The Conference Nobody Needed

It's the afternoon of day two. You're at the back of a hotel ballroom set for four hundred, and a third of the seats are full. The twelve people the conference was for left after lunch to catch flights. The panel on stage is good, and the people who needed to hear it are on their way to the airport.

Three weeks later the report arrives with attendance and a satisfaction score. The team agrees it went well. You still can't say what it changed for the business.

The conference ran well. Your team skipped one check before booking it: did the goal need a conference at all?

Last year's calendar decides

If your conference is on the calendar because it was on last year's calendar, someone chose the format before your team wrote down the goal. Someone holds the venue and sets the date, and the brief arrives later to describe a decision that's already made. We wrote about that pattern in Your Q4 Brief Is Already Late.

A conference is also easy to approve. Your finance team knows what one looks like, and the photos prove it happened. Neither tells you whether it was the right answer.

The cost is bigger than the budget line, too. Two days for four hundred guests adds up to eight hundred working days between them, before you count the flights.

Two goals that need a full room

A conference is worth its time and money when the goal needs a lot of people in one place at the same time. Two kinds of goal need that.

The first is a group that needs to meet each other: partners who should be working together, or a community that has only met online. If the value sits in the connections between your guests, a webinar can't give you that.

The second is a public moment. A launch or a commitment sometimes needs witnesses, and being in the room is the point.

Even then, the connections don't happen on their own. Paul Ingram and Michael Morris of Columbia Business School studied a mixer attended by about 100 business people. The guests were much more likely to talk to people they already knew, even though most had said beforehand that they came to meet new people (Administrative Science Quarterly, 2007). If meeting new people is your goal, someone has to design the room for it, down to who sits with whom and what gives two strangers a reason to talk.

Smaller formats for other goals

If the goal names twelve accounts you want to know better, a conference for four hundred puts those twelve in a crowd. A dinner for twelve, or twelve dinners, puts them across the table from you.

If the goal is a sales team using new pricing by next quarter, a keynote is a hard place to learn it. A working session and a page they can keep come closer.

Both cost less time and money than a conference. Both also make the result easier to see, because you can name who was there and check what they did next.

The check we run before anyone books a venue

We ask two questions, in this order. The first is the sentence we ask for before starting anything:

What has to be true ninety days after this ends for it to have been worth doing, and who specifically has to believe it?

The second follows from the answer: does that need these people in one room, at the same time?

If yes, it's a conference, and the design starts from the moment that needs the room. The measurement goes in before the doors open, so the report can show what changed as well as who came. The Three Reports sets out what that report looks like for the people who will ask for it.

If no, the conference is still your call. You'll be making it knowing what it's for.

Sometimes the answer is both: a smaller format does the work, and a short gathering at the end marks it in public.

Does your goal need a room?

Conferences and events is one of our four practices, and the same measurement runs underneath all four. It starts with putting the goal somewhere your tools can count it, a lesson we learned on our own marketing.

If something on your calendar is a conference because last year's was, take the Brief Diagnostic.

It is a free 30-minute conversation with the team where you either bring the brief you have, or an idea of what you need to achieve. We'll work through what the event has to make true and whether it needs a room to do it.

No pitch. No deck. Just the questions we would ask anyway.