If you’re planning a meeting, conference or event in 2022, this video has three things you can do to make it the best it can be.
You can also download our team’s free checklist for effective hybrid meetings at http://bit.ly/HHTChecklist
We’re giving this valuable checklist away because we want to work with clients at hybrid events where everything is setup for success and maximum value.
This is going to be what distinguishes average events from great ones, and will help you make the most of the time you have to spend in meetings and conferences in 2022.
Make sure you work through our ten point checklist and get the most out of your meetings, conferences and events in 2022.
Transcript
If you are planning a meeting or conference or exhibition in 2022, I’ve got a prediction for you and three things you need to do. My name is Graeme Codrington and I’ve been speaking at events and conferences around the world for the last 20 years. I think I know what’s going to happen next. I think it’s fairly obvious that we’ve all missed meetings and we are wanting to rush back to them.
That’s what’s going to happen. People are going to be desperate to get back together. But unless you spend a fortune, you’re going to end up back in one of those soulless exhibitions and conferencing spaces. Remember, the food was terrible, the coffee even worse. And the commute.
We’re not used to the commute. We don’t like the commute and we’re going to be sitting in that room thinking, “Was it really worth taking a day, maybe sometimes even a week to travel all the way here?” And then we’re going to realise that some of our colleagues are missing because they can’t or won’t make it to the meeting. And then we’re going to remember how bad, how boring meetings were to start with. So after the overreaction of getting back in the room and trying it once or twice, we’re going to ask ourselves, “Well, should we go back to digital?”
And we’re going to end up at Hybrid. That’s where we’re going to come back to Hybrid being a combination, right where some of the people are in the room and some of the people are dialling in. Now. Hybrid is hard, but there are three things that you can do. As I said, the first thing is if you are getting back in the room, even if it’s only with some of the people or with everybody, make sure that it is engaging.
What’s the point of getting everybody back in the room? And then we just go back to the conferences the way that we used to do them. Why would I just sit in a room and listen to a whole lot of people speak at me, get the CFO to do what she always did, which was to put an Excel spreadsheet up on the screen and say, I know you can’t really see this, but… And then talk to it for the next 20 minutes. Please, let’s not do that.
So if all you’re going to do is do a presentation. Here’s an idea. Why not prerecord the conference content, and send it to people in advance? Everybody’s used to watching videos now, we’ve had two years of doing that.
Then make sure that the conference itself is a Q& A is an interaction is breakaway sessions for small group conversation. Let’s learn the lessons that we’ve really had to learn in the hard way over the last two years of how to be more engaging, how to make sure that we drag everybody’s attention every ten or 15 minutes. Keep the energy up, make sure that you do that for everybody in the room. The second thing that you need to do is to make sure that your meeting your conference is not merely an event.
It needs to be a process, not just an event.
You could get too over excited with this event. If it’s hybrid, you have a lot of work to do to plan for it, and you can be focused just on the day or two days that we’re going to spend together. You can forget that the real value comes from an extended process doing stuff in advance. Like I said, maybe sending some of the conference content and videos in advance, giving people things to read to prepare in advance, then thinking about what we do afterwards to embed the learning – the best conferences used to do this, we’ve got to get back into the habit.
It’s not an event.
It’s part of a process.
And the third thing that you need to do is if you are going to go hybrid and have this mix of physical and digital, you really need to get your head around exactly what’s going to be required to do that. It’s really difficult, but our team has put together a top quality checklist. This is what we do, and you can sign up. Now.
You can download our checklist. It’s a ten point checklist for making sure you get Hybrid spot on and do it perfectly. It’s for free. We’re giving it away because we want people to do it properly and we only want to come and speak at events that are done well, really, this checklist is about making sure that our clients do their conferences in the best possible way that we enjoy our contribution as a team to doing that. If you like to connect with me, you’re more than welcome to do that.
This is what I do for a living, and I love it. And I love helping people to get the best out of their conferences, their meetings, their exhibitions. 2022 It’s going to be an interesting year, isn’t it? We’re going to do conferences, but they’re going to have to be future focused, future proof and well done conferences if we’re going to get the best out of them all, the best for whatever you decide to do next year.
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