Most event organisers aren’t trying to exclude people. But when it comes to neurodivergent attendees, that’s exactly what’s happening – unless you're planning with inclusion in mind from the very beginning.

In this episode, Clare chats with Andy Williamson, founder of Welcome Brain, about what a neuro-inclusive event actually looks like (and what it doesn’t). They talk about why making your event accessible for different types of brains isn’t just ethical – it’s practical. It increases your potential audience, boosts attendee satisfaction, and doesn’t have to blow the budget.

Expect honest chat about small changes that make a big difference, why slapping a coloured lanyard on someone isn’t the solution, and how asking for advice (instead of feedback) can go a long way.

What we cover:

– Why “we’ve never had any neurodivergent attendees” is a self-fulfilling prophecy

– The 3-tier checklist that helps you plan better events (even if your budget is zero)

– What not to do when trying to be inclusive (hint: don’t out people with a lanyard)

– How filming a 15-minute “how to get here” video makes a surprising difference

– The real reason your event space might feel like a battery farm

– Why including people is, funnily enough, the essence of inclusion

– How small acts of empathy boost connection and attendee loyalty

Chapters:

00:00 – What we mean by neuro-inclusion

02:19 – Andy’s background & why Welcome Brain exists

04:04 – Personalising events for how adults actually work

05:17 – 85% of neurodivergent people are skipping your event – here’s why

08:30 – It’s not just ‘them’ – most of us benefit from more human events

09:27 – Good intentions that go wrong

11:34 – Personalisation, empathy, and how the checklist works

13:09 – Ask your attendees: how can we make this better?

14:09 – Why lived experience matters in the planning team

15:25 – The disability comparison: visible vs invisible needs

16:43 – No-budget options: start with the Silver tier

18:15 – Tackling scepticism and “we’ve never had anyone ask…”

20:08 – Rethinking networking and connection

21:56 – Breaking away from warehouse layouts and long-term venue contracts

23:16 – Why the events industry is actually well placed to lead on this

25:33 – Final thoughts: the small things really do matter

Find out more:

🧩 The free neuroinclusion checklist: welcomebrain.com

📧 Contact Andy: andy@welcomebrain.com

mentioned eventwell https://eventwell.org/

Ready to dive deeper? Download your free guide, five ways to elevate your attendee experience without breaking the bank HERE

Connect with Clare:

WEBSITE

LINKEDIN

YOUTUBE

welcome back to not the same as last year, the podcast for everyone and anyone who is trying to make, events less boring and more human. So today we're going to talk about something that I think is often overlooked in event planning and it shouldn't be, and that is neurodiversity, because how inclusive really are our events?

when it comes to the brains in the rooms. And I don't just mean putting in ramps and quiet rooms and things like that. I mean, considering the whole of an experience from registration to networking to the dreaded panels, is it generally designed to work for everybody? And therefore, is it designed to work for people with neurodivergences? So my guest for this is Andy Williamson. He is the founder of Welcome Brain and he's someone who's been working with people with neurodiversities.

for over a decade. His background is in education and mental health, and his mission is very simple. If you give people better support, you will get better outcomes. That's not just for them, but for the team, for the organization, for the event, whatever it is. So welcome, Andy.

Thank you, thank you for having me.

I can get into all the things that I rage about at events that are not helping people, but I think maybe we'll start with you and your background and how you got into this field.

Yeah, I started off in education and mental health. I was living and working in America in Seattle, and I was working with students, teenagers who were neurodivergent, who had additional support needs. And I was working with them one-on-one, sort of private tutoring. And it became really clear when you work with people one-on-one and you teach them and you convey information in the way that they like information to be conveyed, that people can really thrive. And I was working with students who...

had difficulties in a traditional classroom environment, as many people do, and they were failing their classes. But if you work with them one-on-one and you say, well, actually, let's learn in this way, they were really, really thriving. And it made it clear to me that we don't really do that for adults. We don't really do that on a sort of an industrial in a professional context. So I moved back to the UK. I sold my education and my mental health businesses. And Welcome Brain is the latest iteration, I think, of that same concept.

that for too long we've made individuals conform to institutions and traditions, but actually now we have the capacity and the technology and the mindset to allow institutions to fit individuals and we see much better outcomes if we do do that. So welcome brain, we work with businesses, with organizations to help them become more neuro-inclusive and we've done a lot of work in the events industry The most notable element of that is

we published a neurodiversity and events checklist. in partnership with the Association of British Professional Conference Organizers and with the Edinburgh International Conference Centre to create a toolkit to make events neuroinclusive. So if you're planning an event, you can use this free toolkit to help you work through all of those stages from the very beginning, from registration and check-in to networking to the food.

to every element of it. So you can actually plan a neuro-inclusive event that includes everybody.

all of those elements when you said that we don't talk about the way adults learn, I mean, we don't talk about the way anybody learns our traditional education system, which tends to be the default and I think is definitely where most events, ⁓ obviously, we're always talking about business events here, but where business events tend to go is well, that's the way we've always learned. We're so institutionalized to do that. And we just follow the sort of what seems familiar.

even when it's not particularly good for you. You we all know that. I if you've done any degree of therapy, counseling, looking into yourself, you'll realize that we all go for the familiar because even if it's not good for us, it's just, it's our default mechanism. And I feel like events has done that. And we're so lucky now there is so much out there to help us personalize, suppose, for it. We talk about the personalized journey within retail and when you're buying things and when you people come to your website, how is it going to get them through? And yet we just,

somehow miss it once these really key simple ways forward. So I'm really excited about checklist. And I would say to people, It's got to be absolutely intentional from the beginning. That list should be next to you or on your computer when you start planning your event, shouldn't it?

Yeah, absolutely. mean, there was a really interesting study done by a company called Eventwell, who are down in London, and they found that 85 % of neurodivergent people won't attend an event if they think it's not neuroinclusive. And so thinking it's not neuroinclusive means this event is explicitly said to be neuroinclusive. So just, you know, purely from a math perspective, from a profit perspective, if 85 %

Yes, we do them.

of the 20 % of the population who are neurodivergent aren't attending your event. That's about one in six people in the population won't go to your event. If you're not advertising it, marketing it as being neuro inclusive from the very beginning. So yeah, this is something that needs to be done right from the outset.

That's really interesting. So people who know they have a neurodivergency will actually be looking to see if your event is proclaiming to be that before they even go.

Yeah, absolutely. I think an event, particularly sort of a large conference can be exceptionally daunting for everybody, but that's particularly true if you are neurodivergent, there's a lot of additional sort of stresses involved. so an event that is explicitly marketed as being neuro-inclusive is one that has taken heed of that and has put things in place to, to mitigate the stresses. that's very comforting,

neurodivergent people are a wide community of people and the old joke is if you've met one neurodivergent person, you've met one neurodivergent person because everybody's truly unique and has different requirements. But across a conference, particularly a multi-day conference, there are so many potential triggers or potential areas of stress that it just can be a nightmare.

I think as well, a lot of people will be saying, I have a neurodivergency that never had said it before. You kind of realize that certain people that you've met throughout your life were probably on one of those spectrums. And it makes you more.

I hope forgiving of any moments you had when you difficult with that person also makes you probably feel a bit guilty that you didn't realize that about that person and you had expectations that they could never have met because they weren't in that same place as you all those kind of things. and you're seeing it in yourselves. No doubt. I definitely see elements in myself and in my family members and you think, well, all those people now would be turned off coming to an event.

and just won't go because as they understand themselves, they'll go, this is going to be a place that's going to trigger me or be a problem for me. And in the past they would have gone maybe because they had to for work. Now they'll just go, nah, that's not good for me. So you really are chopping off a huge chunk of your income if you're not making it right for them.

Yeah, absolutely.

And you know what, Claire, as well, that number is only getting bigger as well. So we always talk about 15 to 20 % of people are neurodivergent. But if you look at statistics, I'm based in Scotland, so the statistics for Scottish teenagers are between 40 and 50 % of them either have additional support needs or ⁓ neurodivergent. and what's more, they're not silent about it as well. The Gen Zs are awesome when it comes to demanding ⁓ accommodations or adjustments. They're really comfortable with the language of ⁓

Yeah.

neurodiversity. So in the next decade, this is going to be something that event organizers have to take into because pretty soon we're getting up to almost 50 % of the population are going to be requiring these adjustments.

Yeah, if the ethical argument doesn't persuade you about being neuro inclusive, then the profit argument should you're missing out on people who would be attending your event.

from a financial perspective, this is something that has to happen.

Well, I would argue that it's probably even more than that. think, as you say, we're all blooming unique. So we all have different needs and we all have things. And I know I'm an event host. I'm allegedly ⁓ an extrovert person who can go to event and feed off the energy. I tell you, I get exhausted a couple of days after an event because I've been all out there. So there's elements of me that needs it. I will run to that choir room. I love the event world space. I always want to know where that is at big conferences because just

Mm-hmm.

five minutes, 10 minutes of being able to go and just find myself again is so effective for me. And I have not been diagnosed with a neurodivergency, but I'm seeing in myself elements where the traditional way of doing things isn't necessarily ideal for me. And I think if most people were honest, they would say that too. So we've been kind of talking about all of that. Let's get into the common assumptions maybe that are put into events where people think they're being helpful

probably aren't or they're just not getting it quite right.

don't want to call people out who have had the best intentions or anything like that. of the most common refrains we hear when we speak to people who working through the checklist is to say, well, I didn't realize how simple some of these steps were. true. And also that people don't want to necessarily engage with making their event neuro-inclusive because they're daunted by it. They're scared of doing it wrong and getting canceled or anything like that.

No, don't. Keep an eye on

But what we always say is doing 50 % of the checklist is better than doing 0 % of the checklist. think sometimes people think, if we can't do all of the checklist, there's no point doing any of it. But to go back to your question, something that is well-intentioned but sometimes backfires. I've seen people say, what we can do is we can have lanyards of different color for people who are neurodivergent, because then we can help identify they might have additional needs, which

it's all done with the best of intentions, but sometimes people who are neurodivergent don't necessarily want to be of identified and stand out. it can be a bit of a minefield and, you know, every person is an individual. So it's about respecting that. And you've hit already on the two core kind of thematic elements of putting the checklist together. The first one is personalization, allowing people to have a truly individual experience. And the other one is empathy responding

on a person by person basis. So those are the two key ideas. So oftentimes people go in with the best of intentions, but I mean, that's why we built the checklist because this is designed to be a foolproof guide to help work you through the steps. And we're certainly not saying that the checklist is perfect. We're still revising it now and we still get comments and feedback and changing things. So one of the most recent bits of feedback we got was use of cutlery. So

for OCD for example, some people like to bring their own cutlery to events because they don't necessarily want to share. And we had, you know, a very senior person messages and say that that's actually a bit of a problem because you're enabling a lot of the difficulties that OCD people have. And so we, in with various experts and each of the experts had something slightly different about what best practice was in that case. So yeah, it can be very difficult I do understand it. So.

Sometimes you have to hedge a little bit, but that's where being empathetic, being personalizing of experiences and being flexible really comes into it.

you know, so many points that you the one that comes up that I was just thinking about that cutlery because you can see people go, health and safety. I don't want everybody walking in with their own knives and forks and stuff, which is you're not opening the door to everybody bringing the knives and forks. You're being empathetic to that one person to whom it really matters

But also the other idea you said about being counselled, which that came to mind when you said label your event as neurodiverse, if it is to help people, I guess as a fear of if we say we're neurodiverse and we get something wrong,

That's almost worse than just trying to make as much nice as we can. can see people, know, I've got the kind of questions I get, which is we're way too scared of calling ourselves a neurodiversity special event or an event that's for people with neurodiversities or, you know, can help them because what if we mess it up? We'll be cancelled.

Yeah, I mean again with the checklist if you complete level of the checklist, so there's three tiers you can do silver gold or platinum level gold is designed for events that have no budget whatsoever Silver is slightly bigger events of platinum is the giant ones and so if you if you complete a stage of the checklist We can the event on your behalf.

we'll go through it with you and say, yeah, okay, we agree. And so you're able to use that then on your marketing. I would suggest probably then maybe you're outsourcing some of the risk of being canceled to us. But one of the things you can always do if you're not sure, if you don't want to work through the checklist, you can always say, we're aiming to make this event a very neuro inclusive event. want to hear from you.

If you have any requirements or adjustments or anything we can do to make your life easier, let us know about it. That would be a good example of ⁓ flagging up that you want to make this neuro inclusive without promising the world and potentially under delivering.

that's brilliant. mean, I'm always like, get your attendees involved earlier. I know people to send huge, great, big pre-event questionnaires because that does everybody's head in, but You've got to ask them what they want. You you're coming to my event. Tell us about specific needs that you have. Tell us about things that you would like to see at events. People want to be asked for their kind of views on it. The amazing woman, I think she's great. don't know if you know her, Victoria Matey, who talks about

brain friendly events for everybody. And she's always saying ask for advice because people love to give advice, don't they? You'd love it if someone says, I want your advice rather than that dreadful feedback word So it's just those kinds of things.

Yeah.

Well, the person needs to feel enabled and included and know that what they say is going to matter. And when you get told, we're listening to what you say and we're going to put it in. And then when you turn up at the event and say, we've tried to put in all these things you asked for, you're instantly forgiving of any errors, I suppose, because you know that they're trying and that's what most of us want, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, well, you're right. mean, it sounds obvious, but the essence of inclusion is including people. that raises a point about neuroinclusion as well, is trying to include neurodivergent people in the planning process. If you have neurodivergent people on your team, there's a danger always of neuroinclusion people. A neurotypical person puts these in place and said, well, that should be good for neurodivergent people. But actually, you need to...

ask the attendees if they have any specific requirements. If you have neurodivergent people on your team, involve them in the planning process because they see things in a different way than a neurotypical person would. So they can often sort of say, well, actually this policy you put in place doesn't work for these groups of people. So yeah, absolutely. Asking people their advice in advance. You're right. That's great. That's just a great sort of customer service approach as well, because then it's collaborative and people feel buy-in

and that's a much more positive way to approach an event.

Yeah, when talking about people with disabilities come into an event because we have so many assumptions, unless you live with someone with extreme disabilities or you have direct experience of it, you'll think, well, there's a, I don't know, disabled toilet here. It's fine. It's like, you've got no consideration for how's that person going to park the car? How they going to get their wheelchair out? Can they get it through the thick carpets? Can they actually, do they need a different kind of facility other than just a bog standard?

Yeah.

⁓ sort of did their disabled toilet, they might need to change them and there's all kinds of things and you think you've considered it based on your narrow viewpoint of water disability is in the same with neurodiversity and you may live with somebody with a neurodiversity but theirs will be as we've been saying very different from somebody else's. So I mean I normally would say to you where do people begin? You've said begin with our checklist and you have a level which is for people who haven't got really

major budget to implement huge changes. And I know that lots of people who listen to this podcast are young people in events who have come in and gone, blimey, this thing is old and it needs changing. But they are having pushback all the way along the line when they talk to more senior people about how they can change things their bosses or whatever, go, there's no budget, there's no time. So the key way is there is a way in without budget.

Mm-hmm.

So we designed it explicitly with that in mind. as I say, we've got three tiers. The entry level tier is silver. And that's really the no excuses tier because nothing in the silver level should cost any money. designed, you know, if you are running a terrible folk evening in the back room of a pub, you can implement the playlist. Sorry, not playlist, the silver checklist. The playlist of the folk evening, that's different. But the silver level,

I'm sorry.

Checklist and and it shouldn't cost you any money. to give you an example, I always use this but If you are planning an event Film a video of yourself walking from the local transport hub to the event space record it on your iPhone that takes you the time it takes that walks at 15 minutes It'll cost you nothing other than that time

Mmm.

And what that does is that removes the element of stress of somebody who might be getting public transport to your event. Because as you just said, a neurodivergent person isn't just neurodivergent when they arrive at your event, they're neurodivergent as they're getting to your event.

And that makes a huge difference to someone's experience of your event. And that's the sort of thing that we have in the entry level checklist, the silver level checklist.

That's great. And it doesn't have to be super professional, amazing video. In fact, it'd quite amusing to like film myself getting there and stumbling over things. And oh, I think it's here. But you're right,

Yeah.

we've got to assume that everybody is different and everybody's going to need different help.

And it's really not going to cost you anything more than time. It's not going to cost you anything else, which is great. And you're going to see that huge difference because those people will arrive in a better frame of mind. They will enjoy the event.

even if you can't persuade your bosses of the financial ⁓ benefit to do this because I know that people will say well most people come to our vent don't consider themselves to be neurodiverse we don't have to change it this way is just a little bit different

Well, that's probably true. Most people do

come to an event who are neurotypical, but because the neurodivergent people are filtered out because you've not made it a neuroinclusive event. it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don't make your event neuroinclusive, the neurodivergent people won't go.

And this is the case, isn't it? Because people said that to me, again, when we're talking about disabilities, well, we've never had anyone come to our event in a wheelchair, so we've never considered it. And you're like, ⁓ it's, you know, what comes first, the chicken or the egg? In that situation, when you are getting that kind of ⁓ pushback, what's the quickest, easiest way to respond to it?

Right.

In terms of if we get pushback about neurodivergent people don't attend to our event, I would say that that's true. If you don't make it neuro inclusive, then you're losing out on one in five people. I don't know an event that couldn't sell tickets faster or do better financially in that respect. So if you're feeling so confident in your event that you can lose one in five of the population from attending then.

good on you, suppose. But I don't think that's true of any events. mean, maybe, you know, like Oasis tickets or something or Glastonbury that sell out instantly. for most people who are running events, ticket sales is the biggest concern, the income is the biggest concern. So broadening out that pool of people is never going to be a bad idea. It's never going to be a hard sell, it? Hopefully.

Yeah.

Yeah,

do you % more people at your event than do this? Absolutely.

Relatively little investment, well not really any investment if you're doing the entry-level checklist, the silver-level checklist. it's a, know, ROI is high if we're talking in financial terms.

There are specific things that I think as well at events that everybody talks about beyond ROI, which is the engagement level. They always want to improve the engagement and they know that people are coming to events when they do come to meet the right people. And I wouldn't, I don't want to call it networking there because I know a lot of people with a neurodivergency would literally, I do not go for the networking. but they are coming to the event in person because they want the human connection or they want to meet the right people or they want to talk to their,

the people they meet through work. How can we make those elements better for people with a neurodiverse? What's on the checklist to help with that?

Yeah, well, so networking is, we do have a headline of networking, so I'm not scared of the term, but if you look at really boiling down events to the two constituent elements, it's information sharing and human connection. Those are the two elements. So whether it be sort of who do we hear speak, or then what do we do the informal sort of networking side of it. And those are two areas that need to be improved. But in terms of the networking,

I mean, we have a whole range of things in the checklist. You can get really advanced. You can use augmented reality to find people to network with. That's way up on the platinum level of the checklist. But on a simpler level, you can allow people to pre-book any networking conversations they might want to have. If you send out the delegate list in advance and say, if there's anybody on this delegate list who you'd like to speak to in advance, I can help coordinate that and book that and give you a time slot to speak. So there's less of the...

having to walk down that corridor and you hear the hum of the room full of networking people and everybody stood there in either a giant circle, everybody's facing away from you and you have to awkwardly go and get a glass of wine or whatever and try and sidle into somebody's conversation. You can break down that side of things. I mean, from a sort of room-based perspective, I like to have lots of smaller rooms or lots of little alcoves because then it's not just one big warehouse full of people like a battery chicken farm. I like to sort of have the ability to...

to pick people in smaller rooms it be a lot more atomized. I think that's a little bit nicer rather than just one giant thing. again, I've seen things like people giving people bands based on how willing they are to network, red, amber and green traffic light system for how willing you are to network. I'm a dubious about that for the reasons we spoke about earlier, but.

I think allowing people to network in advance or if you've got an app system for your own event, you can allow people to message in that and connect that way.

It is an interesting point you raise about the warehouse concept, because unfortunately, we all know this when you go to a venue or you're booking a venue, you're kind of saying, okay, we want this space, we're not going to have all these extra bits, because that's going to cost money. So we'll have this big space.

you've got the limitations of what's in the venue. And I know I see that with people when they're saying, well, we had to book this venue three years ago. Now we've had all this feedback from people that they don't like this, this, and this.

We're now having to have this kind of conversation with the venue about, we need to change the way you kind of put the furniture in and the layout. And it's getting harder to do that when, you know, people sign these contracts years in advance. So you do have to be thinking about these things really early on in the event planning process. You cannot just put them in later. And you have to accept that some things are going to be hard to change. They'll take a few years before you can implement every element of these.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, absolutely. mean, neuro inclusion as an idea is definitely a process and it's still changing. We're understanding more about the brain, the technology that can mitigate the difficulties is changing. So yeah, we understand this is process, but hopefully sort of we're all working together to improve it. And again, just because it's difficult to do doesn't mean you shouldn't do any of it. I think that there you can do what you can, even if you've booked your room three years in advance to say, well, okay, are there things we can do? we

Yeah.

Can we do 15 minute slots of networking or can we do something on the back end to make it easier for people? Can we do something like that? So yeah, absolutely. I know that it is difficult. There's budget constraints. There's room constraints, architectural constraints. But if you do one thing from the checklist, you've made somebody's experience better. And ultimately, the events industry is a hospitable industry. It's about making people feel welcome and safe.

and included. So as an industry, it's best place to do these things. You know, it's full of really just lovely empathetic, nice people who are really welcoming. And it's about harnessing that I think, rather than just sort of burying your head in the sand and saying this is too difficult, I can't do it.

Yeah, you do what you can. It's like all the changes that need to be made in events with a lot of these things. It is very small steps. And you, maybe if you work with the same client for a few years, you really see, I certainly do, and what I do, that the improvement of the attendee experience has been really kind of a very sort of move up, but they have only implemented little small things each time because of budget and because of whatever.

whatever's already agreed in a contract that they can't change. But it's the effort and the willingness to change that you see that people really respond to and that the attendees will see they are changing it, even if it's not everything overnight.

Absolutely. I mean, not the same as last year, hey, right? So it's about it's about approving year on year. I mean, I think in general, the events industry has been a little bit slow to respond to neuro inclusion, compared with the private sector or the corporate sector. But there is definitely a willingness to do it. Everybody I speak to is on board with it. So perhaps it's just a case of how does this actually happen? Rather than why does it need to happen?

that's what we've been really focusing on is giving people the details of how they can actually do this. And then, yeah, I think a lot of people planning events, say here's our playbook that we ran last year. We can just replicate that our life easier, right? And yeah, events can be very stressful to organize. I know I've seen event people on day of or week building up to it, and I know how stressful it can be. having that playbook helps. But if you can just make those incremental improvements.

then pretty soon they compound and people are having a much better experience.

Yeah, what you're saying, it's only little tweaks often that are required to make such a difference to one person's experience. We know that's what this is about. The whole concept of this podcast is to help improve the attendee experience. And there are huge varieties of human beings that walk into events. And I think for many people, even if they aren't neurodiverse, anything that you can see that the...

organizers have done to make your personal experience better, you are going to respond to. mean, that's the great thing. Human beings, when someone makes you feel that they've done something for you, however small, you're able to forgive a multitude of other errors and problems because you see that. So you're just going to generally get, I can know better love back from your attendee, which also then spurs you on to do a better job next year.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

So that's a good place to end. We're talking about love here, where I put love in. Thank you so much, Andy, so interesting. And obviously, if people want to work with you, how do they get hold of you and find out about this checklist?

is all open source, so it's available for free on our website, which is welcomebrain.com. You can have a look, you can download it there and have a look at them. And getting accredited as an event organizer, having your event accredited is free as well. you work through the list, you book a call with us and we can credit your in general, if you want to work with us, have a look at our website, we do a whole range of services. We're just launching now the ability for venues to get accredited.

you can contact us through the website or my email is andyatwelcomebrain.com. And I'm always happy to chat about this, even if it's just a casual chat or hear people's experience or feedback because that's what keeps this going.

So a huge thank you to Andy there. So many useful insights. And also a reminder that inclusion isn't just about what's visible. It is about what is actually felt. So if you are planning events and this has sparked some ideas or made you realize that you've still got some work to do, then good, that was the point of it. Obviously you can find out more about Andy and Welcome Brain, as we said, welcomebrain.com. And Andy is all over LinkedIn as well. And if you liked this episode, please