How do you plan an event or a conference?

Let's begin by admitting that running an event or a conference is tough sledding.  Few notice when it goes well; everyone complains when something goes wrong.  Lots of downside risk and not much upside potential, as a wise conference planner once told me. 

That said, there are ways to get the most out of the planning -- and the conference itself. 

First, a theme is not an excuse for a cartoon or a superhero.  Too many conference-planning teams begin by setting a theme -- and then forgetting it.  So they'll pick 'the superhero', say, and use that to inspire the designers, and perhaps hire a few actors to wear painfully hot costumes at one of the dinners, and that's about it.  The theme is forgotten when the actual programming is under consideration.  That's just a matter of hiring a few big names, booking your CEO, and getting a few stalwarts from Marketing to help with the rest, right?

Wrong.  You should pick the one big idea you want to get across to your audience, and then everything at the conference should support that idea.  A conference should tell a coherent story, from the opening gun to the last speaker's "in conclusion...."  Anything less is not doing your job.  Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends, and your conference should too.  That helps the audience retain more than a smattering of the incredibly expensive event you're going to put on. 

Second, the audience is more than just a sea of faces.  How can you get the audience involved?  Can they help structure the event, drive the programming, lead a discussion session, even speak at a breakout session?  Audience participation should be more than just occasional raising of hands.  The best events are audience-driven, not merely entertainment pushed at the masses.  Mix it up!   

Third, give your MC a real job to do.  Hire an MC (either one of your own or a professional) who can do more than indicate the exits and the bathrooms.  An MC is the audience's representative.  It's her job to take up the issues that have been raised, test them, integrate them when possible, and help the audience with takeaways.  A lot of information comes at an audience during the course of a conference.  The MC can help to make sure that the audience gets as much as possible out of the time invested. 

When we're hired to help design and plan conferences, we often annoy traditional planners who think in tidy concepts of venue, speakers, dinners, and so on.  We see an evnt as an (expensive) opportunity to bring a group of people together in an unusual setting in order to jolt them with some new ideas and new experiences.  Anything less is just filling in the blanks.