People will still show up for a great event. The challenge is giving them a reason to leave their desk. Regina Lysaught, founder and director of VEE Agency, explains how.
Every few months, someone declares conferences are dead. I don’t buy it.
People still travel across town for a great restaurant, queue for gigs and give up whole weekends for festivals and sport. They’ll show up. They just won’t show up for something they could have watched on Teams.
After more than 20 years in events, the biggest change I’ve seen is that your event has to earn people’s time.
At VEE, we’re often brought into an event once the venue is booked, the speakers are locked and the agenda is packed. Then comes the question: “How do we make it engaging?” My answer is usually not to leave engagement until the end.
Start with what you want people to do differently
Before you book another speaker, decide what success looks like.
Do you want people to understand a strategy? Meet somebody useful? Feel more connected to the business? Buy something? Change a behaviour? Once you know that, the format gets easier.
- If the goal is connection, don’t add another panel. Give people time to talk.
- If the goal is action, don’t finish with 40 minutes of slides. Ask attendees to commit to one thing they’ll do next.
- If the goal is understanding, give them a problem to solve at the table instead of another presentation about it.
I also like giving every speaker one job. What is the one thing you want people to think, feel or do differently after your session? If nobody can answer that clearly, there’s probably a lot of PowerPoint you don’t need.
And resist filling every gap. An empty 20 minutes can look wasteful on a run sheet, but people need time to absorb, move, talk and think.
Some of the best outcomes I’ve seen at events have happened over coffee because two people who needed to meet finally had the space to speak.
Design the energy, not just the agenda
This is one question I use constantly at VEE: How should people feel next? Your run sheet might say keynote, morning tea, workshop, lunch. Your guest experiences curiosity, energy, boredom, connection, fatigue and surprise. That’s the real event.
Look at the program through that lens. If everyone will hit a wall at 3pm, don’t put your most important speaker there and hope for the best.
Change the pace. Get people moving. Bring in an unexpected treat. Change rooms. Run something tactile. Ask a provocative question.
The same goes for arrival. Before doors open, walk the event exactly as a guest will. Where do they hesitate? Where will they queue? Can they find the registration desk, coffee, cloakroom and toilets without asking somebody? Those small friction points shape how an event feels long before the keynote begins.
The 70/20/10 system
A simple check I use when looking at an agenda is 70/20/10. It isn’t science, it’s just a useful sanity check.
Roughly 70% should deliver what people came to learn or achieve, 20% should allow for connection, discussion and participation, and 10% should give them something unexpected. In other words: don’t spend 100% of the day broadcasting at people.
Before you build your next event, ask three questions:
- What do we want people to think, feel or do differently when they leave?
- What will they get from being in the room that they couldn’t get from an email or Teams?
- What is the one moment we want them talking about afterwards?
Answer those before you start filling the agenda.
Because people aren’t done with conferences. They’re done with conferences that aren’t worth showing up for.
