what's new at our meeting

We're working on a slew of new projects for our upcoming Annual Meeting... including:

• A "greener" meeting - no more photocopying zillions of slides, most of which don't mean much to the listener. Instead, speakers get to develop a meaningful one-page handout for listeners to use as the follow along... in combination with...
• Speaker training - we've conducted training (with Jeffrey Cufaude's assistance) to educate our speakers about adult learning principles, the principles of good slide design and how to create effective, useful handouts
• A blog - yes, we're starting a conference blog. I'll post a link once we've got a few posts up.
• A learning guide/workbook. We've reformatted our final program into a workbook, incorporating notes fields following every session, so that learners will be encouraged to use it as a reference.
• Updating the "schedule at a glance." I shamelessly stole this idea from Mike Mason at Communicatio... We got it down to one page, on the back cover of the final program.
• Targeted marketing... see my earlier posts.

I'll report back on how these go over with the attendees, but I'm pretty excited about the changes!

guess i should explain...

David asked me about the crazy idea - and I realize I never did tell the details. We decided to segment our marketing to our target audiences for the conference. I identified three sessions that each of our audiences would be interested in attending, put them on the cover of our brochure along with a statment such as: "We've designed the following sessions for chief executives like you!" Then we mailed that cover to our CEOs and COOs. We did it for 4 distinct audiences and then a generic for everyone else. We intended to personalize but that became cost prohibitive. (And maybe we didn't even need it!)

Is this rocket science? No, not really. But a big, big step forward for us.

that crazy idea....it is working.

I am absolutely thrilled that my cockamamie idea in June that caused me and my coworkers so much stress has apparently resulted in an 85% increase in registration for our meeting over this time last year. Truly phenomenal. Some folks have suggested that may not hold through the rest of the reg period. Frankly, I'm just happy that something in our marketing mix is working. Heck, not just working, but kicking butt. If nothing else, we've gotten 85% more people to commit to our meeting earlier than ever.

Can't beat that. It wasn't so crazy after all!