Strategic Serendipity at Meetings

Association meeting planners deploy a variety of strategies to get attendees mingling and networking: cocktail events, dedicated connection lounges, snack centers in the venue hallways. But engagement is often imperfect, and those infamous “hallway conversations” always feel too short. Is there a better way?

Lee Gimpel, founder and principal of Better Meetings, an events consulting firm, says that there is, but it requires planners to take a step back and ask some baseline questions about the meeting’s purpose.

“The first big question I would ask [as a planner] is, ‘Why do people go to our conference?’” he says. “I think a lot of associations get this wrong. They say, ‘Attendees really love the content.’ But people almost never say, ‘My God, I loved the PowerPoint presentations.’ They’ll say they met a research collaborator, or a mentor, or they got a new job because they went.”

To that end, Gimpel recommends striving to create experiences where people can announce throughout the conference what their professional needs are, and better broadcast it. For instance, it makes sense that name tags at conferences include attendee names. But those tags can also serve as meaningful conversation prompts by including the top thing they’re looking for assistance with.

Structured for Surprise

Jeffrey Cufaude, a professional facilitator and former association executive, notes that conference apps can help with creating connections, but only go so far. “The primary thing they do is help you find someone that you can schedule a time to meet with, and that’s good, but that doesn’t really create a sense of community,” he says. “It doesn’t expose me to a lot of people, and it requires me to make a fair amount of upfront effort prior to the event, and for the other person to do the same thing.”

A better way, Cufaude says, is to build serendipitous but meaningful connections into the in-person conference experience, starting with the place everyone goes: the registration area. He proposes a model where instead of the usual airport-style check-in area, break up registration desks by discipline, or region, or another way that makes sense for the group, to allow for groups with similar interests to meet and connect.

Moreover, speakers should be encouraged to support connections: “[Meeting planners] want to communicate, ‘Here’s what we’re trying to do, and here’s why, and here’s the value that we think it brings, and here’s how you can help with that,” he says. “You want to give session presenters something that doesn’t require significant effort on their part but articulating it all the way from the call for program proposals. You want to be clear: This is an expectation, but we’ll make it easy for you to do this.”

Other elements of the conference experience seem designed to stifle rather than encourage connection. Consider the typical circular table at a conference: six feet in diameter, seating up to a dozen people. Communication is hard, as is consensus among strangers in a group that large.