When I first worked with Adrian Segar at Event Camp East Coast in 2010, I knew I’d met one of the most insightful, skilled, genuine meeting facilitators in the industry.
So after The Conference Publishers began working with the International Association of Conference Centers to host the Bright Ideas for Conference Centers webinar series, I was excited when IACC asked us to organize a program on learning design techniques for small meetings. The webinar takes place:
Thursday, February 2
1 PM to 2 PM Eastern
Registration here
Late last year, Segar talked about the power of onsite participation in an interview with MeetingsNet Editor Sue Hatch. The interview pointed to some of the surprisingly simple, incredibly powerful concepts that make Segar’s Conferences That Work approach a huge asset for small meeting design.
“Participant-driven event designs create meetings that become what attendees want and need them to be,” Segar said in the interview. “You think about your attendees not as customers, but as resources, which is a very different way of thinking.”
He attributed fast-growing demand for participant-driven events to the fact that “the world has changed. Six years ago there was no YouTube, no Facebook, no online TED Talks. If you wanted to hear someone speak, you had to go physically and listen. Now, broadcast-style content is widely available online.”
The result is that today’s participants—the people formerly known as the “audience”—need and demand more networking. Participant-driven events build it into the program.
“Thirty years ago, most of what you needed to know to do your job you learned in the classroom, or at company trainings,” Segar said. “Today, research says that you learn most of what you need to know for your job from your peers. Our conferences need to reflect that.”
These are ideas that are already beginning to reshape small meetings and events—just ask anyone who attended ECEC10, or has taken part in any of the other Conferences That Work sessions that Segar has organized over the last two decades.
One of the very interesting to-do items if you organize a webinar series (really, you should try it sometime!) is that you’re supposed to review the slides beforehand, and yesterday, Segar and I began reviewing his. So I can already tell you from first-hand experience that you don’t want to miss this webinar.
