Meeting attendees are seeking more opportunities for learning outside the traditional session, according to a new report, and open to various learning formats if networking is included.

The second part of Unlocking XLNC, a report by meeting logistics company Freeman, was released late last month. Based on a survey of more than 2,500 attendees and more than 800 exhibitors, it found that attendees would prefer to spend a majority of their time (54 percent) “outside traditional session rooms.” As the report puts it: “Designing for learning inside the conference room is necessary. Designing for it everywhere else is just as important, and most events haven’t caught up to that yet.”

But Freeman SVP of Strategy Ken Holsinger cautions that meeting planners need to better organize what that kind of education looks like.

“The irony is that though we call it ‘unstructured learning,’ much of it needs to be more structured,” he said. “Who’s in charge of it, and what does that look like? How do you program for it and measure it, and actually bring structure to this Wild West of spaces? Some of it will, by necessity, be left to serendipity and out in the fringe, but much of it needs more discipline and rigor.”

The study found that attendees do have clear demands for unstructured learning: The top preferences include “discovery of new products/services” (50 percent), sharable insights (40 percent), applicability to work (40 percent), and peer-to-peer interaction (35 percent).

Related to the finding on interaction, Holsinger said a common throughline throughout the research is an enthusiasm for networking.

“Almost whatever question we ask [attendees], they said, ‘I want to connect with other people,’” he said. “You see it come up over and over and over again, so the takeaway for me is: Give them space to do it.”

That means a packed schedule of classroom sessions may not be as appealing as some planners think. “The loud shout from the attendees that you see in the data is: ‘Give me space, maybe a longer time between sessions intentionally,’” Holsinger said. “Give us time afterwards to breathe.”

The report also challenges the conventional wisdom that attendees are averse to sponsored education sessions. A majority (54 percent) are neither positive nor negative about them, and 30 percent are somewhat or extremely positive about them. The key factors are whether the subject matter is relevant, whether the speaker has true expertise on the topic, and if the organizers are transparent about its sponsored status. 

Holsinger said organizers and sponsors can assemble a successful session—and alleviate skepticism that it’s a glorified sales pitch—by leaning hard into expertise.

“Often organizers are going out and trying to find an independent expert, and sometimes that’s almost impossible,” he said. “Particularly in large tradeshow environments, if you’re at CES and there’s a massive electronics manufacturer, their subject matter experts are some of the best in the world, and the attendees recognize that. But the organizer has to make it clear this can’t be a sales pitch. The attendees will vote with their feet.”