What’s Keeping Planners Up at Night, and What to Do About It

By: Beth Surmont, Head of Strategy & Design

I asked my colleagues: "What’s keeping you up at night right now when it comes to events?"

‍The answers I heard were not surprising:

1. Replacing a retiring audience

2. Retaining first-time attendees

3. Managing budget uncertainty

4. Dealing with late registrations.

All different issues, but all solved with the same tools: reach, relevance, and trust.

If your audience is changing, it is an opportunity for expansion.

Look at your total addressable market, and the adjacent audiences where you can be relevant. The strongest events are positioning themselves as industry hubs, places where people come not just to attend, but to connect, understand, and belong.

It also means building your pipeline to the next generation. They must have voices on committees and advisory groups. Create spaces where they can find their peers quickly. You need to show them that your event is their professional home, and they will only consider it if they see themselves reflected in the event.

Once you have people coming, you have to earn retention, not assume it.

Look through your audience’s eyes and ask yourself: "Is it worth it for them to come to my event?”

If you are offering a series of co-located PowerPoint presentations instead of a cohesive and thoughtful narrative; or leaving it to audiences to find their own connections; or scattering your products across an exhibit floor and hoping people stumble across solutions; then your relevance is in question.

People want to be connected to the right people and the right information. The events that are thriving right now, in spite of headwinds, are offering one or more of these:

• People like me.

• People to solve for me.

• People to buy from me.

• People to help me understand what is going on right now.

That does not “just happen.” It is intentionally designed.

Then there is uncertainty.

This is not new, but the weight feels heavier right now. And we have to carry it differently. Start by identifying the highest impact / highest probability situations. Do you have a lot of government attendees? Is international a big piece of your audience? You should assume that these types of participants will be disrupted and you should make plans now to meet them where they are or provide them post-event access to the most relevant highlights. Showing your audience that you are there for them earns trust.  

Treat uncertainty as a line item in your budget. Proactively prepare your committees and leadership for increased costs. Let them know to prepare for either increased budget or reduced experience. And then for your audience, set the expectations appropriately. You earn trust by being honest. If you can't serve breakfast or a coffee break, let them know the best ways to get it themselves. Point them to a local favorite just around the corner, set up breakfast catalyst meetings, make it into an experience instead of an inconvenience.

And finally, late registrations.

You may not eliminate them, but you can get ahead of them. Quick and simple pulse polls can help you understand their decision process. Also consider special experiences or early access opportunities that can nudge people to commit sooner.

None of these challenges are new, but they all feel amplified in the current moment.

And they all point to the same opportunity: be more intentional about who you serve, how you design for them, and how you earn their trust.