« A Dynamic Dozen: The Making of a “Killer App” | Main | The Conference Publishers Turns 25 »
Recycle Your Conference for Fun and Profit
By Andrew Horsfield | October 1, 2009
A few years ago, archaeologists found a small Bronze Age spear point in England. I can’t remember exactly where they found it, but I do remember that they determined the bronze in the spear point had originated in Italy. In fact, an original larger spear point had broken, and then been melted down to make smaller points, since in those days, the effort required to make bronze made it a very valuable metal.
Today we call that recycling. We think it’s a new idea to save the planet, but for thousands of years, people have been recycling almost everything: from the stones they used to construct a building, which were used later to make a bridge; to food scraps they fed pigs on the farm; to scraps of cloth they salvaged from worn clothing, then sewed together to make a quilt.
In those days, everything took a lot of time and effort to harvest or fabricate, so materials were extremely valuable. It was only after the Industrial Revolution made things cheap and easy to manufacture that our “disposable society” came into being.
I have never met a meeting planner who said that a quality conference is cheap and easy to manufacture. In fact, they usually talk about the immense amount of money, time, and effort they spend planning to bring all the right people together, in the just the right place, with just the right mix of formalized and impromptu conference content that makes a conference successful.
And yet, many of them just throw all that time, money, and effort away once the conference is over. Why don’t they recycle and reuse the conference’s content to really make the most of their investment?
To recycle and reuse the content from your conference, you must first capture it in a way that it can be re-purposed for later use. In the most basic terms, that means recording the sessions for downloading onto CDs or the Internet. This kind of recording may be long and cumbersome, but at least people can watch it later.
Or you can write a summary of the sessions and post that online. Invite your members to review the summaries as a membership benefit.
Then, take the same summary and edit it for your newsletter.
Then take the summaries from each session and compile an overall chronological summary of your conference for the next planning committee meeting.
As an added benefit, you can distribute the same summary to your board of directors and stakeholders.
If you include a foreword that analyzes the chronological summary, then aggregates and condenses its themes, then suggests a course of action, you have created a detailed return-on-investment document.
In fact, this whole process does more than demonstrate return on investment on a conference. It actually multiplies it. Once you have the information generated at your conference in a summary form, you will find all sorts of uses for it that fit your unique situation and organization.
But whatever you do, don’t throw away your conference coverage after just one use.
After all that time and effort, it’s far too valuable.
Topics: Meeting Design, Meetings ROI, Meetings Technology, Onsite Learning, Social Media, Virtual Meetings |
Comments Feed
October 2nd, 2009 at 12:42 am
Andrew, you knocked it out of the park with this one!
I appreciate that you not only provided a thoughtful concept but also a step-by-step plan for recycling said content. By posting these summaries and encouraging peer review and input, you are also creating an ROE - or Return on Engagement - document.
As usual, well done!
Midori Connolly, Chief AVGirl
http://www.twitter.com/GreenA_V
January 7th, 2010 at 5:34 pm
Great article - really spot on points about conference content re-usability. Also, it’s important to keep track of what works and what doesn’t so in the future you have some way to continuously measure - “we did this at this conference and got this result” etc, so you know when to try new tweaks on similar ideas.
Thought provoking.