Engaging Attendees and Maximizing Attendee Retention
Who
The Client
AENC provides its members high quality professional development and networking opportunities, and fosters recognition and respect for the association management profession. Members include CEOs and staff of associations across North Carolina, as well as representatives from the association service and hospitality industries.
Needs
The problem and goals
AENC is one of the organizations I belong to. I spend a lot of time networking and providing professional development and wine experiences. It is a great group of people that are loyal to the organization and know how to balance a high level of professionalism with fun.
Like any conference organizer knows, it’s like playing conductor to orchestrate a successful event that provides high value to all attendees.
One constant struggle is the last speaking slot of the day, which is the bridge to evening networking and interacting with sponsors and exhibitors.
Goal One: design an interactive speaking session that would be educational and fun to entice people to stay and interact.
Goal Two: To showcase a unique way of providing educational content while also helping relationship building and encourage in person participation.
Solution
What we designed
We created a speaking topic of Edutainment” for the last speaking slot on day one of the conference.
Edutainment is an experience design realm where the participants are active in the learning as well as entertained.
Two of the three tracks on day one ended with our Edutainment speaking session.
Specifics
Event details
The educational portion focused on team decision making methods including hierarchical and consensus. We discussed the value in understanding how the roles change for team members depending on the form of decision making assigned, and how this knowledge and understanding leads to higher productivity and alignment.
We then played Wine Detective. Wine Detective has its own set of wine education, but the format of small teams competing to solve a case using blind tasting, allowed us to put into practice one form of decision making.
For this group, we chose consensus decision making, which is the hardest since it involves everyone coming to an agreement on the final decision and to uphold the decision in support of the team.
With many folks in the room knowing a lot about wine, it was very interesting to see the team communicate and work together to solve the case and agree on the answers.
But most of all, it was fun. Working together, sharing wine experiences and work stories, led to a lot of laughter and getting to know each other through this shared experience.
We had a great turnout and were able to keep the numbers much higher than average for the last speaking slot of the day. Additionally, the discussion of the experience led to a very active networking event which followed the session.
Testimonial
Feedback and outcomes
Thank you for the testimonial!
A huge thank you to the wonderful folks at AENC; Rich, Madi and Julie!
