Meetings

Daily Buzz: Help Attendees Apply Conference Learning

Don’t let attendees forget what they’ve learned at your conferences. Set up a communication strategy that prompts them to take action. Also: Tech disruption is still challenging associations.

Many conference attendees come, learn, and leave. The lessons can be insightful and exciting, but after the event it can be hard to apply them back at work—or even remember them at all.

“All those new ideas and contacts? They fall victim to merciless to-do lists and the forgetting curve: People forget 70 percent of what they hear within 24 hours unless they make an effort to retain it,” says the MemberSuite team on its blog.

To ensure that attendees get long-term value from your meeting, help them remember what they learn and turn it into action.

“Invite attendees to opt in to accountability reminders and notifications about resources related to the sessions they attended,” suggests MemberSuite. “Remind them about session slides, handouts, and recordings. Encourage them to make connections (on LinkedIn and your online community) with the people they met at the conference.”

Another idea: Send out prompts to help them reflect on what they’ve learned and how that insight can help them at work. Then, check in a few months later to see how they followed through. If the experience was successful, consider using their testimonials in next year’s event marketing campaign.

Tech and Your association’s future

Technology disruption will continue to make waves for associations in the future. What does that mean for you?

One key issue is that you’ll need to understand how technological change will affect the industry or profession you serve, writes Carol-Anne Moutinho in Association Magazine. Based on that information, you’ll need to identify where you can provide the most value. From there, it’s all about adaptability.

“Adopting flexible structure and processes that enable ongoing adaptation and evolution to survive and thrive in this new state of constant and rapid change” is a major challenge for today’s association leaders, Moutinho says. “Whether it is reducing board size, instituting advisory groups to more rapidly get feedback to drive decisions … finding ways to reduce bureaucracy and redundancy is a central focus for organizations seeking to respond more proactively to the world inside which they operate.”

Other Links of Note

Need to get your team on the same page? The HubSpot blog suggests using one of five personality tests to understand coworkers.

Echo on the go. Amazon unveiled the Echo Loop, a smaller version of the smart device that goes right on your wrist. Business Insider has more.

Taking a different approach to Instagram posts can better engage followers. Sprout Social offers nine ways to spice up your account.

(z_wei/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

Jeff Hsin

By Jeff Hsin

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