How to Help Chapters Improve the Event Experience

Get enough chapter leaders together and eventually you’ll hear them complaining about low attendance at chapter events. But this gripe doesn’t jibe with what the research shows. ASAE’s Decision to Attend study found that 43% of Gen Y and Millennials are attending more association events than ever. In fact, the propensity to attend events is high across all generations.

So, what’s going on? During one of our most popular webinars ever, Adding Snap, Crackle & Pop to Chapter Events, Peggy Hoffman, executive director and president of Mariner Management, identified the culprit behind the attendance challenge: events aren’t providing what people seek.

Do Chapter Events Provide What Your Members Want?

Members are driven by a desire for continual learning. This desire is understandable and necessary. As jobs and required skills change faster than ever, the need for lifelong learning grows.

However, people don’t attend events just for professional development. In many industries, countless organizations provide professional development both in person and online. It’s even a commodity in some professions—whoever offers the lowest price wins the sale.

Besides high-quality education, your events must provide two additional ingredients…

Interaction, Connections & Community

“As humans, we crave interaction and connection. When opportunities for connection are well orchestrated, it makes an event special… groups of people interacting face-to-face and creating shared experiences that stimulate all five senses—that’s the creation of memories,” said Chris Preston, managing director of Freeman EMEA (Europe, Middle East, & Africa).

Sure, educational content is important, but interactions are what attendees remember. They’re more likely to digest, take away, and recall information when they can talk about it while connecting with others who have a similar need for and interest in the content. Chapters shouldn’t only focus on content when planning an event, they must also design an interactive, connection- and community-building learning experience.

“…we crave interaction and connection. It’s groups of people interacting face-to-face and creating shared experiences that stimulate all five senses — that’s the creation of memories.” Peter McGrath, FreemanXP

An Experience to Remember

The new E word in association management is Experience. It now rivals Engagement for mentions in headlines and session titles. No surprise given the increased attention by association professionals to User Experience (UX) as well as Customer (CX), Learner (LX), and even Member Experience (MX). An exercise in member journey (or experience) mapping was a huge hit at the 2018 Association Component Exchange.

The increased focus on experience is also due to the ‘experiential economy.’ An Eventbrite study found that 78% of Millennials would rather spend time and money on experiences—like concerts, travel, festivals, and dining out—than products.

Chapters should pay attention to the preferences of Millennials, the largest generation in the workforce, who are entering their prime earning years. Coming of age during the recession, they’ve dealt with stagnant wages and student loan debt. This generation is the catalyst for the sharing economy—think Uber and Lyft, Bird and Lime, Rent The Runway, and Airbnb.

A luncheon lecture isn’t going to wow them. Besides the desire for interaction, connection, and community, event attendees want a memorable experience.

#1 Show Chapters How to Map the Event Experience

Once members are involved in planning events, it’s natural for them to forget how it feels to be a normal event attendee. They become too invested and naturally biased against seeing it like a ‘normal’ attendee would.

Mapping the event experience helps chapter volunteers understand the event journey from the attendee’s perspective. In this rewarding exercise, you first list all the major touchpoints in the event lifecycle, for example:

• Seeing the first and subsequent announcements and promotions
• Registering and receiving information or interacting before the event
• Arriving on site
• Passing time before the event begins
• Participating in all facets of the event
• Leaving the event
• Receiving information or interacting after the event

The best way to capture this journey is to assign a group of people to take notes before, during, and after an actual event. For each touchpoint, identify opportunities for creating a memorable experience. For example, when can you add moments of power or opportunities to get people into small groups for conversation and connections?

Encourage volunteers to forget everything they know about typical chapter events and think of little touches and big elements that could surprise and delight attendees. What about interesting ways to use the event space? One of the webinar chat participants suggested having a large screen in the registration area showing photos from previous events.

One of Peggy’s chapters is adding free valet parking to an after-work winter event—a sponsor is covering the expense. Parking is available but it’s a cold walk from the lot to the venue and attendees appreciate spending that extra time inside with their peers.

Look at the branding and messaging around each touchpoint. Is it aligned with your goals for the event? Does it reinforce the value of the event? Talk about more tangible ways to communicate your brand and bring your organization’s culture and ethos to life.

Identify any technology that can enhance the attendee journey at each of the touchpoints, maybe a better registration process, a list of registrants so attendees know who else is coming, or an event app. The association event technology marketplace offers lots of options.

Make the journey mapping exercise as simple or comprehensive as you like. You could also map journeys for speakers, sponsors, and exhibitors. Read how we mapped a chapter member journey at the 2018 Association Component Exchange.

#2 Demonstrate Creativity in Action

During chapter leader training events, let them see creativity in action. They’re more likely to try something new that they’ve already experienced or heard about.

Experiment with different training formats at your chapter leadership conference and throughout the year. If you haven’t experimented with videos, podcasts, or webinars, start with those. You’re bound to find something new and interesting in this list of 292 training activities.

#3 Look Outside for New Event Formats

Half-day sessions, luncheons, webinars, yeah, been there, done that. How about looking outside the association world for different event formats? A great place to start is the Meetings category on Associations Now.

Peggy and the webinar chat participants shared these ideas:

• Hackathon: Someone brings a problem and the group solves the issue together.
• Ted Talk-style event: 18-minute presentations are long enough for a speaker to flesh out an idea, but short enough for a listener to digest and understand the most important information.
• Pecha Kucha: In this storytelling format, the presenter shows 20 slides accompanied by 20 seconds of commentary on each, for 6 minutes and 40 seconds total. The slides automatically advance, making the presentation lively and suspenseful.
• Simulcast the meeting so members and their colleagues can participate remotely.

One chat participant suggested asking young professionals for event format ideas: “Give emerging professionals room to run and they will amaze you.”

#4 Teach Chapter Leaders How to Facilitate Meetings

Most people have never been trained to facilitate meetings—a skill that makes a big difference to the event experience. You could offer training in three formats:

1. In-person workshop
2. Online learning program
3. Flipped or blended learning

In a flipped or blended learning approach, chapter leaders attend a webinar on facilitating meetings before the leadership conference. At the conference, they attend a session on practicing the skills they learned.

#5 Change the Chapter Mindset

One of the webinar participants brought up a common problem. Chapter leaders are happy if they just get the same number of attendees each time and don’t lose money. How do we shift their mindset so their goal is to provide a memorable experience, not just maintain attendance?

Peggy shared three ideas for shifting that mindset:

• Offer a different definition of a successful meeting as well as a meaningful metric for them to track. Give chapters an event evaluation form that includes this critical question: ask attendees to describe and score their event experience. Tell leaders the measure of success is the experience rating and not the number of people in the seats. A highly rated experience will lead to higher attendance.
• Hold leaders accountable for new event idea execution. At your chapter leader training, divide them into groups and ask each group to create a new event. Display their ideas like a poster session. Give them time to walk around, take pictures, and discuss what captured their interest. Ask each leader to commit to one of the ideas they saw and report back next year on the results.
• Add innovation awards to your chapter awards program. Give chapters award points for everything they tried to do differently in the past year. Incentivize them to think differently about metrics and reward them for their experiments.

When chapter events become ho-hum predictable, busy members can easily find excuses not to attend. Help chapters understand the need to provide what their members seek—interaction, connections, and community as well as memorable learning experiences—and to think more creatively about the event experience, one that adds Snap Crackle and Pop to their attendee’s day.