Content matters at events, but not at the expense of collaboration and contribution. In this episode we talk about adjusting the balance so that your attendees aren't just learning but also contributing to your event.

Summary

In this episode, Clare Forestier discusses the three Cs of events: content, collaboration, and contribution. She argues that traditional event models prioritize content over collaboration and contribution, and suggests that allowing more attendee involvement can lead to richer discussions and connections. Clare shares her experiences attending the annual UK conference of the International Association of Facilitators, where facilitators guide discussions and activities to achieve specific goals. She emphasizes the importance of attendee contribution and collaboration in creating a more relevant and valuable event experience. Clare also provides tips for incorporating interactive workshops, networking sessions, and technology to enhance collaboration and contribution at events.

Keywords

events, content, collaboration, contribution, attendee involvement, traditional event model, facilitators, interactive workshops, networking sessions, technology

Takeaways

• Traditional event models prioritize content over collaboration and contribution.
• Allowing more attendee involvement can lead to richer discussions and connections.
• Attendee contribution and collaboration are important for the success and value of an event.
• Interactive workshops, networking sessions, and technology can enhance collaboration and contribution at events.

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YOUTUBE

Hello and welcome to episode 14 of Not the Same as Last Year. Today we're going to be talking about the three Cs. Now the three Cs are content, collaboration and contribution. The three Cs of events to me anyway, that's what I think of them. So let's start by talking about something familiar. So you're planning an event, a business event.

There will be experts delivering presentations at this event and there will be an audience who is listening and watching the presentation. And at the end of every one of these talks or presentations, there will be a five minute Q &A session for questions and answers. Questions from the audience, answers from your expert speaker or potentially your panel of expert speakers. Sounds good. So far, so normal, right? Well, it's not good actually. I think this traditional model

tends to prioritise content over something that I think is much more valuable and that is the other two Cs, contribution and collaboration. Now, I was talking to a prospective client recently and I mentioned my views on this, that I think we should allow a lot more attendee involvement, collaboration and so on, giving more time for attendees to get involved in each session, that kind of thing.

And they sort of pushed back and said, well, you know, that's all very well, but if you do that, how do you legislate for the chatty Cathys? So they were talking about the people they believe dominate group discussion time at event sessions with long -winded opinions. And basically they were saying that they are worried about making any time for questions any longer. They thought it was too risky to make them longer than five minutes because then they would get dominated by the chatty Cathy.

Now, my answer to this is if this is really a common issue at the events that you are running, then I would suggest that your event is not providing enough opportunities for your attendees to contribute to the event. If you've listened to even a fraction of what I tend to bang on about on my podcast, on my YouTube channel videos, on my social media posts, you'll know that I talk about

the human needs to be seen and heard. And the traditional event model that I described above really is focusing on the expert educational content being fed to your audience, pushed out to your audience. And yeah, that is important. It's potentially why people go to events to get some good educational content. But I think the really effective way to get your education is by tapping in

to the collective intelligence of the room. So if you as the event organizer can make that happen, because the experiences and the insights and the diverse perspectives of your audience in whatever industry or business your event is about, will actually help create richer discussions and connections. you know, we're students being lectured at at university by an expert, you know, we're not doing a degree and going to lectures.

We're actually people working in the job in the industry, in the businesses that your events are working towards, are trying to be successful in. And I would go as far as to say that you have a lot more people attending your event who are experts than potentially

some of the illustrious speakers that you have on your stage. So why wouldn't you want to hear from all the experts as well? Now I attend a lot of business events, right? Sometimes as the MC, sometimes as a panel host or a speaker, or, you know, as an attendee. And there's one conference that for me truly stands out when it comes to getting the attendee participating and involved.

Now it's the annual UK conference of the International Association of Facilitators. Here's the thing, they're a professional association that sets global industry standards, offers accreditation and literally advocates for the power of facilitation. And basically facilitators are the people who help guide discussions and activities to achieve specific goals. Now I can facilitate sessions. I say I can do that.

but I don't call myself a professional facilitator yet. I haven't done the official training and accreditation, but I still attend the IAF conference and any workshops or meetups that they offer that I can possibly go to because I find it so valuable for my work as an MC and a moderator. And here's the interesting part, even though I'm learning from them, okay, I'm not a facilitator professional per se, I have something to offer to them.

workshops and their conferences because I have a different perspective. My B2B event experience is very different from what a lot of them might be doing day to day, but a lot of them will be facilitating workshops and days within organizations to help solve specific business problems. But I help moderate all kinds of different sessions on all kinds of things at events. And often I kind of call it ninja facilitation because I'm...

maybe just meant to be MCing, but I'm also there to help a session be more engaging, more fun and more collaborative. So I've got a completely different role. I'm not just entering as a proper facilitator with a license to use post -its. That's an in -facilitator joke, by the way. But the difference is I might not be doing what they're doing, but I can still offer valuable insights and see light bulbs from the things I say, as well as the things that are told to me. So the point I'm making there is,

A, facilities give amazing conferences, but also if you're attending an event to learn, you still have something really valuable to contribute. Another way of looking at this, I suppose, is a specific word. Now, if we could take this word out, it could be a game changer. And I'm thinking of the word audience here. If you take the word...

audience out of the equation when we talk about events, things could be different. Now, of course, there is nothing wrong with the word per se. And obviously, we're often using it because we don't want to keep saying the word attendee. We want to use other words. We have a rich language, the English language. But the audience word to me, the issue with it is that it just immediately makes you think of a mass of people watching and listening passively, maybe clapping, maybe laughing, but not, you know, doing stuff,

You know, we use the word audience for all sorts of things, don't we? You know, whether it's going to a gig or to the theatre or to a stand -up show or to an event. the mass of the people and that the real performer is the on stage person. And I kind of think, could we not think about everybody as coming to an event as a contributor, not just the people that are...

the invitees on the stage. Now, maybe it's calling everybody an event contributor or a collaborator or a member of the event. I don't know what the right word is. I'm sure some people are trying other words and, you know, answers on a postcard or below my post on this podcast, please, because I'd love to find a better way of saying it. Now, we know that attendee contribution really matters to events.

getting them engaged is hugely important to the success of the event. There's enough research about that now. As it also helps people remember the kind of stuff that they're learning and also go away and act on it as well, if that was the intention of your event. But it's not just about the retention because if you actively participate in something, then you're going to feel much more part of it. You're going to be much more invested in what happens as a result. And of course you're going to feel valued.

which then means you've enjoyed it more and you're just gonna go away having had a better experience, formed better connections, everything is just gonna be that much better. And of course, every attendee is unique. They've all got different needs, they've all got different interests. So if you enabled the contribution from all of them, you've essentially also helped tailor the event to their specific wants and needs. So you're literally creating a more relevant and more valuable experience for every person or member of your event, whatever we're going to call them.

And they've all got more out the experience. They've all given back. The learnings are deeper. We all know that it's not just about monkey see and then go away, you know it all. It's monkey see, monkey do, isn't it? You've had the opportunity to really get your hands dirty in an event you are gonna really see the light bulbs go on. But you might be thinking, yeah, that's lovely, Claire. I love all that concept. I love that you go to your hippie dippy facilitator sessions, whatever.

this is going to go down like a particularly cold bowl of sick with my corporate straight lays traditional clients or company. They only want to do the events the way they want to do it. And like, how am I going to shift the scales just a little bit to make the balance of content and collaboration and contribution a little bit better. So to do that, let's go back, look at the three C's there, the content, the collaboration, the contribution.

and think, okay, well, we're going to put some interactive workshops into the traditional event format. So we will have everything we do on stage as per normal, but we will make sure we've got these proper workshops. I think people kind of getting their heads around that. We can get absolute experts in there, but we can also make sure we have people who can properly facilitate the discussion. And I think that's really good and really important, but please don't just go, yeah, we're going to have breakaways and we're going to call them.

interactive workshops where they won't actually be very interactive because I've seen that a lot. You know, just chucking a few polls up, putting people in a slightly smaller room and getting some poll responses back is not a collaborative workshop. Sorry, it isn't. Yes, you're using the tech. Yes, it's probably better than what you were doing last year, but it's calling it a collaborative workshop or an interactive workshop. That's a good one, isn't it? It's not that. It isn't. It's just you and a poll.

in a slightly smaller room, still with a load of people on stage, still with a load of people in the audience and you really want to hear from them via technology. So be aware, you can call it what you like, but you've got to actually implement the changes if you want to make it truly collaborative.

And how do you do that then? So set the stage up differently. Take the person off the stage, put them in the room with everybody, sit everybody around in groups and sofas and lowering the stage that essentially either everybody's on the stage.

or the speakers off the stage, if that makes sense. And they're not a speaker, they are a person facilitating a conversation, moderating a conversation. Big difference. And, you know, again, you can be getting questions ahead of time. You can be...

getting people to have sent them in before saying what kind of breakaways they'd like, what the conversations they want to be in those breakaways. You can be getting all those ideas so you already know they're going to be more collaborative because people have included the questions and ideas that they want for that breakaway. So you're immediately getting their opinion in there. You're helping them create. Remember the co -creation we've talked about before and it just becomes automatically something that people are going to come into and expect to talk at. You've set it up that way.

And I do see, sorry to harp on about this, I do see this a lot at events where the breakaway session has been given as a...

kind of thank you to a sponsor or being something that the sponsor has paid for, i .e. the breakaway conversation is going to be about what they want to talk about to an audience. And then it is literally just them selling their product to this audience. And it's been called a breakaway and a workshop or a collaborative interactive discussion. And really it is just a sales pitch.

So if it's going to be a sponsored breakout session, interactive workshop, keep it that way. Have the sponsor involved as one of the contributors, as somebody in the conversation. Maybe they're talking about what they hear from other people who aren't in the conversation, or they're talking about a potential solution or ideas, but they're also still having that conversation with all the contributors and attendees and everybody else who are collaborating in that conversation.

Now, you may have thought I was slagging off technology when I said you can't just call something an interactive session because you've chucked three polls in and I absolutely stand by that. But of course the technology can really help you. The technology will help with polling. There's nothing wrong with a bit of polling, but not if that's the only bit that's interactive in your whole session that you've called interactive. And...

It can be a really good way of gauging things. And I've seen it work really effectively, like when you're trying to understand how much people know about subjects. So right at the beginning, say, look, I'm going to get you all involved, but I'd love to just get an idea from us all in the room that we can all see who knows what and who doesn't. And then we can say, right, we're going to lower the tone on this one or we're going to raise it because you all know the basics. And I've got that from the polls. And that's a very quick way of using polls. Then you can dive deep and start getting individual answers.

And also you could be using that polling beforehand when everybody's making a decision about which events they want to come to or which sessions they want to come to. That's more collaborative, isn't it? Because people have already picked their topics and explained it and that's helped guide, as I said before, and co -create your event. So that kind of technology, absolutely brilliant. Don't knock it. Absolutely think it's fantastic. It's crowd sourcing and why wouldn't you get as much information about your guests, your attendees, your contributors, everybody beforehand?

they're also then being able to feel they're contributing and collaborating right from the get -go. Now you can also get a little bit more collaboration and contribution just from networking sessions. And as you know, I'm not talking about the networking sessions where you just shove people in a room while there's a break on and call it networking. I'm talking about really structuring some sessions, connecting ideas so people could go after very thought -provoking session into smaller groups and discuss it there and they could know this is the place to go.

call it, I don't know, the discussion rooms and have groupings and sofas where people sit down and maybe areas, this is where we're going to talk about this, this is where we're going to talk about that so people know. I really want to know more about that. There's going to be an expert sitting on a sofa then and we can have a discussion group with them. There's all kinds of ways that you can do this. And you can make it.

Very formal and take notes and structures or you can make it much more laid back. There are different ways to control and run it. And again, it's a really good way for people who might not have wanted to stick their hand up in a really busy room, but would feel a lot more happy and still have a very collaborative conversation.

You could also beforehand have got people's coming with an idea or a topic that they really want to talk about. I mean, literally it's endless, the opportunities when you start to kind of really prioritize collaboration and contribution.

So I hope I've shared some useful ideas, but I do think there's one point that I want to consider that you might feedback to me because I do hear it from people who say, Claire, we really like your ideas. We often say that we want to do a lot more of this in our events, but then we struggle with some of our moderators and our speakers and our panel hosts who really just want to stick with the old way. They're a bit set in their minds, a bit set in their ways. They turn up, they've got their 30 minute conversation or 40 minute conversation.

they've got five minutes at the end and that's kind of all they'll leave, whatever we say. there's two things really.

that I think you could do. You could tell them that you want to make it audience focused and they could completely ignore you and therefore you have to just go, okay, well the rest of what I'm doing in the event is absolutely, you know, all about content and collaboration. I'll just let this panel be a bit old fashioned, a bit more fusty and how it's always been. I'll just, you know, control what you can control. Or you can do what I think I suggested, I think it was it was at episode eight when I said how to really get your

contributors on board with attendee first and that is to get them into conversations early with people like your MC because for example in my case I moderate lots of panels at events but even the events where I'm an MC and I'm maybe not doing all the panels I find that there's quite a good reception when I tell the other panel hosts that I'm there to help them and I make suggestions and I say look I'm going to be helping you on the day I'm facilitating not facilitating I don't use that word I'm helping the whole event go with a bit more of a bang so

anything I can do to help you, your session, do shout and you could try this, you could try that, you could use me like this. And most of them go like, okay, I like that idea. Yeah, okay, yes. I like the idea of directing questions to the audience. I don't know how to do it. What would you suggest? Would you like to come on and throw those questions in first? Would you like to sort of put out some of those questions to the audience before you introduce us? And it kind of works then. And there's a little bit of kind of already collaboration between me and the panel host. And then it happens.

But if for some reason they're really just not receptive to that and you thought, God, I don't want to just let that be a boring old session in the middle of a really good day, you could say, okay, I've got two ground rules, okay. One, I insist that the panel host does the introductions for the panelists, that you spend some time getting them to be pithy and tight that will introduce the panelists as exactly who they are and why they're relevant for that session.

and what kind of expertise they're bringing. Because if you do that and you've got four guests and you've got a good moderator who can do that or a good panel host, that can be done. You can introduce all of them in 90 seconds. if you ask them to introduce themselves, that will be six minutes. And that's if you've only got three people, three or four people, because they will waffle about themselves. It kills six minutes and that six minutes could have been another six minutes for Q &A.

with the audience at the end. On that note, depending on your time, assuming you've got 30 minutes, that seems to be the hot number of minutes for a session, no more than three panellists, you will get no audience contribution if you've got any more than that. That was also a rule, but not what I'm talking about here. So the second rule I'm saying for you to say to your moderator is please, at the beginning of your session, throw out some questions to the audience to just be thinking about. Even if it's a...

Who's new to this subject? Who isn't? Who knows nothing? Who does? Who's come to learn this? Who's come to learn that? Just get a picture. That's all, just getting people involved already and getting them stimulated to actually, that's how you raise a hand. They'll be more likely to do it at the end.

Do you remember at the beginning, I said I spoke to somebody who didn't want there to be longer than five minutes for Q &A in a session. She was worried about the chatty cathies, but she also said, you've either got the chatty cathies or you've got audiences that don't ask questions and then there's like this sort of deathly silence.

So you don't want that to happen, which is why I have said be kind of coding in the sticking up of hands, but also consider there's a reason why people don't ask questions at the end of a session. And it's usually A, the panel was boring. It's eating into their break time. It was maybe the last of five sessions. The audience is jaded. There's also potential a language barrier between the audience and the contributors. And also,

the panel has maybe been pitched at the wrong level. So therefore people can feel very stupid, like they may have misunderstood a lot of what was going on or not really understood because it was pitched at too high a level from them. If they've got a lot of their competitors there, they don't want to ask a, what they might see as a stupid question because they misunderstood something. All these kinds of reasons, which would essentially be because your panel was not right. It was not run right. It was not on the right subject or the right level. So that's a thing that you need to consider.

I've actually seen this a lot this year with panels on artificial intelligence, where there's been an assumption of a knowledge and a use of AI that is just not there, or it's been pitched at the assumption that nobody knows what they're talking about and therefore it's too low and it's annoyed people and you've seen people who are much more kind of higher on the journey or further on the journey just get up and walk out. So that's again why asking questions of your audience is really important because you can then...

use that polling those answers to judge where you are going to pitch the level of the conversation. And again, it's also a reason why you need really expert panel hosts, not just experts in the subject who you've then asked to moderate the conversation. You want to make sure your audience is stimulated and ready for collaboration. And you want to make sure that you are pitching at the right level for the audience there. Okay. I've gone off on lots of tangents. I hope some of it was useful, but the key thing is remember that

At your event, it isn't just about what is said on the stage. It is about creating opportunities for your attendees to be part of every conversation, to focus on that, on the collaboration and contribution as much, if not more, than your content. And that will make it What we always want to do from this podcast, more attendi -centric. I would love to hear about what you're doing here.

Please share with me what you think of this episode. If you've come across lots of clever ways for collaboration and contribution, share that with us. If you totally disagree with everything I've said, I still love to hear that too. And I look forward to seeing you on our next episode, which is going to be episode 15. I can't believe I've managed to get to episode 15. And we're going to be talking about artificial intelligence and how using AI can actually help your attendee have a better experience at your event. See you next time.