A Blueprint for More Meaningful Experiences: Recommendations From RNN YouTube Series
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Over the last 12 months, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance’s RRN media platform organized 17 YouTube show interviews and feature articles with top meeting planners as well as some of the leading event speakers about event formats, including businesspeople, entertainers, athletes and other accomplished people. Here’s what we learned.By Bruce Bolger
What’s Wrong With the Current Format and How to Address It
A Sample Event Format
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Advice for association and corporate meeting planners seeking to optimize the value and impact of events.
- Make sure your program has a clear purpose, goals, and objectives with measurable metrics.
- Blow up the traditional keynote and panel discussion format by putting the spotlight on the audience, not just the stage.
- Don’t do anything you can do on a Zoom.
- Use gatherings to involve all attendees in helping to address industry or organizational strategic or tactical issues, so that everyone leaves with a clear mission and action plan with measurable goals and objectives.
- Find speakers with appropriate stories who feel comfortable spending less time on stage and more time interacting with attendees and facilitating discussions.
- The best entertainment is not only entertaining, but emotional, personal and authentic.
- Get your attendees off-site to share together local experiences with authentic stories, when possible, that support the purpose of your event.
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These summarize the key recommendations of about two dozen leading meeting planners and corporate speakers participation in a year-long series of YouTube shows called Meaningful Meetings, co-hosted by RRN publisher Bruce Bolger and Las Vegas Speakers Bureau Founder Jaki Baskow. Panelists include industry journalists, planners and speakers from the world of business, sports, and entertainment. In these shows, all summarized in RRN feature articles, panelists share their views not only on the general state of industry events and how they can be improved, but on their own lives or professional experiences they share when speaking.Their conclusions: Many organizational meetings miss an unparalleled opportunity to harmonize the interests of their organizations and teams toward the same purpose, goals, and objectives. Stakeholders often come from far distances without ever addressing many of the silos and other human elements that thwart productivity, quality, and innovation. Meetings are often more focused on selling, talking to and “inspiring” attendees rather than on proactively involving all participants in the best ways all stakeholders can fulfill the organization’s purpose, goals, objectives, and values, whether strategic or tactical.
What’s Wrong With the Current Format and How to Address It
Here are some of the key findings from the show along with recommendations.
1. People don’t need to travel to be informed or learn to the same extent as in the past. With video meetings, YouTube shows with top experts, and AI, people no longer need to travel to meetings specifically to learn. The expertise of almost every world or topical expert is now available 24/7 on YouTube or through a Web or AI search. The opportunity for events today is to bring people together in collaborative formats that strategically involve them in supporting the purpose, goals, objectives, and values of the organization or team in a way that simply is not possible in the office or electronically.
Recommendation. If you can do it on a video call, do not do it in a room.2. Meetings often lack a clear sense of purpose to the audience or speakers. Many association and business annual meetings become an annual event without a clearly articulated purpose, goals, and objectives that support organizational or team priorities post-event and throughout the year. The results are annual variations on a theme rather than a dynamic source of value creation in which people come out energized to accomplish goals. Commonly, people sit through a series of keynote speakers, panel discussions, and maybe a few breakouts; mingle at breaks, meals, and evening events, and head home with a few snippets of new wisdom, having made some new acquaintances with no particular impact at work.
Recommendations. Ideally, create at your event an authentic story in which all your attendees are actors. Reframe the concept of an event from a presentation to a gathering that not only tells a story but involves all participants in its creation. From the very start of planning, articulate a clear purpose, goals, objectives for the event, along with specific metrics related to organizational priorities. What specific challenges or opportunities can be addressed by gathering these stakeholders offsite that can’t be accomplished otherwise? Related to the purpose of the event, survey attendees to find out what issues they’d wish to see addressed and/or other teams they’d wish to collaborate with. Spend 20% of the agenda on stage—80% in collaboration, socializing, and experiences, onsite and offsite.
3. Events often lack clear return-on-investment or impact metrics. Post-event surveys are important, but the opportunity is to demonstrate the value created by the event. Value is not only based on financial terms, but on whether the event achieves its stated purpose, goals, and objectives. Do people leave the event with a greater sense of the “why” and how they can contribute?
Recommendations. Establish buy-in from all key stakeholders on relevant metrics that can include both results or outcome measures, or behavioral measures--actions taken that related to results.4. Too much time is spent selling people on a story, rather than involving them in its creation to foster a greater sense of ownership. Often, as much of 80% of the day is spent with keynotes and panels talking to the audience, when people would prefer to have the ratio flipped. Too often, the speakers do not strategically or tactically address the key purpose of the meeting, and panelists are association board members and sponsors rather than representatives from the attendees to authentically share their voices. Ironically, the audience often consists of people with greater industry expertise than the keynotes or panelists who go unheard.
Recommendations. These practitioners recommend formats that get speakers and attendees actively involved in collaboratively addressing issues relevant to the purpose of the organization or team. Based on the purpose of the event, find plenary speakers who can tell a relevant story to help clarify the issue to be discussed, allocating no more than about 20 minutes to the speaker. Then, break the audience into working groups, facilitated by the speaker and facilitators, to discuss the topic(s). Reconvene in a plenary facilitated by the speaker, to have the facilitors serve as panelists to share the findings from each group and recommended action plan. Effectively selected facilitators selected from the attendees often make for far more authentic panelists than company executives or sponsors.
Topic suggestions. For an association, the topics can relate to challenges or opportunities in the field. For businesses, they can address industry and marketplace, strategic, and tactical issues. Don’t come with all the answers: let participants find them. People should walk out not only with new knowledge, but with action plans.
5. The focus is on what the organization wants to say rather than involving people in addressing underlying issues that often go overlooked. Even top speakers say that there is too much focus on the speakers and panelists on stage. Most yearn to spend more time with audiences beyond book signings. Many seek to actively help organizations achieve their purpose, goals, and objectives, and to be brought into the planning process from the very start. Events are an opportunity not only to present an organization’s purpose, goals, and objectives but to get all stakeholders passionately involved with achieving them.
Recommendations. Identify in advance issues that present opportunities and challenges related to the purpose of the event and involve attendees in addressing them. Don’t just present a plan, solution, or tell a story; involve attendees in making it come true. Find speakers not only with relevant stories to tell but who enjoy facilitating breakouts and emceeing the follow up plenaries in which each group presents findings, observations, and recommendations. Use speakers to warm people up, entertain, and inspire but most importantly to tell a story that sets the stage for group discussions afterwards. Whenever possible, select panelists from the audience; i.e., those who facilitated the group dialog, to present findings of group breakouts. This gives voice to the audience.
6. A tendency to mix entertainment with business. These panelists, some of them well-known entertainments, recommend making evening entertainment pure pleasure to let people unwind and absorb the day's experience.
Recommendations. Whatever entertainment you select, try to keep business presentations and announcements out of it. Make the entertainment as authentic as possible by reflecting the culture of attendees and try to find a person or act with people who enjoy becoming more personal with the audience. The closer the audience feels to the entertainment, especially when a well-known person or band is involved, the more meaningful it becomes. Look for entertainers who like to share a story or two.
7. A failure to address the growing desire for shared, authentic experiences off property. Every destination has a story to tell that can help reinforce an organization’s own story. One of the best forms of meaningfully supporting a destination is to get participants for a half-day or evening off property to a local restaurant, cultural, or historic spot important to the community’s history.
Recommendations. Reformat the old concept of a dine-around into a slightly more strategic selection of local options based on the size of the group that includes a guide and perhaps even an opportunity to meet with locals in a restaurant to discuss an issue related to that of the organization or one that is relevant to the community.
8. Lack of a 365-day-a-year strategy. Many organizations organize their digital strategy on a pre-event, at-event, and post event basis, when the true opportunity is to create a digital community throughout the year sharing snippets of the content or fresh information to keep the audience engaged on an ongoing basis.
Recommendations. Create an ongoing digital platform for the event, either on your own company's site or on the event's web site, that sends people useful information either from the event or new content to keep people engaged. Use the digital platform to send people useful information in advance of the event related to the agenda, and to send information about the findings and action plans, as well as shared experiences, throughout the year.
A Sample Event Agenda
Here is a sample format for a three-day two-night event.
1. Establish the purpose of the event.
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Engage key stakeholders in implementing the coming year’s business plan, based on a senior leadership retreat with representatives of all
stakeholders that re-established the purpose, goals, objectives, and values of the organization. - Audience. The annual meeting consists of the leadership of each division of the company as well as a select group of top performers based on the organization's incentive or recognition program.
- Metrics. The intent is to evaluate the degree to which the organization’s purpose, goals, and objectives were achieved over the year based on the established metrics for each group, as well as a survey of participants on the meeting’s effectiveness.
Use this information to establish the nature of the working groups. Will they consist only of representatives of each of the departments or teams, or will they instead be broken into cross functional groups, or both. In this case, the organization opts for a combination of both because the surveys found friction between sales, marketing and customer service and between human resources and the entire organization.
3. Agenda.
Day 1. Arrivals.
4 pm. Kickoff meeting is by CEO before cocktail reception. He or she casually explains the purpose of the event and introduces the key representatives for each stakeholder group, depending on the organization; i.e., finance, operations, administration, human resources, sales, customer service, marketing, technology, logistics, etc.
Reception, dinner, award recognition, followed by pure entertainment.
Day 2.
9 am-9:15. Plenary guest speaker. Someone with appropriate business experience brings to life the importance and benefits of having a clear purpose, goals, objectives and values.
9:20-9:40 am. CEO or other senior executive. This person explains the updated purpose, goals, objectives
and values of the organization; their history, and how that translates into day-to-day actions and priority setting.
9:40 to 9:50 am. Same executive or other speaker explains the morning exercises, which in this case consists of having each group articulate and discuss the needs of external and internal customers and and other stakeholders.
9:50-10:15. Coffee break.
10:15 am-12 pm. Breakouts. Representatives of each stakeholder group meet with those of other groups to explain the needs of their external and internal customers. The plenary speaker wanders between the different groups to listen, answer questions, and perhaps make a few observations.
Noon to 1 pm: Lunch.
1 pm-2 pm. Plenary on the breakout meetings. In an event facilitated by the morning emcee, representatives from each group present their findings from the breakouts: who are the major external and/or internal customers of each group; what are their major needs; what if any tradeoffs exist; what can be done to improve service and results, what metrics are missing?
2 pm-2:20 pm. Plenary. Morning keynote speaker perspective. He or she sums up his or her perspective and thoughts about moving forward.
2:30 pm-2:50 pm. Expert speaker on the importance of systems and how to apply them to strategic planning, implementation, and continuous improvement. Or, use an expert on the company’s current operating system, if it has one.
3 pm to 5 pm breakouts. Each stakeholder group reconvenes to summarize how to use the recommendations on operating systems toward the development of their own plans for the year in a manner consistent with the purpose, goals, and objectives of the organization.
Evening: At leisure...Or choice of guided escapes to a surrounding community event at a business, school, charity, etc. followed by a meal in a local restaurant involving the locals they met with.
Day 3. Breaking Down Siloes (or some other issue identified in the pre-event survey.)
9 am-9:20 am. Plenary. The corporate speaker focuses on issues related to siloes and how to break them down
9 am-10:30 am. Attendees are distributed evenly by department so that each group has representatives from all levels of each department. The people who will later be the panelists will facilitate the meeting to identify what issues are standing in the way of greater harmony, with the goal of creating a list of recommendations with an action plan. The speaker makes the rounds of the groups to listen, answer questions, or make suggestions if relevant.
10:30 am-11 am. Break
11 am-noon. Plenary session. The facilitators are brought back on stage on a panel to share and discuss findings, hosted by the guest speaker. Each group provides an overview of a game plan resulting from the session with a means of measuring and reporting back about progress at the next year’s event.
Noon. Lunch and departures
For longer meetings. Every industry or organization has different challenges and opportunities. The same format can be used to address each one. Find an expert plenary speaker who doesn’t mind spending three-quarters of the assignment mingling with the attendees and facilitating their overall learning process.
Event Followup
Reporting. Provide a summary of the event recapping key findings and sharing photos of experiences with attendees. Break the event into stories that can be reinforced throughout the year, rather than in a one-off newsletter.
Digital. Communicate throughout the year with the audience sharing clips of useful information from the event or current news of interest to the audience, along with information about the upcoming event as it comes closer.
Measurement and assessment. Immediately establish and implement the process for evaluating attendee satisfaction and, more importantly, the business impact and results, including year-long metrics if appropriate. Make sure that the metrics get into the hands of any stakeholder who can benefit from them. Include their implications in formulating the following year’s plans and have that information available at that year’s event and share it as relevant.
Enterprise Engagement Alliance Services
Celebrating our 15th year, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance helps organizations enhance performance through:
1. Information and marketing opportunities on stakeholder management and total rewards:
ESM Weekly on stakeholder management since 2009; click here for a media kit.
RRN Weekly on total rewards since 1996; click here for a EEA YouTube channel on enterprise engagement, human capital, and total rewards insights and how-to information since 2020.
2. Learning: Purpose Leadership and Stakeholder
Management Academy to enhance future equity value and performance for your organization.3. Books on implementation: Enterprise Engagement for CEOs and Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap.
4. Advisory services and research: Strategic guidance, learning and certification on stakeholder management, measurement, metrics, and corporate sustainability reporting.
5. Permission-based targeted business development to identify and build relationships with the people most likely to buy.
6. Public speaking and meeting facilitation on stakeholder management. The world’s leading speakers on all aspects of stakeholder management across the enterprise.
