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In looking for quality content, the conference decision makers need to reach into the full membership and poll for priorities. This leads to another challenge, which is to get significant or even moderate response. Before you can submit the survey, you must find a respondent’s minor “need” that can be filled as a result of their support. This could be everything from money in the form of discounts, certificates good for purchases at a future event or even plain old cash. How would you react to receiving a crisp brand new dollar bill?
Knowing what will make a greater majority of potential respondents become respondents will help you get a broader cross section of results.
Armed with this new information, organizers can build relevant themes, seek out experts and authorities and create challenges to develop curriculum that attendees will find of great value. By using the content model of becoming the aggregate resource, sessions need to hold some debate. Differing viewpoints by vendors, polling of the audience and collaborative conclusions all create new and better content.
Another concept being kicked around by industry associations and recently tried at the 2005 ASAE conference in Nashville is the session where the final content bubbles-up from within the attendees. In the ASAE example, they took event technology as the basis for the session and broke it up into 5 sub-themes. Attendees were shuffled into workgroups based on their favorite topic first. A moderator who was considered an expert in the particular field for each group read the summary of the objective as well as the specific technology item their group would tackle in the 7 minute time period.
During that time, individuals responded to the question posed with their own experiences, concerns, support or objections. The moderator would use a laptop to record the comments and prioritize them based on that group.
Then at the end of the 7 minutes, each group got up and shifted once to the left. At the end of the 35 minutes, the overall session moderator used a few minutes to talk about technology within the association environment, which included some survey results from past ASAE studies.
During that time, each of the moderators compiled the points gathered from each of the five groups that passed through the system and rated the results in order of most importance. In the final 15 minutes, each moderator repeated the question to the entire audience and then gave the top 5 responses. The responses gathered for each of the five sub-topics where quite surprising and virtually every member of the audience felt fulfilled from participating. The content was not predetermined yet the results of the participation reflected trends, levels of understanding and issues felt by the group as a whole.
The next big issue is getting this content into the attendee and/or member’s hands. If less than 50% of your targeted audience actually makes it to your event, how do you reach the remaining ones who, for whatever reason, did not make it?
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