June 2007
Content is King
10 ways to turn your conference program from an afterthought to an attendee draw

By Maxine Golding

Another airwalled, white-box room. This was possibly the worst place for the session Tyra W. Hilliard, J.D., CMP, was leading at the 2006 MPI World Education Congress. After all, the Associate Professor at University of Nevada-Las Vegas was there to help meeting professionals improve educational content and quality at meetings. Hopefully, the flip charts around the room and her facilitation would stimulate creativity, lively exchange and real learning.

But one attendee reminded her that many audiences are uncomfortable with spaces, formats and presentations that require more active participation than the typical didactic learning experience. “When I walked in and thought you would make us do something,” this attendee told Hilliard at the session’s end, “I considered leaving.”

She didn’t, because education matters to attendees more than ever. And according to a recent EXPO survey (see Marketwatch: Conference content, EXPO, April 2007), 22 percent of respondents will put on more sessions in 2007 than 2006; only 5 percent will present fewer sessions.

Yet ramping up the conference program is only part of the equation. People learn differently, and there lies the paradox for show organizers. How do you keep educational sessions from falling at opposite ends of the spectrum: “all style but little substance” on one hand, “solid content but boring as hell” on the other? Here are 10 ways to turn your conference program from boring to stimulating.

1. Play to learning styles.
Some adults are more active learners (processing information primarily by doing), while others are more reflective, according to the Felder-Silverman model, which was originally formulated by Dr. Richard M. Felder and Dr. Linda K. Silverman for use by college instructors and students in engineering and the sciences, although it has subsequently been applied in a broad range of disciplines. Sensing learners like traditional ways, while intuitive learners embrace innovative approaches. There are visual learners and verbal learners, but everyone learns more when information is presented both ways. Some learn sequentially, in linear, logical steps; others learn material globally in a much more random process.

“We’ve all been brought up from kindergarten to sit quietly, face the teacher who talks at you, and leave when the bell rings,” says Hilliard. Consequently, adults need retraining and shows
need rethinking.

The American Academy of Audiology (AAU, www.audiology.org) knew it could better communicate and deliver the learning experience it was after. At its April 2006 annual meeting of 7,000 attendees, the organization unveiled a new name and brand, AudiologyNOW!, and a new focus on engaging learners through more interactive presentation techniques. The changes emerged after Cheryl Kreider Carey, CAE, Deputy Executive Director of Convention, Exposition & Education, read an article, “Curriculum for Change,” by Jeffrey Cufaude, President and CEO of Idea Architects.

Programs should play to the varied ways people learn by mixing lecture, structured exercise/role play, hands-on demonstration, case study and facilitated discussion. It’s even better when more than one is used in a single session, Hilliard says.

2. Focus on conference development.
The right mix of content emerges from every resource imaginable — program committees, past evaluations, research, listserv exchanges, publication articles, field talk, attendance metrics and professional experts.

Data is essential to content development. A client of Cufaude’s shared a binder with “mounds of data, more than I had ever seen, from member needs to conference evaluations to focus groups,” he says. The data deepened the discussions about content development and tightened session focus.

“I always start program development with a curriculum sketch,” says Jack Powers, Director, International Informatics Institute (www.in3.org), a technology research and consulting organization based in Brooklyn, NY. “Here’s what I want — panels, roundtables, key topics, conflict areas — and here’s the type of people in the audience.” That makes for a more in-depth call for papers and generally more thoughtful proposals.

For Questex, telephone interviews with past and prospective attendees help dig out the most compelling themes and topic areas. “We want to know what pushes their buttons,” says Tom Bliss, Group Conference Director for Questex (www.questex.com).

3. Train your speakers.
Volunteer speakers may be experts in their subject matter, but if they can’t convey the material well, attendees will walk.

With 500 presenters, AAU knows it can’t micro-manage its presentations. However, it now spells out in its submission guidelines the criteria for using interactive techniques and backs that up with training for speakers. Peer review subcommittees look for abstracts with attendee engagement in their outlines. And in a Webinar two months ahead of the meeting, a creativity coach walks presenters through various learning styles. The coach is also accessible on site in a “creativity room” to discuss last-minute ideas.

Attendees at the VMworld user conference arrive expecting a high degree of interactivity with speakers because the two groups have been in constant touch, giving and receiving feedback. “The VMware staff has almost ‘rock star’ status with users,” says Lisa Busby, Vice President, Client Services, The George P. Johnson Co. (www.gpjco.com), which manages the event. They know that interaction must carry through the presentation.

4. Mix up formats.
The tide has turned from traditional lecture to interactive format, including peer experience, case study, best practices, group problem-solving, roundtable information sharing and how-to demonstrations.

Yet show producers still spend a small fortune and inordinate amounts of time to stage and manage general sessions, Cufaude contends, when the bulk of learning doesn’t happen in those time slots. Looked at in terms of return on investment, it’s a disproportionate allocation of resources.

“Yes, we want to entertain and inspire,” he says. “But if we would attend to the rest of the conference with the same attention to detail and resources, wow! Yet it’s barely one percent of the time that a show producer has a dialogue with me suggesting a successful format someone else used.”

In 2007, AudiologyNOW! embraced more interactive formats across the board. It pared its “learning cores” from 11 (too cumbersome) to six in each time slot. Focus tracks weaved a series of sessions around a key topic, such as hearing loss prevention: a learning lab the first day, a featured session the next morning, for example. Three topical areas debuted, with five time slots for each, broken down into different interactive formats at basic and advanced levels.


5. Energize the environment.
How do you stimulate adults in a room that immediately turns them off? “It’s one of the great disconnects in learning that facilities are not there yet,” says Joan L. Eisenstodt, Chief Strategist, Eisenstodt Associates.

Hilliard would outlaw the classroom setup with a talking heads podium because it interferes with attendees seeing each other. “Tables have a practical purpose for note-taking, but they present a psychological barrier, with people looking at the back of heads,” she says. Yet it’s become the default setup because it’s easy to determine how many bodies fit in a room.

Because they don’t always find what they need in sessions, attendees take it upon themselves to do more incidental learning at conferences. “Smart planners are seeing that breaks can be a productive time,” Hilliard says. “Their presenters are saying, ‘Take a 30-minute break, think about the issue, and come back for group problem-solving.’”

Silly as it sounds, says Busby, beanbags are a good choice for VMworld, where attendees are engineers, mostly male, and 35 years old, on average. Instead of sitting cross-legged on the floor outside meeting rooms, as they did last year, now they can plunk themselves down on beanbags, connect to the Internet in a wireless environment and more comfortably engage in conversation with others.

6. Prep the audience.
Adult learners are problem-oriented. Get them to clarify their objectives in advance, and they’re more likely to take away what they came for.

Online polling and agenda discussion in the run-up to sessions should be essential tools, both to stimulate participation and enable speakers to hone their presentations to the audience’s learning styles, levels and needs. Few show organizers, however, are prioritizing such pre-conference exchanges.

“If I were designing learning for younger folks in their 20s and 30s,” says Cufaude, “I would look for them to be co-programmers. Even just two or three quick survey questions that describe learning styles and rate issues would let faculty members engage with potential participants. This is a missed opportunity.”

He recently received a 60 percent response rate from pre-registrants to a five-question, 60-second survey. “It tells me, as a speaker, how much time and attention to give to different parts of the presentation,” he adds.

7. Change tracks and shake up expectations.
Most conferences live and die by segmenting sessions according to functional areas, markets or experience levels. The tracks are
as much a marketing tool as a delivery tool, says Bliss. Adult learning specialists suggest that conferences would be better off tracking sessions by attendee motivation: the experiential learner, the read-write learner, the kinesthetic learner.

“Don’t track the entire event so that it precludes other connections,” says Cufaude. He sees increasing calls for ideas and content outside the primary discipline, but related. Powers, too, counsels show organizers to “make sure people go to sessions in tracks they wouldn’t have gone to otherwise, where they often wind up learning something new.” Non-track alternatives that George P. Johnson Co. uses include “chalk talks” — engaging vignette experiences in public spaces that are semi-private with no pre-registration.

A draped table with a podium and four speakers is “duller than dishwater,” says Diane Stone, Chief Operating Officer, WSA Global Holdings LLC, which produces the WSA Show (www.wsashow.com). In 2005, WSA debuted a more stimulating environment for content delivery. It builds a television studio (visualize “The View”) on the show floor, with the audience of 300 seated on risers, overhead theatrical lighting and no obstructive walls. For one hour on the first and second days, “Style Talk” presentations by fashion personalities create a “gonzo” environment, says Stone.

8. Insist on interaction.
Training through experiences sticks much more than telling, experts say. And when attendees plug in their objectives, they can directly measure the extent of
their learning.

“Although this is tough on the presenter, I would love to see more real-time feedback during sessions,” says Hilliard. In her scenario, the presenter would lay out the objectives she thinks attendees have for the session, while attendees would write down their objectives. Together, they would periodically revisit those objectives throughout the session.

While such technology tools as audience response systems provide an interactive boost to sessions, nothing works better to engage people in learning than appealing to multiple intelligences: visual and auditory, not just cognitive interchange.

Eisenstodt is known for bringing creative, inexpensive items that stimulate audience involvement in multiple ways — visual, tactile, motile. Squishy balls, springs, toys with unusual shape and action to them — they all work.

9. Revise the take-aways.
Adult learners are notorious for wanting take-away wisdom they can use. Indeed, Hilliard gets “dinged” on evaluations when she doesn’t provide her PowerPoint slides. But a one-page resource sheet is much more useful, she and others maintain.

Questex requires entire presentations to be submitted two weeks before the event, which enables the show organizer to distribute electronically and in advance all handout materials. Still, audiences’ growing preference for peer-driven roundtables makes it difficult to prepare a set of deliverables in advance, says Bliss. To resolve that dilemma, Questex plans to use note-takers to assemble meaningful material from the conversations, available only to attendees in the room.

Rather than a complimentary note pad, AAU gives attendees a spiral-ringed notebook, which has been successful, says Carey. For these, presenters are required to provide more useful and interactive handouts than their slides — information that has been digested rather than raw facts. “There’s resistance to this,” she admits, “as it requires extra work by presenters. It’s a learning curve.”

The presenter’s slides will still be provided to attendees, but online and after the meeting. And more of them will be accessible since presenters will no longer be allowed to use their own laptops in sessions; their presentations will be delivered to a single computer in each meeting room, and consequently available for immediate upload following the event.

10. Improve the evaluations.
Show organizers take attendee evaluations seriously in designing more meaningful learning experiences. “I spend a lot of time mining the evaluations and reading all the answers to open-ended questions,” says Powers.

Yet the standard evaluation form often doesn’t frame questions in ways that deliver valuable information, Bliss says. Plus those who reply tend to be positioned at opposite ends of the chart, “ecstatic with the presenter or particularly disenchanted,” he says, and not necessarily representative of the audience. So he uses the data in moderation and learns to read between the lines.

What’s important to know is if a session (or the entire conference) was a worthwhile investment of an attendee’s time and fiscal resources — “What attracted you to the event?” and “How did the event deliver on your expectations?”

Sidebar: How to Add Value to Vendor Sessions
Vendor sessions can be good for vendors, good for the show organizers and even good for attendees, but it will take greater work and effort from all three to get there.

“Vendor sessions are perfectly valid, particularly when you deal in a universe of product demonstrations,” says Diane Stone, Chief Operating Officer, WSA Global Holdings LLC, producer of the WSA Show. “But don’t disguise this as education when it’s an on-site marketing opportunity.”

Yet others make the point that vendor sessions can — and should — be educational. Treat vendors like other speakers and have them provide learning objectives, says Tyra W. Hilliard, J.D., CMP, Associate Professor at University of Nevada-Las Vegas. “Put two competing vendors in a session and turn it into a point-counterpoint,” she suggests.

While trying not to control the content, Questex encourages vendors to include customer co-presenters in their presentations. The show organizer also makes the vendor sessions more desirable to attendees by placing no other sessions at the time slot, when four to six of these sessions run simultaneously. And placing vendor sessions on the show floor has significantly increased audience participation.