With so much choice of business events to suit your needs, and increasing availability of low cost travel operators such as EasyJet, the market of potential delegates for your event is likely a discerning one. And few come more discerning than the associations courted by producers and service providers within the market they operate.
The annual Associations Congress is run by the Associations Network, which brings together employees of professional, scientific, medical and business associations, societies, federations and other membership organisations. It claims to be the largest network of association executives outside North America. Now in its eighth year, the congress is a forum for edification and discussion on all matters that appeal to the association events marketplace, the congress aims to provide solutions to the questions asked by its membership base of 15,000.
Executive Director of Associations Network, Damian Hutt, says that to be successful, the audience must be included in the process of establishing this year’s concept, to the moment the speakers and figureheads are on stage, to the dissemination of information that follows.
And most good stories start first by studying your audience. “We’ve been good at professionally researching what associations want to know,” says Hutt. “We have a very professional conference programme researcher whose role it is to interview association employees. That includes different types of associations, some trade and some professional bodies, as well as forums, or indeed federations of associations.
“We talk to all of them, including people with very different responsibilities: the executive director, the events manager, membership and marketing. We invest a lot of time finding out what their issues are and then getting people who have solved those issues – associations that have solved those issues – to come and talk to people and explain how to address these problems.”
Hutt, while working in a previous capacity on the Mobile World Congress, learned it was difficult to get in front of the associations. Other events built around associations were small affairs, struggling to catch the eye of the associations, so Hutt decided to enter the market with a greater proposition. He points out that while associations have a board to select topics, what they don’t have is someone with a background of professionally researching conferences, researching the audience and finding out what it wants to hear.
“If you want people to come all that way, with all that time out of the office, you have to give them a compelling reason to come,” he says. “When someone says ‘I’m having trouble getting delegates to attend’, we see there could be various reasons. It could be the programme is not strong enough; it could be that the marketing isn’t done well enough; it could be that the pricing is wrong. So in one edition we will tackle one area for them, the next year we’ll move that focus somewhere else.”
Keeping it interesting
Brevity is also key for speeches, according to Hutt. “I’ve worked on a lot of conferences where the standard was 40 minutes, 30 minutes presentation and 10 minutes Q&A. And what we’ve focused on here is having something like three 25-minute presentations. Maybe leaving the Q&A segment to a panel format after they’ve all spoken.
“We are very much bringing down the length because we’re bringing down the unnecessary, messy content. It’s about compacting it and getting down to within that length of time.
Hutt works closely with Elling Hamso, Meeting Management Consultant and Managing Partner of Event ROI Institute, as well as meeting design consultant Mike van der Vijver and Jan-Jaap In der Maur from Masters in Moderation. Hamso, for example, works with the congress speakers right up to the event, helping them to provide highly valuable presentations with the assistance of a slide designer.
Value Harvesting
At the other end of course, lies the post-congress follow up. All streams at the Associations Congress are recorded to be made available online to the general public. But Hutt goes a stage further in creating a record of reaction to the presentation. From this they can gauge whether or not the content of a particular session would be worth a half hour’s attention. Names, after all, can be deceiving.
“We end up with 35 webcast recordings, but with the best will in the world these delegates don’t have time to trawl through them all,” says Hutt. “So we’re speaking to delegates after they’ve been to a session, asking them what they liked about it, what would be good for them to put into practice. After a month we find out from them how they went about applying what they learned in the session, what they thought was most interesting.
Hutt plans to make this audio available so that people can just click on the feedback from the event, and then go and see the whole presentation.
“It’s not just about explaining what was interesting, it’s about admitting how you’re going to implement it,” he says. “It’s what we’re trying to extract in the interviews.
As for webcasts, Hutt will probably live broadcast a whole stream from the congress next year.
“The engagement you can provide people by doing that is really important,” he emphasises. “They can put in their questions and have them passed to the speakers by the chairman, they get involved, and as technology gets better and less expensive, then that will become more valuable and people will become more happy to pay.
Business model
Hutt is also offering attendees a further service by offering help with business models for his members’ associations and their products. He says the associations fear change, and the need to adjust their events has become a matter of great significance in recent years.
“Many associations are having problems with their business models. People are coming into the market and setting up a community online, or they’re being encroached on by a commercial organiser moving into that area, perhaps as a result of economic hardship,” he says. Today Hutt works with Ruud Janssen and Roel Frissen from the Centre of Business Model Innovation to help associations implement necessary change with the consent of board members and volunteers who all think they’re running the organisation. “These are the people that need to understand business models and how to articulate them,” he explains.
Hutt, Janssen and Frissen, together with association figureheads including Michael Anderson of the Canadian Society of Association Executives, have become very involved in the generation of new event models, looking at the events of several associations in the process. Hutt claims the fact many associations get as much as 80 per cent of their revenues from their events, makes them nervous about what happens if they change their event programme.
“We’ve come up with six different things that the team will present,” he says. “We’re using this model to help associations say: ‘These people are coming to the market, what are you going to do? Can you change your event this way or that? Perhaps you can move your event here, or have a different type of event. Whatever it takes’.
By exploring this element of association business in detail, getting down to how the financials may be affected, or the consequences of doing one thing over another becomes clear. However, the ability to explain it to the board, members and staff is as important.
“If you’re a corporate, you tell people to do things. You take them with you to a certain extent and things get done,” he says. “When you’re an association, every member thinks they own you. And they do. Which presents a problem for the director of the association. You’ve got to explain to them what the issues are, how you’re going to change it and what effect this will have and why. That’s one of the things we’re working on.”
The next Associations Congress takes place at Swisstech, Lausanne, on 5-7 May 2015.
This was first published in issue 78 of CMW. Any comments? Email Zoe Vernor
