Take Networking Up a Notch

“Sometimes when we’re hosting an event, we’re not necessarily putting ourselves in our participants’ shoes,” Kaiser said. Meeting planners organize beautiful receptions with great settings and elegant food and drinks. But once they’ve staged the environment, “then it’s up to members to do their thing.” A better plan is to curate the experience for attendees and facilitate conversations when everyone gets together, she says.

Audience Participation

As more conferences return in person, networking opportunities will need to be “baked into everything,” said Sarah Michel, CSP, vice president of professional connexity at Velvet Chainsaw Consulting. Going back to the pre-pandemic formula of a session followed by a 15-minute break isn’t going to cut it.

“You have to really reimagine it and realize that community and connection are what people are really starving for,” she said.

Michel recommends working with speakers in advance and investing in training and coaching to get speakers to provide more evidence-based, interactive education, which can fuel networking among attendees. Start with the speaker RFPs and make it clear from the beginning that 35 to 45 percent of the presentation should involve the audience.

“What people really want when they’re coming to a meeting is to solve a problem and find a solution,” Michel said. So why not leverage the intellectual equity in the room and get attendees more engaged? “The speaker is not the smartest person in the room anymore.”

A common issue with hybrid conferences is that the in-person audience doesn’t network with the virtual audience. A good way to bridge that gap is to have a content weaver, emcee, or moderator to keep the virtual audience engaged, Michel says.

“It’s a role that’s not a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have,” she said. The moderator doesn’t have to be a professional—a board member or a staff person who is naturally good at facilitation or has some training could do the job.

Helping your attendees network effectively is more important now than ever as people crave the professional connections and personal interactions they’ve been missing throughout the pandemic. The most successful meetings do more than set a stage: They actively encourage participation and provide an atmosphere, virtually and in person, that makes it easy and natural for people to engage.