Expert insights. Personalized for you.
These mental models are deeply embedded in our conference planning and management practices. Savvy conference organizers realize that their mental models have much more influence over their outcomes than their decisions and actions. Surfacing our cognitive conference constructs. MORE
Your conference is out of balance. And most conference organizers don’t even know it. Sure as a conference organizer you know that creativity and innovation are important to your planning. These conferences collect data in myriads of ways. MORE
But when it gets to “go time,” does that culture manifest at your conferences and meetings? Her boss apparently thought she should spend all her time out “doing meeting planning” and not hanging out in a hotel conference room. Conference staff are not able to do everything! MORE
The Association of Professional Piercers’ 24th Annual Conference & Exposition begins in Las Vegas this weekend. Conference: APP 24th Annual Conference & Exposition. The conference offers a mentor program to help new attendees get the most out of their experience. MORE
Who says conferences or chapter meetings have to be in traditional meeting spaces? Conference rooms tend to be dark, and participants may find themselves fighting post-lunch naps. Recently, I got a conference promotion with the subject line, “Have you ever had a meeting in a kayak?” Sample your association’s conference for prospective participants. The post Conference Rooms Are Freezing! MORE
Too often conference and meeting professionals assume that their role is best suited to planning and executing the conference. I get that from the education section or the conference technical teams.”. They own designing the conference customers experience journey. MORE
When talking about conference education, most people think about the traditional lecture. It is perceived as the holy grail of much of the conference. Our Love/Hate Affair With Conference Lectures. Five Myths Of Interactive, Participatory Learning For STEM Conferences. MORE
Whether a virtual conference is driven by the current virus COVID-19 virus, financial considerations, member outreach, or beneficial global dialogue, the fundamental process for planning and implementation remains the same. At the heart of a conference’s success is audience participation. MORE
How to Prepare Attendees for a Virtual Conference—or Other Options for Cancelled Conferences. Read more about How to Prepare Attendees for a Virtual Conference—or Other Options for Cancelled Conferences MORE
However, a conference at rest, tends to die. The enemy of most conferences is the way it’s always been. Cognitive and organizational inertia keeps an association on its current conference course even when facing disruptive or rapid external changes. MORE
Conference adaptation of a great analogy from strategist and author Tony Morgan. Same Conference, Segregated Silos. This analogy is a typical image of the traditional conference planning process. They each have specific tasks to attend to for the conference. MORE
Although I didn’t participate in today’s #assnchat about ASAE’s Great Ideas Conference , it still inspired a blog post. Perhaps playing with toys shifts our mindset from serious office mode to relaxed engaged conference mode. The association professionals in today’s Twitter chat had plenty of great ideas (heh heh) for conference creativity rooms and I even have a few of my own. F&B : The Canadians also served poutine at one point during the conference. MORE
The program at a recent conference was nearly perfect. After a long conference day, one night, I fell in with a crowd walking to the reception, and I learned they were some of the conference staff. The conference was beautiful on the outside, but it seemed very broken inside. MORE
The League of American Orchestras’ 74th National Conference begins next week in Nashville. Conference: 74th National Conference. If you’d like us to consider your meeting for an upcoming Conference Circuit, contact Samantha Whitehorne at swhitehorne@asaecenter.org. MORE
Once you’ve observed the conference through the lens of your target customer and gained insights from conference data, you can move to the next steps. These steps are critical for you and your conference planning teams to embrace, enlist and employ. MORE
Applying a story arc to the conference can activate participants’ brains. You can use the story arc concept to carefully craft the messages and issues you want your conference participants to explore, experience and learn. So exactly how do you use a story arc for your conference? MORE
We are thinking about conference innovation from the wrong perspective. We usually think about conference innovation as something we create for our paying attendees. Conference innovation is a way to design attendees! Evolving Your Conference Customer. MORE
We observe what other conferences are doing. Conference Impersonators. Yet too often, conference professionals copy someone else’s idea before they are really prepared to implement it. They search for a model that is working in someone else’s conference. Many of us do it. MORE
For associations, our annual conference is our flagship education product. Naturally we want to maximize our investment and extend the reach of this great content. MORE
In a matter of days, important details about the best conference moments (and the worst moments) will get fuzzier. Ultimately, you team will forget their thoughts about improving the conference experience if they don’t have some type of prompts. The closing keynote was a big hit. MORE
Associations, companies and other organizations have been using conference and video calling to meet and conduct business for many years. Check out these videos of what some of your calls may be like: A conference call in real life: [link]. Association Management Companies CM Services Conference Calls Leadership Meetings Video Calls Virtual Meetings Volunteerism meeting etiquette MORE
To paraphrase Hoffer, you can never get enough of conference fads, gimmicks and trends. Unless your a conference participant and we often have had enough!). They also want access to your conference budget. You can never get enough of what you really don’t need says Eric Hoffer. MORE
In physics, the second law of thermodynamics says all things—bodies, businesses, conferences, energy, organizations, relationships—move toward chaos and disorder. As your conference matures, it experiences entropy. As a conference professional, you know this to be true. MORE
On the day this posts, my association's Board meeting and Annual Conference will be two short weeks away. This has traditionally been my time to enter what I call my "Annual Conference Mode." MORE
Conference organizers have been on a quest to create a 365-day community around their big annual event. Most conference organizers do a decent job of delivering education and networking value before and during the event. But what about after the conference? MORE
As conference organizers, why can’t we also have a fun, fulfilling, and collaborative experience planning and designing the conference? Here are six ways to focus on designing your team’s experience during your next conference planning process. MORE
RSA Conference is this week in San Francisco. This event is like the annual prom for the security industry—part conference, part trade show, part “place to be.” Finally, I was pleased to see the conference include a track this year on. MORE
So what is your conference’s return on mission? Think of ROM as investments that should move the mission of your organization and conference forward in very real and tangible ways. So how are your investments in your conference moving the mission of your organization forward? MORE
The quality of a conference’s education program cannot exceed the quality of its speakers. The greatest variance in our conferences relates to our presenters. In short, a conference education program cannot give what it does not have. Conferences Exist For People Improvement. MORE
Many conferences are stuck in the rut of legacy routines, age-old rituals and cloned programming. Conference organizers and its advisors replicate the past maintaining the traditions and well-established procedures of yesteryear. Conference Reform Requires These Leadership Traits. MORE
Who wants to attend a common, ordinary, ho-hum, everyday , I’m-just-like-all-the-others traditional conference? Your conference growth and revenue depends upon repeat paying attendees year after year. And your customer loyalty is built upon making your common conference uncommon. MORE
He didn’t like dealing with people, especially disgruntled conference stakeholders. As conference organizers, we can easily fall into today’s culture of cynicism. Instead of fostering and practicing conference kindness, we embrace a stoic armor of rightness, pessimism and skepticism. MORE
The North Star is the perfect metaphor for your annual conference purpose. When your conference purpose serves as a North Star, it guides all decisions, tasks, behaviors and strategy. Uncovering Your North Star Conviction To Find Conference True Target Market. MORE
According to the Community Brands Member Engagement and Loyalty Study, meetings and conferences, which traditionally have emphasized training and continuing education, are one area where association professionals (Pros) are very focused. MORE
At a conference dinner earlier this month, a bunch of us, hungry and tired, sat at the table joking that chicken was most likely on the menu. Sounds about right for a conference, yes? Farm-to-food eating is gaining popularity across the globe, so conference venues are taking note. MORE
Does your conference education drive attendees’ business performance? Five Business Improvement Conference Education Trends. Here are five trends in aligning conference education with business improvement efforts. Conference Planning Teams Become Better Business Partners. MORE
It’s hard for conference organizers to stick to planning the essential elements of their events. As a conference professional, it is your mission each day to keep your focus on the essential elements of your event for your customers’ sake. What is the essence of your conference? MORE
Most conference and meeting professionals want the coolest, hippest, latest ideas and trends for their events. We want to know what unique things other conferences are doing so we can borrow their ideas. We pursue fads, gimmicks and trends as the silver bullets of our conference woes. MORE
The days after a major conference are filled with busy work, attending to all of the things you pushed off leading to the conference. I have 50,000 vendors calling me (yes they call me too, I know how you feel) some from conference and others I politely deferred before conference. MORE
Conference professionals suck at measurement. If you trust your conference smile sheet evaluations as a barometer of how effective your conference education was, you are just being foolish says learning research psychologist Dr. Will Thalheimer. MORE
If there’s something strange in your conference-hood. Our cognitive frameworks—our mental models and paradigms—shape our thinking, behavior, operations and success of our conferences. We falsely believe that future conferences are just an extension of the past. MORE
Conference Related Topics Blue Sky eLearn
MARCH 3, 2020
Whether a virtual conference is driven by the current virus COVID-19 virus, financial considerations, member outreach, or beneficial global dialogue, the fundamental process for planning and implementation remains the same. At the heart of a conference’s success is audience participation.
WBT Systems
MARCH 30, 2020
How to Prepare Attendees for a Virtual Conference—or Other Options for Cancelled Conferences. Read more about How to Prepare Attendees for a Virtual Conference—or Other Options for Cancelled Conferences
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Association Leaders
MARCH 22, 2020
Associations, companies and other organizations have been using conference and video calling to meet and conduct business for many years. Check out these videos of what some of your calls may be like: A conference call in real life: [link]. Association Management Companies CM Services Conference Calls Leadership Meetings Video Calls Virtual Meetings Volunteerism meeting etiquette
Velvet Chainsaw
JANUARY 21, 2019
In physics, the second law of thermodynamics says all things—bodies, businesses, conferences, energy, organizations, relationships—move toward chaos and disorder. As your conference matures, it experiences entropy. As a conference professional, you know this to be true.
Velvet Chainsaw
JUNE 17, 2019
But when it gets to “go time,” does that culture manifest at your conferences and meetings? Her boss apparently thought she should spend all her time out “doing meeting planning” and not hanging out in a hotel conference room. Conference staff are not able to do everything!
Velvet Chainsaw
JULY 27, 2018
Who wants to attend a common, ordinary, ho-hum, everyday , I’m-just-like-all-the-others traditional conference? Your conference growth and revenue depends upon repeat paying attendees year after year. And your customer loyalty is built upon making your common conference uncommon.
|
Eric Lanke
FEBRUARY 18, 2019
On the day this posts, my association's Board meeting and Annual Conference will be two short weeks away. This has traditionally been my time to enter what I call my "Annual Conference Mode."
Velvet Chainsaw
JUNE 21, 2018
The North Star is the perfect metaphor for your annual conference purpose. When your conference purpose serves as a North Star, it guides all decisions, tasks, behaviors and strategy. Uncovering Your North Star Conviction To Find Conference True Target Market.
Velvet Chainsaw
SEPTEMBER 17, 2018
Most conference and meeting professionals want the coolest, hippest, latest ideas and trends for their events. We want to know what unique things other conferences are doing so we can borrow their ideas. We pursue fads, gimmicks and trends as the silver bullets of our conference woes.
Aaron Wolowiec
APRIL 28, 2015
At a conference dinner earlier this month, a bunch of us, hungry and tired, sat at the table joking that chicken was most likely on the menu. Sounds about right for a conference, yes? Farm-to-food eating is gaining popularity across the globe, so conference venues are taking note.
Velvet Chainsaw
OCTOBER 1, 2015
When talking about conference education, most people think about the traditional lecture. It is perceived as the holy grail of much of the conference. Our Love/Hate Affair With Conference Lectures. Five Myths Of Interactive, Participatory Learning For STEM Conferences.
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Velvet Chainsaw
SEPTEMBER 18, 2018
To paraphrase Hoffer, you can never get enough of conference fads, gimmicks and trends. Unless your a conference participant and we often have had enough!). They also want access to your conference budget. You can never get enough of what you really don’t need says Eric Hoffer.
Association Management
FEBRUARY 16, 2017
RSA Conference is this week in San Francisco. This event is like the annual prom for the security industry—part conference, part trade show, part “place to be.” Finally, I was pleased to see the conference include a track this year on.
Velvet Chainsaw
NOVEMBER 8, 2018
Applying a story arc to the conference can activate participants’ brains. You can use the story arc concept to carefully craft the messages and issues you want your conference participants to explore, experience and learn. So exactly how do you use a story arc for your conference?
Velvet Chainsaw
JULY 10, 2015
So what is your conference’s return on mission? Think of ROM as investments that should move the mission of your organization and conference forward in very real and tangible ways. So how are your investments in your conference moving the mission of your organization forward?
Velvet Chainsaw
JANUARY 31, 2019
However, a conference at rest, tends to die. The enemy of most conferences is the way it’s always been. Cognitive and organizational inertia keeps an association on its current conference course even when facing disruptive or rapid external changes.
Velvet Chainsaw
JANUARY 25, 2018
Too often conference and meeting professionals assume that their role is best suited to planning and executing the conference. I get that from the education section or the conference technical teams.”. They own designing the conference customers experience journey.
Velvet Chainsaw
JULY 16, 2014
We are thinking about conference innovation from the wrong perspective. We usually think about conference innovation as something we create for our paying attendees. Conference innovation is a way to design attendees! Evolving Your Conference Customer.
Velvet Chainsaw
SEPTEMBER 3, 2014
Conference organizers have been on a quest to create a 365-day community around their big annual event. Most conference organizers do a decent job of delivering education and networking value before and during the event. But what about after the conference?
Velvet Chainsaw
JULY 8, 2015
We observe what other conferences are doing. Conference Impersonators. Yet too often, conference professionals copy someone else’s idea before they are really prepared to implement it. They search for a model that is working in someone else’s conference. Many of us do it.
Velvet Chainsaw
AUGUST 24, 2015
He didn’t like dealing with people, especially disgruntled conference stakeholders. As conference organizers, we can easily fall into today’s culture of cynicism. Instead of fostering and practicing conference kindness, we embrace a stoic armor of rightness, pessimism and skepticism.
Velvet Chainsaw
JANUARY 7, 2019
Many conferences are stuck in the rut of legacy routines, age-old rituals and cloned programming. Conference organizers and its advisors replicate the past maintaining the traditions and well-established procedures of yesteryear. Conference Reform Requires These Leadership Traits.
YourMembership Blog
AUGUST 7, 2013
The days after a major conference are filled with busy work, attending to all of the things you pushed off leading to the conference. I have 50,000 vendors calling me (yes they call me too, I know how you feel) some from conference and others I politely deferred before conference.
Velvet Chainsaw
JUNE 4, 2018
As conference organizers, why can’t we also have a fun, fulfilling, and collaborative experience planning and designing the conference? Here are six ways to focus on designing your team’s experience during your next conference planning process.
Associations Now
MAY 30, 2019
The League of American Orchestras’ 74th National Conference begins next week in Nashville. Conference: 74th National Conference. If you’d like us to consider your meeting for an upcoming Conference Circuit, contact Samantha Whitehorne at swhitehorne@asaecenter.org.
Velvet Chainsaw
APRIL 1, 2015
Your conference is out of balance. And most conference organizers don’t even know it. Sure as a conference organizer you know that creativity and innovation are important to your planning. These conferences collect data in myriads of ways.
Smooth The Path
FEBRUARY 6, 2020
The program at a recent conference was nearly perfect. After a long conference day, one night, I fell in with a crowd walking to the reception, and I learned they were some of the conference staff. The conference was beautiful on the outside, but it seemed very broken inside.
Velvet Chainsaw
JULY 12, 2018
These mental models are deeply embedded in our conference planning and management practices. Savvy conference organizers realize that their mental models have much more influence over their outcomes than their decisions and actions. Surfacing our cognitive conference constructs.
Velvet Chainsaw
JUNE 25, 2015
Conference adaptation of a great analogy from strategist and author Tony Morgan. Same Conference, Segregated Silos. This analogy is a typical image of the traditional conference planning process. They each have specific tasks to attend to for the conference.
Reid All About it
MARCH 19, 2013
Although I didn’t participate in today’s #assnchat about ASAE’s Great Ideas Conference , it still inspired a blog post. Perhaps playing with toys shifts our mindset from serious office mode to relaxed engaged conference mode. The association professionals in today’s Twitter chat had plenty of great ideas (heh heh) for conference creativity rooms and I even have a few of my own. F&B : The Canadians also served poutine at one point during the conference.
Velvet Chainsaw
SEPTEMBER 29, 2015
Does your conference education drive attendees’ business performance? Five Business Improvement Conference Education Trends. Here are five trends in aligning conference education with business improvement efforts. Conference Planning Teams Become Better Business Partners.
Velvet Chainsaw
OCTOBER 27, 2014
In a matter of days, important details about the best conference moments (and the worst moments) will get fuzzier. Ultimately, you team will forget their thoughts about improving the conference experience if they don’t have some type of prompts. The closing keynote was a big hit.
Velvet Chainsaw
APRIL 22, 2014
Conference professionals suck at measurement. If you trust your conference smile sheet evaluations as a barometer of how effective your conference education was, you are just being foolish says learning research psychologist Dr. Will Thalheimer.
Velvet Chainsaw
JULY 13, 2018
If there’s something strange in your conference-hood. Our cognitive frameworks—our mental models and paradigms—shape our thinking, behavior, operations and success of our conferences. We falsely believe that future conferences are just an extension of the past.
CommPartners
JUNE 26, 2019
For associations, our annual conference is our flagship education product. Naturally we want to maximize our investment and extend the reach of this great content.
Velvet Chainsaw
JANUARY 26, 2018
Once you’ve observed the conference through the lens of your target customer and gained insights from conference data, you can move to the next steps. These steps are critical for you and your conference planning teams to embrace, enlist and employ.
Smooth The Path
OCTOBER 8, 2019
Who says conferences or chapter meetings have to be in traditional meeting spaces? Conference rooms tend to be dark, and participants may find themselves fighting post-lunch naps. Recently, I got a conference promotion with the subject line, “Have you ever had a meeting in a kayak?” Sample your association’s conference for prospective participants. The post Conference Rooms Are Freezing!
Associations Now
MAY 9, 2019
The Association of Professional Piercers’ 24th Annual Conference & Exposition begins in Las Vegas this weekend. Conference: APP 24th Annual Conference & Exposition. The conference offers a mentor program to help new attendees get the most out of their experience.
Velvet Chainsaw
JANUARY 10, 2019
It’s hard for conference organizers to stick to planning the essential elements of their events. As a conference professional, it is your mission each day to keep your focus on the essential elements of your event for your customers’ sake. What is the essence of your conference?
Velvet Chainsaw
JUNE 2, 2014
The quality of a conference’s education program cannot exceed the quality of its speakers. The greatest variance in our conferences relates to our presenters. In short, a conference education program cannot give what it does not have. Conferences Exist For People Improvement.
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