Like most good achievements, a magnificent meeting depends on planning and preparation. These are essential to a good conference and this article explains
basics of what you need to do.Planning The first stage in organising any conference is planning. Your plan should start with these questions:
What do we want our audience to go home and say about meeting, apart from fact that they had a great time? What is key message we want our audience to remember? What action do we want our audience to take after attending this conference? In other words, start your planning with your meeting’s overall objectives. Write these objectives down and ensure that everyone involved knows them - from people who hand out coffee to speakers themselves. The answers to these questions will be your mission statement for meeting. You must have a clear set of simple objectives for your meeting otherwise it will fail.
Having set your objectives you will need to work out how you will achieve them. Challenge all your assumptions about your proposed conference. For instance:
Do you actually need a conference to achieve your objectives? Will some other kind of meeting or even no meeting do? Do you need one big meeting or a number of small, more intimate ones? Does meeting need to be a grand formal affair, or an informal get-together? In other words, just because you have been set task of organising a conference, does not mean you have to! If there is an alternative, superior method of achieving your objectives, choose that route instead. Do not opt for a conference just because it seems a good idea.
Choose your key messages Assuming you have set your sights on a conference, you’ll now need to work out what messages you want to convey. These will arise from your mission statement. It is worthwhile noting, though, that there is plenty of research to back up fact that your audience – no matter how expert – will only remember a handful of messages from your meeting. Typically, average conference day can only deliver four or five main messages. Once you have set out your key messages, work out order in which these will make most sense. Try to produce a logical sequence so that one key message clearly comes out of previous one. This will make it much easier for your audience to remember meeting. Do not put your messages together in some kind of internal sequence, such as by company department. Instead, put your messages together that would be seen as logical by audience. If you do not know what would be logical to them, you need to do some audience research to find out. Indeed, finding out as much as you can about your audience is essential to any meeting.
Describe your audience You now have a good idea as to what you want to say at your conference. But who will be listening? You need a definition of your audience that will help everyone involved. Your audience definition should describe a typical member of audience – age, gender, job title, work interests, personal likes and dislikes, professional qualifications etc. Together with your conference mission statement and your key messages, your audience description will provide you with a very clear outline of your meeting. Together these three items will tell you:
What you will say Why you will say it Who will be listening What they will do
Your audience description will also provide your speakers with a good guide as to what they need to say in order to get their message across.
You have now completed all main parts of your initial planning and your need to move on to detailed preparation.
Preparing your conference The first stage of preparation is script writing. You need at very least an outline script of your event. Often, people produce a conference programme that shows timings and list of speakers. But this is not enough. Your outline script needs to be much more than a simple programme. That’s because everyone involved in conference needs to know exactly what will happen, when it will occur and how it will take place. Otherwise, it might not be possible to ensure you meet your conference mission.
Your script should start with logical order of your key messages you produced in planning stage. Then allocate some timing to each message. Generally, no key message should take longer than 20-30 minutes to deliver; human attention span is comparatively short and you’ll need plenty of breaks to keep your audience ‘alive’ and ‘fresh’. Also, at this stage, decide where to hold your long breaks, like coffee, lunch and so on. These long breaks should always come in your programme at dramatic points. You will want to leave your audience with something powerful to talk about so make sure key message delivered before a break is controversial, emotional or surprising in some way. This will keep your audience on their toes and wanting to come back into room for more. This means you may well need to arrange breaks at unusual timings – don’t opt for coffee at 11am, for instance, because that is ‘normal’. Instead, put coffee immediately after a controversial message, even if it means breaking for coffee at 10.30 or 11.30. In other words, shape your meeting around messages, not tradition. By arranging your timing in this way, you will be helping to ensure maximum impact of your key messages and therefore supporting your conference mission. Your conference script can now have some detail added to it. For instance, you can now put some specific times onto your programme. These would include length of each presentation, length of each link between talks and timing of any music, video or other multimedia you are planning to include. In other words, your conference script that determines how long a video or a presentation will be – not items that determine programme timing. Essentially, you are working much like a TV producer; these people have fixed times available to them – 30 minutes, 50 minutes, an hour. What they have to do is fit all music, dialogue and any breaks into that time – no less and no more. That’s what a professional conference script will be like – detailed timings of every item to be included. Far too many conferences decide what to include and then try to work timings out afterwards.
Choosing your speakers Your preparation can now move on to deciding whom you should use as speakers. You will realise that you have done a great deal of work already, and that speakers will have to fit in with your plans if conference is to be a success. You do not need prima donnas who say they need an hour to give their talk when your script only allows 20 minutes. Nobody, absolutely nobody, is more important than your audience. Hence, script that has been prepared from their point of view is virtually sacrosanct. Speakers will need to be kind of people who will fit in with your requirements; you cannot allow yourself to fit your programme around speakers. Otherwise, you will fail to meet your conference mission. To ensure that you get right speakers, prepare yourself a ‘Speaker’s Contract’. This is a list of requirements that you have of your speakers. When you invite someone to speak, you let them sign up to contract; if they don’t like it, there are plenty of other speakers around. Professional speakers never have a problem with such contracts. In fact, they like them. Suitable speakers are those that can deliver your key messages – not necessarily most senior people in business or an expert. Base your decision on who should speak based on their ability to communicate with your audience – not on any other measure. This means, for instance, that best person to get a particular message across might be a senior manager, rather than chief executive. This does not matter – what does matter is that audience gets message, not who they get it from. Indeed, some large multinationals use actors to get important messages across, rather then senior executives.
