Event and Experience: did the pandemic make yours the “can’t miss” or the “must skip”?

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard in passing at a Zoom event or even an in-person networking event, “I just want to get back in-person like things used to be before COVID.” This nostalgic thinking for a bygone time is most frequently voiced by those who produced, staged, or presented at the events, though, and are a lousy way to guide how audiences will consent to be brought together today and tomorrow. By today’s audience values and needs, many of our past “can’t miss” events are becoming “must skip” events absent some massive reinvention on the part of the conveners and producers and hosts. 

I got my start creating innovative experiences for best-in-class clients, and as I work on building data driven transformational experiences for innovative communities, I see that the rose colored glasses of “how things used to be” are scratched up, fogged, and often horribly out of style. Nostalgia focuses on a few familiar details we liked back then instead of the real issues that matter today. In my innovation practice and in the broader economy, it’s clear that the best experience professionals are not defined by the physical tools they have used, they’re defined by the real problems they solve:

Who:  Who is able to participate? Who is featured?

In addition to demonstrating that business could be conducted without getting on a plane, online events transformed who an event audience was and who got heard. People who were on the fringes and unable to attend long our old-paradigm events could suddenly participate as attendees and speakers. The old excuse for manels and lily white speaker rosters - that “we don’t have that much diversity in our field” suddenly evaporated even as millions of people left the workforce or moved to new jobs. Your audience is probably different than you remember, and they want representation, access, and respect to gain their trust.

What: What gets talked about? What happens while we gather? What are the outcomes? 

After you address the question of “Who,” you have to get on with what happens. Letting an old timer drone on telling industry war stories on a panel is going to drive your audience away today, but it was more commonplace than we like to admit just a few years ago, and makes him look bad as it alienates your audience. Today the content needs to be intentional, engaging, concise, and result in an outcome. This doesn’t happen by accident, no matter how unscripted you want it to appear. Will you risk losing an audience by only being in person, or will you incorporate hybrid experiences? The pre-event communication is more than promotion, too, it should be based on real audience concerns and should prepare them for the transformative experience you better be crafting. During or post-event, something needs to happen. Without a memorable outcome, your audience stops caring.

Why: Why should I participate? Why should I care? Why should we trust each other? Why will this matter?

If we're honest, many past attendees were there out of habit, not to participate. Two pandemic years of being stuck at home endlessly scrolling, binge streaming, and being subjected to disinformation taught us all to be very cynical. On Zoom and other platforms, many also learned they could attend multiple events per day without leaving home, so many acquired the habit of attending without paying attention, investing less of themselves and robbing our online and hybrid experiences of energy. The disillusionment driving the Great Resignation is real in your audience, too, so now if we squander our audience's time or attention we can lose them forever. Shared purpose today is probably more important than you’ve ever experienced professionally. How you create common ground and shared purpose in an audience that brings different expectations and career/life experiences has never been more critical.

Metrics: What does success look like? How is it measured?

A colleague shared with me that his client measured success by how likely an audience member was to consider attending the same event in a year. A different client measured success based on how happy attendees were with the food and beverage and venue. These have no relation to the Who, What, and Why of above and are actually indicators of a ready to fail experience. Successful programs I’ve worked with use real data, not just surveys, to measure success by asking the data questions like, “How many meaningful new connections were made?”, “What new initiatives are succeeding because of the experience?”, and “How much more purpose and energy did participants gain from gathering?”

As much as everyone wants to get back to in person events and experiences, things have changed a lot - and continue to change rapidly - since the good old days of late 2019 and early 2020. 

The changes in this new territory are not trivial - layoffs, pandemics, lockdowns, geopolitical strife, social divisiveness, inflation, the Great Resignation, supply chain fragility, and values-oriented expectations all loom as concerns for your stakeholders, while hybrid event models, “entertain me now” production expectations from 2 years of streaming binges, and a traumatized hospitality industry struggling to restart impact you. How we navigate this new territory is a sign of our ability to adapt and thrive for our audiences. These audiences will find somewhere else to go if we can’t meet their needs.

We need to adapt to new opportunities, too. How will you and your team blaze a new trail without getting run over by someone more responsive, resourced, connected, or trusted than you? Are you strategic or tactical? If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything you encounter is going to be treated like a nail. With a myopic focus on your one tool, you’re a tactician being disrupted one day at a time. With a perspective on the opportunity and openness to new tools, you’re a strategist able to adapt and thrive no matter what the world throws at you.

Tactical people might avoid some disruption, but they never create new value so they die sooner or later (sooner in a rapidly changing world). Strategic people and organizations are always adding to their tool set, never letting the tools make the decisions, as they create new value by asking who, what, why, and how it can be measured. They disrupt the status quo and reap the benefits.

Here’s hoping you're an disruptive experiential strategist rather than a disrupted tactician!