Improving productivity at industry conferences

With 12 live events in the series we need to talk to our delegates all the time.

Steve: What tech do you use inside your business?

Andy: We use Slack for communications, we use systems to organize our events, in particular Eventbrite, which is a little clunky. I think there’s some work to be done on that one. Those are the keys ones.

Steve: I was a at startup conference in Asia and they had this very cool networking. It was a bit like Eventbrite, but it had a social aspect. Your calendar was in there, you could see everyone that was attending, and you could suggest meetings, see their profiles, incredibly productive way of getting the most out of an event as a delegate. Have you used anything like that?

Andy: No, but it’s a good question, because one of the things we’re looking at for Talent Leaders Connect is to grow the community side of it.

We’ve got 12 events this year in the series, around Europe, and we want to engage with our delegates and our audience in between the events and not just about the events. We’re looking at various different engagement tools at the moment, so we can actually launch that for our 2018 program.

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Steve: Excellent. I went back to that conference the following year, and they changed the app – replacing it with something that hid who was there and didn’t facilitate networking. It devalued the conference completely.

If your expectation was that you could go and network efficiently, politely make meetings to have a quick 10-minute chat, it was brilliant. To then take that away I really thought was daft.

Andy: Well with 12 live events in the series we need to talk to our delegates all the time, really… And we’re growing the digital side of the business – we’ve got a huge resource bank of content and material that we’ve talked about at the events, a lot of which is video.

So we’re going to work hard to find the technology partner to enable all of this.

Steve: Well, I look forward to finding out what it is you choose – I think if you can truly up the productivity of delegates at the conferences you create a major differentiator. From personal experience it makes the events so much more valuable.

Andy, thank you very much for your time.

Andy Daniel (@andydaniel_TJP) is Director at Talent Leaders Connect.