Our Guide to Organise a Conference That Stands Out
Organising a conference that leaves a lasting impression requires careful planning, creativity, and a seamless experience for attendees. Regardless of the scale or type of event you’re organising, every detail matters, and a successful conference can work wonders for your organisation. From large-scale industry summits to thought leadership events, every opportunity is unique and can achieve a range of goals.
We’ve put together this helpful guide for organising a conference that will stand out from the crowd while engaging and inspiring your target audience.
Understand Your Goals and Audience
When curating a luxury event, it’s important to establish exactly what you’re trying to achieve. For example, the purpose of organising a conference could be a product launch, to share industry insights, or simply to gather professionals to encourage collaboration. So, make sure you look at the bigger picture before you search online for suppliers and get quotes from potential venues.
Understanding your goals helps you shape every decision, whether it’s creative aspects such as choosing speakers or key ideas like defining the format. From here, you’ll also need to invest time into getting to know your audience. It’s not just about who they are and what they do but also about learning what challenges they face and what they hope to gain from your event.
Choose the Right Venue
Finding the right venue and securing it is among the most important tasks when organising a conference. Not only does it set the tone for the event and help to support themes or aesthetics, but it also must accommodate essentials like capacity and location.
However, you should also be thinking beyond things like capacity and location. Does your venue appropriately reflect your brand? Is accessibility suitable for all attendees? Does it have the tech capabilities for speakers and presentations? The venue isn’t just a location; it should enhance the entire event experience, no matter if you opt for a modern inner-city space or an offbeat historic location.
Inspire Engagement and Build Anticipation
Passive listening and absorbing knowledge may be informative, but it’s not the most effective way to draw in an audience. We’ve all been at a work event or conference with little to no interactivity or excitement. Today’s attendees want interaction and collaboration and, ultimately, to feel like they’re a part of the experience.
With this in mind, it’s a good idea to provide a range of activities to boost engagement and suit varying needs. Combining informative talks with hands-on workshops, live Q&As, and even breakout sessions is a great way to involve and inspire your audience. Additionally, a creative marketing strategy during the build-up will help to drive attendance and build anticipation.
A Seamless Experience On the Day
Organising a conference takes time, money, energy, and plenty of creativity—but none of that matters if the event is a stressful and frantic affair. With any event, you should aim for simplicity and seamlessness for attendees, allowing them to fully immerse themselves in everything. However, achieving this means you’ll have to be prepared and make sure that everything is double, nay triple-checked, well ahead of the event.
This is where partnering with an event agency plays such a big role in organising a conference that makes an impact. Working with event planners puts the responsibility in the hands of experienced professionals with high-level expertise and industry connections. That means peace of mind for your team and a wonderfully seamless experience for attendees, where people can simply turn up on the day and enjoy themselves.
Keep the Event Momentum Going
The thing with event planning is that the work doesn’t stop when your conference does. Even after the last session wraps up, it’s important to keep the momentum going by sharing takeaways across all platforms as well as internal and user-generated content. Also, strategic follow-ups with attendees are effective for circulating post-event materials and encouraging continued engagement.
The post-event analysis stage is crucial for gathering feedback through surveys, engagement metrics, and assessing how well you met your goals. This is another area where working with an event agency can prove to be crucial now and in the future. Using their experience and industry knowledge, professional event planners can help you understand what aspects worked (and what could be improved) to set you up for even greater success next time you’re organising a conference.
Why Partner with Word on the Street?
Word on the Street specialises in designing and delivering bespoke events to stand out and make an impact for brands. Our team of dedicated event planners will take care of every detail, from concept to execution, to organise a truly unforgettable event for your business. Are you organising a conference but need expert help to make your vision a reality? Let’s talk!
Get in touch today to discuss your ideas with our team and find out how we can bring your event to life.