5 Tips to Make Your Annual Conference Unforgettable
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Remember the first conference you attended professionally? Think back on it. How did you feel? For me, it was a conference led by an association that supported Community & Migrant Health Centers around the US. I remember being asked to attend by my boss at the time. “Wow,” I thought, “I get to fly to Portland from Austin for work. How cool!”
I was an impressionable young professional, excited to be in a room of exhibitors, vendors, speakers, and thought leaders. The swag. The keynotes. The buffets. All of it dazzled me. I was like little Annie, out in NYC for the first time.
Now, nearly a decade later, that butterfly feeling in my stomach is hard to come by. But, after years of planning, coordinating, strategizing, and attending annual meetings and conferences, I’ve learned what stands out and what stands still for yearly events—and how you can consistently engage both attendees and sponsors in thoughtful, fun, and imaginative ways.
Let’s dive in.
1. Decide your event’s purpose
Yes, yes, I know. Your organization has been organizing this annual event for years. Maybe even decades. You know your purpose. You know who your attendees are, you know the content they want; and you know the sponsors who’ll invest. But all of these are simply categories—not reasons.
Your purpose can (and should) be exclusive in nature. After all, your organization exists to serve some and not others.
Often, I see associations and nonprofits create vague, broad purposes—by naming a theme and branding the event around that theme. But that doesn’t really serve anyone.
As an example, let’s say your annual meeting aims to educate your members on relevant industry trends.
That is broad and vague. Instead, honing in on your purpose could help you form the guardrails for everything you do, from branding, marketing, and communications to the abstracts you accept and the sponsors you solicit.
Instead, if you said that your event’s purpose was to bring together professionals of all generations to learn from and engage with each other through the craft of [insert your trade or profession here], then you would have more specific guardrails in defining your event experience. It could mean you have more panel discussions or workshops instead of one-speaker sessions. It could mean that you will offer more networking and mentoring opportunities to attendees throughout the conference.
Defining your purpose also makes it easier to say “no.” It holds everyone accountable to the agreed-upon event experience.
Priya Parker has a tool in her book “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters” to help define your event’s purpose. Here’s an adapted example from her work:
Your purpose is a category (i.e. you don’t have a purpose.) | Basic, boring purpose, but at least you’re trying. | Your purpose is specific, unique, and disputable. |
To engage attendees in your association’s trade or profession | To be a place where professionals connect and learn from each other | To learn and grow professionally through engaging across generational lines |
2. Center your attendees
Do you know what the most common things remembered at weddings are?
Hint: it’s not the bride(s) or groom(s).
It’s the food, the guests’ comfort, and a unique experience, if any.
What does this tell us?
At Mighty Citizen, you’ll often hear us talking about “the curse of knowledge,” which is the idea that we assume people consuming our content know just as much about it as we know ourselves. For annual conferences, I’d say it’s the “curse of coordination,”—we get so lost in our own coordination efforts we forget who the event is for and what its purpose is.
Even on an intimate and personal occasions like a wedding, attendees are still the heroes of their stories. They care about how they are experiencing the event, even when they deeply care about who is organizing it. So, if it’s true for weddings—it’s definitely true for your annual meeting.
Your attendees will walk away talking about their experience. They won’t walk away talking about how great the tech at registration was. But they will walk away talking about how frustrating registration was to figure out.
You will have a more memorable event when you center your attendees instead of your organization.
Some tips for centering the attendee instead of your organization:
Collect post-event surveys to understand how attendees felt
For every decision made, first, ask how each attendee type would feel about it based on their feedback
Offer personalization when possible through technology, handwritten notes, or gifts
3. Offset the unplanned hiccups
Imagine you have a toothache. It’s dull and present, not excruciating, but it’s just there. But then, you get distracted with your day. You get on your video calls. You answer emails. You live life, and your toothache is really only there when you think about it.
Attendees will find their own toothache if you don’t give them something to distract them. They will find something unique to talk about after. If you, as the event organizer, do not have control over this unique experience, then you’re at the whim of whatever happens.
After a decade of being at and around events, I’ve learned that stuff always happens. Signs get printed wrong. Keynote speakers have flight delays. Food runs out. Hiccups happen. No matter how much planning, something will go wrong.
Remember that frustrating registration process I mentioned earlier? Well, if there were also something like, say, an art studio for guests to reset and unwind during conference breaks or on their own time—they may be more forgiving of the poor registration process.
The inevitability of something going wrong or not according to plan is a part of the plan. Having fun, engaging, and unique experiences allows guests to have a more enjoyable time and ignore the hiccups, should they arise.
And this does not have to be a solo job for an already strapped marketing and communications department. Enlist your vendors to ideate (and sponsor) unique event experiences that will be mutually beneficial for both your attendees and their goals for your event. And, you’ll get more sponsorship dollars to support your mission.
4. Keep your vendors in check
We love our sponsors, exhibitors, and vendors at annual meetings and conferences (I mean, Mighty Citizen is often the sponsor or exhibitor at tradeshows and expos). Sponsors and exhibitors are a big (sometimes the biggest) reason you can afford to create meaningful and thoughtful gatherings for your attendees.
But remember, vendors are sponsoring your event for their own reasons, too. There is a mutual exchange happening, and being beholden to your sponsors is not advised. I have been to dozens of events where we hear the same thing from attendees: “I got so many vendor emails and communications—it was overwhelming!”
Yes, vendors provide value and insight for your attendees, but giving them free rein over your attendee list can be a slippery slope. Depending on the number of attendees you have at your event, sometimes it’s best to mandate that vendors only send one communication to attendees pre and post-event. This way, the onus is on the vendor to create a relationship where attendees want to engage with them.
Even vendors don’t want mailing lists filled with people who likely won’t engage with them or their products and services.
If your attendee list is smaller, consider best practices for vendors. You are the authority of your annual conference, and being specific and precise with your vendors will pay dividends to the attendees’ experience.
5. Remember, it’s all branding
At the end of the day, the entire event experience is its brand. Not the colors. Not the updated logo. Not the theme. Everything I’ve mapped out above is the brand experience of your event, which is a direct extension of your organization’s brand.
We’re branding experts here at Mighty Citizen, and we’ve branded a few association conferences, too. So, we understand that creating the entire event experience, from its purpose to the venue, is a part of the event’s brand ecosystem.
Why is this an important tip to remember?
When you make every decision through the lens of brand perception of your association or nonprofit, then you have the necessary guardrails to say yes to things that will serve your attendees and members and to say no to things that won’t.
Interested in partnering with us on your special event or annual conference?
Reach out—we’d love to chat.