State of Events

If you know me, you know that my heart beats for hand crafted, human curated community events, where you can see and feel that people who care and want to run this event, actually are behind those events. I might be biased, as I myself run an event like this with beyond tellerrand and started another one together with Vitaly back in 2012 with Smashing Conference, where the community spirit also is important for the whole team.

Actually my roots in terms of my events life are based on this. I always loved the personal experience at events, the random things that happen in the breaks and getting to know and meet other people where sometimes those serendipitous meetings turned into friendships and long-term relationships. Yet sometimes even into projects and jobs, which never was planned in the first place.

The things I describe can surely also happen at big, corporate events and those events have their reason to take place. If I would have to pick and choose, I think I’d always go for the smaller, more community driven events, but that surely is a matter of my own taste. I only really wonder and want to understand, why more and more of the smaller events don’t survive and/or need to be cancelled. Many conversations with my friend Keir and also with other event organisers rise the same questions over and over again:

• Why are less companies interested in supporting those smaller events financially (aka sponsoring)? And how can those events make it more attractive or emphasise the benefits of supporting them again?
• Why are attendees buying their tickets so late, which adds to the organisers uncertainty of whether an event will make profit or even only break even?
• Which channels can be used to advertise an event with a smaller budget without paying lots to bypass the algorithms of social media platforms?

Often times it comes down to measuring the success of a sponsorship for companies to decide whether they would sponsor an event again next time. But how do you actually measure success these days? Generating leads like you did back ten or fifteen years ago, where you’d run a raffle and people throw their business cards into a glass bowl, is surely not the way to go anymore. In my opinion it is the conversations you have at events. Especially if you run a booth. The quality of a conversation is tough to measure and evaluate and how would you even report this to the one who decides about the budget for events?

When it comes to getting the tickets early, how can you convince someone to get their ticket early again and with this, support the organisers to plan and run this event with the knowledge that the cost is covered? Even if the actual attendee understands this, they need to report this to their boss paying the ticket in the end and make the boss understand why this is important. If I would not trust in the reputation of beyond tellerrand and it would be a newer event for me, I would cancel the Berlin edition in November due to not enough tickets being sold and not enough partners, aka sponsors, being on board. I am feeling a bit unsure about a recent project Karl Groves and I want to start next year in Washington DC with a new event called Better by Design for obvious reasons and it is so sad for me to see events like Front Conference being cancelled due to exactly this! I know the people running it and if you look at the line-up you see that they made an effort to get new names onto their list.

Conversations with many other event organisers underline the difficulties of selling enough tickets and everybody is talking about the same phenomenon. Are community events maybe something from the past? A relict that the new generation does not need anymore? Well, you know my opinion here. On the other hand my friend Keir sent me the link to this post on Linkedin, where Julius Solaris tries to predict the future of events. I get some of his points (especially those related to environmental aspects), but massively disagree to a lot of other predictions he makes.

Anything AI driven in the curation process for example won’t help towards a better event experience in my opinion. I also surely shiver, when I read his point 17 in which he says that algorithms are going to decide which events you’ll attend! Or no. 18 – “no more fixed agendas, opening keynotes or parties” – who the fuck wants this? Is the shared event experience not why we actually attend events and what we want? Memories we leave an event with and which are the result of someone who deeply cares and who organised and planned this experience for you?

I don’t say that online events or communities as he describes them in no. 19 of his points will have their reason to exist also, but why not in combination or alongside event as we know them. In my opinion, and I think the pandemic and the efforts made during that time to find something that is like the in-person experience have shown also, the dedication and commitment of people who travel to an event and are ready to spend a day, two days or even more including travel is so much bigger than of someone who is in front of their screen, attending an event, where distractions are waiting to ruin the event experience: the dog needs a walk, dinner needs to be made and the actual talk is boring anyways, sun is shining and I can watch the videos later anyways …

In short: I disagree to most points Julius makes about he event experience itself and how AI will help us for better events or a better event experience – “AI will attend on our behalf if there is no one to meet at an event”. I mean, really? You are the one people want to meet.

Concerning the last of the three bullet points, I think it needs us as attendees to broadcast the message. If we attended a good event, we need to speak about it. Even short messages with a few positives aspects that underline why you liked attending do help a lot. Social Media as a tool for event organisers does not really work like it used to be, but is still needed in addition to us attendees. Reposting, quoting and posting from us as attendees helps spreading the information to possible new delegates. Blog posts for longer write-ups in addition also help of course! Photos that capture the joy of being at an event. If you are working for a company or agency, why not having an after-event meeting with your colleagues in which you describe the experience, what you have learned and who the exciting people were, which you have meet? Make it a team experience next time!

I could go on forever, but I think you got my point. Why do you think in-person events are important? Or do you agree to Julius’ view of how future events will look like? What do you think how issues I addressed and other existing problems can be solved? Let me know via email or join our Discord to discuss this or, if you are totally fancy, here is a new Whatsapp channel, I created ;). I am honestly excited to hear you thought.