg’s School of Management). Simply, hand out pens and cards and get everyone writing—brain writing. She used this at a Sales & Marketing off-site and it got everyone contributing ideas without dominant personalities getting in the way.

Non Verbal Contributions – similar to brain writing but this is done pre-meeting. Send out a poll/survey to your event content development team. Get this noticed by sending it out via Mobile using Mobit – a mobile platform we currently use. This Mobit sample collects key pre-planning information. You don’t want to spend hours discussing the selection of a venue or day of the week, why not just send out a simple poll to get this topic moving before your meeting.

Small Group Discussions – Give tasks/discussion topics to pairs and then ask for feedback from each or some pairs. Another option is to talk to individuals pre-event, this can be time consuming but the wealth of information you get is the big pay back.
Another tip is to take a stop watch with you to your next event content development session and time who is it that does the most talking – this isn’t a name and shame exercise. It’s for your own personal knowledge so you can really understand who the dominant contributors are and if it is an issue.

Event Marketeers is there an Elephant in the Room?

Event Marketeers Is there an Elephant in the Room?

Many event professionals get the job right in terms of marketing and organisation of their events, so much so, even with a poor agenda they reach their delegate numbers.  But what happens next is what determines the future success of their event – how is the content delivered and received?  It’s too late now to test content and review speaker quality.  It’s great that you have a full EXPO and everyone loves their lunch – but you can’t ignore the elephant in the room – content!

Which event would you prefer?

Option 1 - Great content but a little rough around the edges in terms of organisation and weak sponsorship presence?

Option 2 - Average content with squeaky clean organisation and strong sponsorship presence?

Of course a mixture of excellent content with quality speakers and squeaky clean organisation and strong sponsorship is always the best case scenario.   I’ve seen too many events perform poorly with insufficient content (that is often sponsorship heavy) – despite excellent organisation.  It’s extremely frustrating to witness events fall down on poor speaker quality, weak content formatting and a heavy influence of sponsorship pitches. 

It’s easy for event professionals to get bogged down with marketing and operations and leave the content creation to ‘expert teams’.  After all these are a group of people who know a lot about the business – surely the event content is in safe hands?   Well it’s not always the case, content can become disjointed, inwardly facing and when time is tight – peppered with many vendors just to fill speaker slots.

So Event Marketing Professional what can you do to keep the elephant out of the room?

• Build a content blue-print.  Create an ideal framework with a perfect mix of 20% sponsorship content, 50% ‘external expert’ either a customer or analyst and 30% company content.
• Select a strong event champion - It’s imperative you have someone very senior who is an influencer within your organisation and who everyone respects.
• Create a profile for an ideal content committee.  For example - A senior sales and marketing representative, content marketing representative, customer service representative, technical representative. 
• Request your event champion to personally invite the members of the content committee.
• Attend all event content meetings and oversee all actions and ensure they are followed up
• Test, Test, Test – put out the feelers with clients – if you can’t divulge actual speaker names, then share the presentation topics.
• Relay this information back to the committee – make changes – test again!

This may seem like a lot of work, on top of everything else you have do – but if this isn’t right you can forget about healthy loyalty percentages and longevity of your event. Get the content right and allow someone else to take over the operations.

Plan your next event with us 02 8060 8398

luli@bestcasescenario.com.au

www.bestcasescenario.com.au