Perhaps more than any one product and service an association provides, meetings are the industry’s proof of concept. If “belonging” is the main reason people join an association, as studies bear out, then opportunities to connect with people in the field is a critical part of an association’s success.

But even veteran meeting planners would likely agree that meetings achieve belonging imperfectly. Is that name tag really communicating meaningful information about that stranger next to you at the session? Do those meet-and-greet mixers do right by introverts? Connection is forever a work in progress when it comes to events.

For the latest group of Associations Now Deep Dives, I spoke with a few experts about how association meetings can do more to cultivate “hallway moments”—serendipitous connections with the people who can be valuable to attendees personally and professionally, if only they had the opportunity to meet them. 

Technology, as facilitator Jeffrey Cufaude pointed out to me, can only do so much to encourage belonging. A conference app, for instance, “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.”

One thing the pros I spoke with recommended is to look for spaces that have long been treated like dead zones. The registration line should be more than a place to pick up your badge, Cufaude suggests; it can be a place that sorts attendees by interest, nudging those with shared experiences closer together. And Lee Gimpel, a meetings consultant, noted that those familiar nametags can do more to highlight the kind of expertise an attendee has—or is looking for.

Gimpel also notes that planners can do more on the front end to determine what “belonging” specifically means for this group, at this meeting. “A fundamental step that I go through with associations and conference planners is to ask who among the participants should meet and what does a home-run meeting look like?” she says. “Is it buyers and sellers? Is it liver researchers and heart researchers?… Once we start thinking more intentionally, strategically, and purposefully about who should be meeting and why, then we start to think about how to design a conference that makes that happen.”

Another important point that both Cufaude and Gimpel stressed is that the “hallway moments” problem identifies the issue right in its name: Why are we relegating connection and belonging to the spaces between sessions and events, and not making those things the event itself? “Almost all events put up a Great Wall between content sessions and networking sessions, or content spaces and networking spaces,” Gimpel says. “It should be subtly baked into everything that’s happening so people are fluidly meeting others rather than just getting dumped into a room with a cheese plate and hoping magic will happen.”

Doing that requires restructuring the way that many sessions run: more interaction within sessions, smaller groups and tables, more opportunities for attendees to regularly speak to presenters in-session instead of afterward. That will require more effort on the front end on the planners’ part, but Cufaude suggests creating that elusive belonging will be worth it. “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.”