When I think about productivity, GTD, being organized and blogging, I think about Zen Habits. It is the best written blog about all of the above (and more) topics. No surprises it won the award as Best Overall Blog in 2007.

I am one of the thousands fan of Leo Babauta, its editor, who has accomplished a lot in life and shares daily tips on how to tackle stress and life.

I decided to interview Leo and ask him how we could become ‘Zen Event Managers’. He demonstrated to be a great individual and with amazing kindness replied to my questions.

- Multitasking is said to be one of the most critical quality of an event manager. Do you agree?

While it is useful to be able to multitask when necessary, I don’t think it should be your main mode of working. For me, at least, learning to single-task — to focus on one task at a time and block out all distractions — has been the key to being more productive, to getting important things done (as opposed to a lot of unimportant things), to reducing stress, to simplifying my work life. It’s a more important skill in the long run.

- Managing events raises stress levels to rooftop. What would you suggest to deal with this daily nightmare.

Simplify things as much as possible. Take a look at everything you do (make a long list) and decide which ones are most crucial. Then streamline things so that you get rid of the unessential. You might not get everything done, but you’ll be less stressed and you’ll get the essential things done.

- Our desks are full of projects, programs and PC monitors, how should we cope with this clutter?

Declutter. Get rid of everything you don’t absolutely need. Then set up a system where you keep things in one place instead of all over the place, and stick to the system. See my Zen To Done (ZTD) system for more info.

- We are often convinced that working more actually delivers better results, do you agree?

No, not at all. What is important is doing the essential tasks that get you to the accomplishments you want, not doing a lot of busywork. If you can do 3 important things in 4 hours, rather than 20 non-important things in 10 hours, you’re more productive and more efficient. And less stressed. Learn to eliminate the non-essential.

- To become ‘Zen Event Managers’, the first thing we should change is…

Learn to focus on the important, and to eliminate distractions.

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I’ve worked for more than 5 years with entertainment and being more specific with discos and clubs. I became what was and still is called a “PR”, a person that gives away “invites” to cool friends to populate the night. I earned a small percentage on every invite turned in with my name on it. In one year time I started to invest my money in club nights and quicker got more control over the event management.

Soon I was in charge of making the list (of people not paying to get in) and selecting people that got admitted into the event. That gave me a tremendous amount of power. I was soon able to ask the doormen to avoid certain people getting in.

For a pretty long period of time excluding others meant being at the top.

As Jedi Master of Marketing Seth Godin states:

“Credit card companies have made billions by selling a card that others can’t get.

Politicians stand up and talk about their (exclusive) religion, or pit one special interest group against another.

And of course, the best nightclubs have the biggest velvet ropes and the pickiest doormen.”

I had to think again

The Social Psychology of Inclusion and Exclusion, By Abrams, Hogg and Marques talks about the anger generated by exclusion. Violent reactions and discontent.

Soon few question popped up into my mind. How many people do we usually exclude from our events? How much discontent do we generate? Are there good reasons to exclude people?

At a club it’s up to the selector personal taste. Sometimes it is about the price. Few other times it is the content that excludes people.

Does inclusion mean populism?

What if the basis of events would be inclusion? BarCamp and unconferences are based on including people, but are not populist.

We tend to think that limited resources automatically mean exclusion.

The smart event planner thinks of ways to include those people e.g. who cannot make it that day, who cannot afford the price of the ticket, who are not familiar with the content.

Just think that:

- Online conferencing is a solution for those who cannot make it.

- Scholarships are a good method to make students attend an important conference and sponsors are willing to fund them.

- Opening an online forum and a blog about your event could help a lot of potential attendees to understand more about your content.

I am sure you can come up with more ideas and I invite you to do it.

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It is one of the most adopted and therefore definitely worth a review and interview with its Director of Marketing, Jack Mardack.

How does it work?

Few things that I love about the service:

- There is no standard price. They earn a percentage based on your ticket price.
- It’s customizable. You can pretty much input as many details as you prefer. The event page is greatly adaptable and here are few examples.

Alumni Meeting

Fundraising Event

Social Meeting

- Online secure payment. If you don’t work regularly with events this might be a bit of an hassle to set up. Great tool.
- Affiliate Program. A brand new program where you can promote events and earn up to 35% commission (If you blog about events and have ads you might want to consider this instead of random text ads)
- Tagging, personalized URL, RSS. Welcome to Web 2.0, finally some fresh air.
- Promotion. Eventbrite immediately indexes the event with major search engines. This usually takes forever if you don’t have an updated platform up and running.
- Survey, etc. There are few more you can check them out here

I decided to ask a few questions to Jack Mardack, who was very kind and answered as follows:

What is the idea behind Eventbrite?

Eventbrite is a self-service event registration and online ticketing platform. The idea behind Eventbrite is to empower individuals, companies and organizations of all sizes with the tools they need to successfully promote and sell-out their events on the Web.

What’s in it for event managers?

If you are someone who is already tasked with managing events and selling tickets, Eventbrite can make your life a lot easier and make you more successful. We give the event manager control over the entire process, from pre-event marketing, to registration, to ticket sales, and even give them powerful customer relationship management tools they can use to market future events or promote other products and services.

What’s in it for Average Joe?

What’s in it for the Average Joe is the ability to go from being an Average Joe to being a successful event manager in about 5 minutes. See previous answer. We’ve worked hard to make our tools as easy to use as they are powerful. The result is that everyday people, from all walks of life, are using Eventbrite to promote and sell-out events of every conceivable type and size.

What’s in Eventbrite’s future?

We’re committed to continuing to enrich our features and to making Eventbrite even more powerful. The future is we will remain focused on providing event managers with everything they need to succeed, and on making it as easy as possible for anyone to make their event a success. What we see for the industry is that many more individuals and organizations are going to become event organizers. This is going to produce an incredible number and diversity of events, many of which are going to try to find their audiences on the Web. It’s going to be a really long tail, and Eventbrite will be there for all of them.

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Ricardo Semler has sparked a revolution for the theory of business management. He has actually put in practice what tons of authors have just theorized. He walked the walk and showed the world that horizontal management is indeed more effective than any other approach.

Events are about people. Pressure, limited time and resources push us to perform at 100% with no chance to fail. While reading Semler’s inspiring book ‘Maverick‘, I noted down few concepts which I am sure will question the way you tackle team management.

“In the lobby of our headquarters there is a reception desk, but no receptionist [...]. Everyone at Semco, even top managers, fetches guests, stand over photocopiers, send faxes, types letters, and dials the phone. We don’t believe in cluttering the payroll with ungratifying, dead end jobs.”

Most of the requests I receive through this blog are of people asking for how to get involved into events. The nature of the business requires hiring lots of temporary staff and that might be a good way to start getting involved.

Now, talking to managers, I ask you, do you hire to exploit and ‘clutter the payroll’ or do you hire to transfer knowledge?

Too many times I’ve seen and been treated as a “disposable” and “photocopier” employee. I think that hiring temps for events should have both a monetary and knowledge reward. The event manager along the way should share tips, inspire, suggest and help young and willing workers, full stop.

“I always smile when executives boast about how participative they are. ‘I want everyone to feel involved’ the say. ‘So I call everybody in, hear what’s on their minds, and only then decide’. What people call participative management is usually just consultative management”

I believe that the most manipulative, mind controlling technique to motivate people is to tell them how you care for their opinion. I’ve heard that statement multiple times but when I came up with my opinion it was completely ignored, not taken account of, plus I quickly figured out it was a way to keep me under control.

True empowerment and responsibility, on the other hand, made me feel like a thinking individual and actually deliver the best financial and non-financial results.

Therefore, if you do care about my opinion, I’d love to put that in practice.

“We don’t want to be a happy family. We want to be a successful business. We’re only concerned with our employees performance on their job, not their personal lives.”

The second most manipulative approach to managing people is to tell them that ‘we are members of the same family’. No thanks. I do have a family and I’d like to keep it out of the business environment.

I find invasive just the thought of a boss telling me that.

Not only should the manager be attentive in not embarking in such approach, but he/she should also guarantee that such behaviour does not occur horizontally among employees. Performance is indeed the most important factor, human touch and understanding is plausible but not a motivator or a business approach.

“At Semco we have stripped away the unnecessary perks and privileges, such as executive dining rooms and fancy office furniture, that feed the ego but hurt the balance sheet and distract everyone form the crucial corporate task of making, selling, billing and collecting.”

We all need to work a bit more on our egos, I’ll leave the rest of it for you to comment.

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Most of my afficionados know that I’ve worked in the past two months at ecoCamp, a BarCamp about the environment, ecology, sustainability and energy. The event took place yesterday 29th of March 2008 in Conversano - Italy. This post sums up what happened before, during and after the event, from an event management perspective. As a planner I learned a lot from this experience and I invite you to participate in a BarCamp close to you because it will definitely help the way you approach your career.

Why ecoCamp?

I organized ecoCamp with Carmen Boscolo, a fellow blogger and environmental consultant, and I will use “we” referring to me and her. We both fell in love with the BarCamp formula. Open access, no pre-scheduled sessions, interaction and the Internet sounded like a great mix. In conceptualising the event we came up few things we wanted to experiment:

- Usually BarCamps host presentations. We didn’t like that . We thought that presentations are a subtle way to control a session and kill interaction. We decided to tell our audience that we wouldn’t host any presenter but just “promoters”. We borrowed this role from Harrison Owen’s Open Space Technology. At the beginning of ecoCamp, the promoter suggested her/his topic and got immediate feedback in terms of participation to the session. The promoter had the duty to guide and facilitate the session, collect the names of participants and manage time as well as take responsibility of the room and logistics.

- Usually BarCamps share the content, in that the organizers publish slides and materials of the presentations. We did not like that as well. We thought that the chance of having a large number of people working together could not be wasted. We were sure that the energy of the event would have been great. In order to collect and funnel that vibe we thought about creating a document, again inspired by Harrison Owen. We called the document “ecoCamp@world“. The promoter of every session was given a template to fill out during the discussion. We asked few questions:

- What have you discussed?
- Why have you discussed it?
- What were your conclusions?

The participants of the session got their name on the document, which would have been published on the official wiki, open, free and accessible.

Promotion

I have to say that in our case what worked the most were Social Media. I’ll go in depth.

- We used a wiki as the main platform where we put everything about the event. If you want to know more about starting and planning a BarCamp and its wiki, I collected few resources, you can find them here.

- We then created a blog to deliver news and updates.

- We created a badge and put the HTML code on the wiki for other bloggers to grab and paste on their platform.

- We coordinated a database of blogs on environmental subjects and sent the invite to use the badge

- We set up a “posting day”. We published a round-up article on the main blog and 10 other blogs posted about the event, trackbacking to that article.

- That same day we posted on Italian Social Media Networks clones of Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.

- We created a Twitter account for the event and inserted a Twitter badge in the ecoCamp wiki with live updates about the event.

Promotion Results:

- We generated buzz. We got free press coverage on every single local newspaper. In some instances, we didn’t even send the press release. Journalists went on the wiki and grab information. I was interviewed by radios and TVs before and during the event.

- A web TV made a documentary which is going to be online soon

Things to consider about promoting with Social Media

- time to build relationship with other bloggers

- striking content

- knowledge of Social Media Networks and key influencers there.

Location and Sponsors

Most of Barcamps do not take place because of the lack of a location. We managed to find one in two weeks. A business incubator which gave us two big rooms and free internet, plus buffet area and AV equipment.

We set the date of the event the 15th of March. Therefore we had two weeks to work on it. Our approach was: if we get no location or sponsors it means that the event has not to take place.

Three days before the event we contacted sponsors. We did not have any urgency to get buffet or gadgets but at a certain point in time we decided to give gifts to the brave participants. We managed to get on board one of the biggest Italian producer of energy saving light bulbs and photovoltaic panels. They gave us an energy saving light bulb for every estimated participant plus tons of promotional materials, block notes and pens. We got on board local producers of organic cheese, organic groceries, patisseries and cafes. We ended up with a huge buffet.

The great thing was that at no point in time we needed to give numbers or show media releases or participants profiles. The interest of sponsors was proactive and genuine from the very beginning. We told them we managed no money and that we were just intermediaries of the community.

Attendance and Statistics

The most successful BarCamps have 300-400 participants (Los Angeles, Toronto - millions of people and efficient public transportation). We are in a 20,000 inhabitants city in Southern Italy, far from transportation. The biggest city nearby is Bari (300,000 inhabitants), we got 80 people attending. We had more than 100 requests to follow online. Huge response.

The day before we set up a streaming on Ustream with 2 webcams in 2 different rooms. The promoter of every section was in charge of the streaming as well. In this way people living far away did not have to use transportation, therefore we got rid of unnecessary carbon emissions.

Experience and Feel

No one of the participants ever heard before what a BarCamp was. They left the location willing to attend another Camp immediately. We collected feedback such as “Wonderful”, “One of the greatest experiences of my life”, “I only wished we had more time to keep discussing”, “Thanks very much for putting this together”.

We registered people from 10am to 10.45am. You could tell everyone was a bit unsure of what to do and how to proceed. We then gathered in the main room and I illustrated, after thanking sponsors, what was the process.

We had two computers in two different locations. At one station, promoters could suggest their topic, give a brief description and tell their name. In the meanwhile participants looked at the projector where the sessions schedule was quickly building up. At the other station we collected participants for each session and their preferred session time for the day (morning/afternoon). We immediately had numbers and it was quite easy to generate the schedule, merge sessions or eliminate those with not enough participants. We printed out and distributed the schedule and then started off.

We did not have a coffee/lunch break, instead we left buffet accessible at all times for everyone to enjoy, respecting the session in progress .

Response was astonishing. Great, quality topics together with pragmatic and inspiring discussions took place. We had,from time to time, to “hold time and space” as Harrison Owen would suggest, indicating that there were 5 minutes to go and that the promoter needed to draw conclusions.

Conclusions

At the end of the day I saw participants cleaning up tables, collecting and recycling waste. They have been given the possibility to return, instead of wasting, unwanted sponsors’ material. It’s been of utmost importance for us to be consistent with the content of the event. We made sure every bit of ecoCamp was coherent with the theme of the event. From recycling to organic buffet, from promoting carpooling to giving energy-efficient bulbs as gadgets. The ethics of the organization contributed to set up an ethic environment, were people found themselves at ease to interact and produce something.

I saw engineers talking with farmers, lawyers engaging in discussions with media and marketing people, students sitting next to business men and accountants.

We needed to tell people that there was going to be ecoCamp2 somewhere and sometime in the future, because they simply needed to know there was going to be another meeting like that.

As a planner and a conference planner I have seen delegates leaving meetings bored and maybe drunk by the buffet. I have seen people sleeping during endless bullet point presentations and showing up just to follow a super guest star and leave the rest of the event to others.

This experience is a wake up call for those working with traditional conferences because things are changing, and quicker than we think.

ecoCamp

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Last week I had the chance to read about De-growth. I am very convinced now that less is actually more. I think the concept behind the movement outperforms every green/sustainable theory so far. It is quite embarrassing there is no Wikipedia entry about it in English. I will commit to translate it from Italian.

There are several hundreds of posts around the blogosphere on how to green your event. You can follow my Blogroll to stumble upon a few. As a matter of fact most of the green/sustainable practices cut emissions, waste, etc. My point is that it is not enough. I’d suggest that what you do in your event actually generates value for internal (participants) and external (community) stakeholders.

To guide you through my point I’ll reference to the first example of how to achieve the optimum level of satisfaction and being useful.

Sustainable Dance Club. Outstanding. People dancing generate energy. What about collecting that energy and generate electricity to light the club.

Use Fon for your wireless. Most of the times you won’t use all of your bandwidth, with Fon you can share the signal with people close by either by charging them or for free, securely. Opening the wireless could be a great business card for the community where you operate, think about it. The wireless signal is also sometimes perceived by some as pollution and intrusive, making it an opportunity for the community to connect to the Internet can be a way out.

Choose location within your premises. In order to make such a courageous choice you actually need powerful content. If your attendees participate for other than content reasons you might want to skip this step. Location can be used by event planners to incentive participation. An attractive location can move extra (i.e. not-motivated) people. On the other hand, if you manage outstanding content who actually “sells itself” you might want to sort the location within your company/organization. The room/space you will use is already there and will be running anyway, so why not taking advantage of existing premises and cut costs as well as transportation emissions and extra energy to run your sessions.

Promote locally. I have found myself involved in paranoid activities aimed at promoting my event to the whole World. I thought that making people move from London to New York for an event would be a great success. I had to think again. I think the greatest success would be to involve all the potential participants who could use local public transportation to get to the location. For the rest of them there has been a great invention called the Internet who can actually ensure presence (and payment maybe of a smaller fee) and participation. We are going to use Ustream for our next event. Easy, free, scalable, interactive and controllable.

Produce a document. I think this whole principle is not only limited to the environment. It strikes the whole concept of meetings and events from within. I am getting bored by just thinking about gatherings of hundreds of people with no tangible end results. Why are you moving the masses and not getting anything out of it? A multitude of people coming together should be addressed at producing a document outlining their interaction. Verba volant, scripta manent. Writing a participative document about the session could be a great bonding experience and facilitate networking as much as a coffee break.

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The Cluetrain Manifesto is almost ten years old. I was actually surprised to see it was written in 1999 for two reasons:

- It is amazing to see how it is still relevant to both Internet and businesses. The words of the manifesto sound like a Web 3.0 startup’s mission. They got it right. The people who signed it saw 10 years in advance what was about to happen. Few things are yet to come but I’d bet we’ll shortly experience them.

- Crazy, crazy, crazy. Companies had in front of their eyes the chance to get the most out of the Internet and treat the customer in new, engaging ways. It was there, clearly written and explained. It is SAD to see how only few organizations have embraced these life changing concepts.

The Cluetrain Manifesto is free to read. How the most popular Italian and world’s top 10 blogger, Beppe Grillo, would say, download it, print it and start sharing it around. Give it to your boss, to your colleagues, if possible pass it to the person sitting next to you on the underground.

The Manifesto has a lot of things to say to those involved in events. I went through the 95 Theses and got few that I thought might be of interest.

- Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
I said before than men are not monkeys. Treating your guests as demographics is a giant step toward looking at them as these animals. The human kind is indeed of the animal genre but of the social one. Social media are a great examples of that. Great conversations, great ideas, great feelings and strong emotions that we wouldn’t otherwise experienced. BarCamp and Unconferences should be the role models of every event manager. Empower and connect, do not try to divide and lead because you won’t be happy with results.

- The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

What are you doing to allow conversations among the people attending your event. Are you integrating technologies? Are you aware that recruitment now happens on Linkedin? Do you know that there are widgets you can embed in your website to encourage carpooling to your event? Most of the people attending events such as conferences are only interested in networking. Carpooling as well as online forums or wikis enable networking even before the event.

- The inflated self-important jargon you sling around

Be clear, be precise and be real. Rhetoric and Pavlovian stimulus-response tactics belong to the past. It’s good to have demanding attendees because it means they actually care. Talk to them and tell the truth and do not try to persuade. Allow interaction and hold time and space do not try to be the star of the show.

- We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.

How are you talking to your audience. How do you communicate your event. I don’t believe in brochures anymore. Apart from being an environmental disaster (and your customers do care about the environment), I think there are tons of other creative and more engaging ways to get to your audience. Do you have a blog? Have you ever heard of Twitter? Engage, do not try to tell how beautiful your event will be.

- We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.

There is not much time left. The economy as a whole is changing. As Seth Godin said this week, during recession times the biggest changes happen such as Google did. Change now because it’s not sure you’ll be able to do business tomorrow.

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While my visit at Confex 2008 did not leave me with the best memory, I had an interesting meeting with my friend Rob. He participates a lot in Event-Management-Uk a great website and forum about events with an awful lot of information on events.

I could see his dedication and willingness to share information, define practices, give advice to others involved in the industry.

He made me realize how event planners tend to be very possessive with what they know and how difficult it is to share knowledge.

I have to admit it is very true. If you just think e.g. about the number of blogs about sales or PR and you compare it with events you’ll see the ratio is ridiculous.

That translates to me in a lot of people who know how to do stuff but are not eager to share content.

If you are in events, I think you should start blogging now! I am convinced we need far more blogs about events than we currently have. It’s simply not enough.

I do not think about other blogs about events as competition. The good thing about the Blogoshpere is that the more point of views, the better for everyone blogging.

To demonstrate what I state, you’ll find a list of blogs about events below. I think that the content these people create on a daily basis is magnificent and worth reading.

To present them to you in the best possible fashion I decided to select the article that I loved the most, so you can start exploring the rest of the blog. Maybe you know some of them, or maybe not, but hey give ‘em a go:

- Breastest Friends @ Ready2Spark

- Are you Ready to take the leap @ It’s a Jaime Thing

- Tips for throwing a Budget’s Kids Party @ Australia Entertains

- 3 Types of Online Events You Can Host @ IndraSurya

- Now this is worthwhile, memorable and a sure fire guerrilla stunt. This is theater. @ Steve Dennis Event Design

- Going green should not make you feel blue @ Corporate Events Thought

- Event Design tip: Think outside the Table @ SwallowSpecialEvents

- Helpful Event Planning Tools @ Bonjour Events New!

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Now as I can just speculate on the subject and I am sure you seek real experience and down to earth suggestions I decided to interview Sandra Sims.

Sandra first started fundraising when she was in college at the University of North Texas. She was active in a school spirit club and served as chair of the fundraising committee, planning a variety of fundraisers for her club.

After graduating in 1997 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts she went to work in a variety of industries primarily working in marketing and database management.

The turning point was a volunteer experience with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

At that point she realized that not only did she enjoy fundraising, but had a knack for it too. She continued to volunteer for a variety of charitable organizations. In the fall of 2003 StepbyStepFundraising.com began as a way to share her experience with others.

She is author of a blog and several ebooks (some available for free if you subscribe) on the subject

Here are the tips that Sandra shared

- Three attributes of the successful fundraising organizer

Organization, Enthusiasm, Empowering (the ability to recruit volunteers and empower them to fulfill their duties)

- The day of the event your survival kit includes…

Event Binder:

- Contact information for key volunteers and service providers (catering, entertainment, etc.) including cell phones!

- Contracts with service providers

- Exact schedule of events

- Forms related to the event and blank forms. For example, if you are having a silent auction always have blank auction donation forms. Inevitability someone will bring a donation to the event itself rather than turn it in beforehand.

- scissors, tape, pens, paper, mini-first aid kit (something always comes up where you need these!)

- Bags for each person who will be taking money (tickets, raffles, etc.) with printed instructions

- Brochures about the organization that can be distributed

- A way to record attendance and capture contact information - such as a free drawing

- Nametags

- Business cards

And for personal survival: Bottled water & Tylenol!

- Tell us the most critical objective of a fundraising event and what practices do you adopt to achieve it.There are three absolute essentials:

1. First choose an event that your audience will truly enjoy. They must have a compelling reason to want to come other than “it’s for charity.” The social objective of most events is something that’s fun and entertaining. Consider the tastes of your audience, are they more likely to enjoy something formal or casual?

What events have worked with this group in the past? Talk to key supporters and see if they are involved with any interest groups that would be enthusiastic about a certain type of event. If they would enjoy doing a lot of the planning, even better!

2. If you have done well with matching the event to your audience, the second objective, getting attendees, will be much easier. You will still need to do advertising and publicity to get more attendees to the event. Remember that announcing the event once or twice is not enough.

Promote the event to the most people possible so each person is reminded of it 5 to 10 times. You do with by using multiple media: email, mailed invitations, telephone calls, newsletters, newspaper articles, and free Radio/TV spots.

3. The final and most important aspect of a charity benefit is that it raises money! Plan the budget (projected costs and revenues) well in advance. This will help you to know how much gross revenue needs to be in order to make a good profit. Having sponsorships, donations by individuals and businesses, helps to underwrite costs and can be a big revenue generator.

Thank your sponsors by including their names in your programs and publicity. Most events that I have been involved with raise the most funds through multiple fundraisers held at the event, not the entry tickets. Silent auctions, live auctions, raffles, sales of mementos are great ways to raise funds.

- Volunteers are a critical part of the no-profit event. How do you motivate them?

People are often more willing to help than we give them credit for. The trick is discovering what they would enjoy doing, given the amount of time they have to commit. Divide the tasks of the event into a number different areas. For example, a dinner and auction would have several main areas of responsibility: food, decorations, auctions, publicity, etc.

You can recruit lead volunteers, or what I like to call “Captains” for each area. They will then be in charge of recruiting additional volunteers and planning that area.

These are the volunteers that do have more time to commit for several weeks or months leading up to the event. Each of the areas would then be divided into tasks and blocks of time that other volunteers can help with that don’t take as much time. For instance, if there’s someone who’s very social and knows a lot of people that will be there, they might be willing to be a greeter or ticket taker for 30 minutes or an hour.

When the event planner or lead staff person has confidence in the volunteers and empowers them to take charge of their area, that can be very motivating to them. Show your thanks to anyone who helps, attends or makes donations. On the flip side, if the event planner tries to control everything and be the “gatekeeper” for every minor decision, that is very de-motivating for volunteers.

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For those out there who don’t know what I am talking about, Confex is one of the biggest trade shows for event planners, mangers and everyone involved into the industry.

This is the trade show of the trade shows. When you host people who actually work with events, expectations are extremely high and I think Confex did great.

It was a great organizational success. If you go through the numbers, you’ll notice that more than 15,000 people attended. Furthermore you would have noticed how the organizational machine worked perfectly. My congratulations to those who managed to create such a perfect event.

Nonetheless, during the whole visit I had this persisting idea: do we need trade shows at all?

I noticed by walking around the stands and meeting exhibitors that there was a positive vibe and unprecedented eagerness to network and find new business opportunities.

I also sneaked through seminars and presentations and most of them recorded substantial figures of attendance.

After that, I was amazed to notice how a large number of attendees sat at the bars and restaurants tables actually discussing and debating. Talking about projects, ideas, business insights.

My thought at that point was, what if all of the money spent for the event by both organizers and exhibitors was designated to run an Open event.

So I started to dream of how I would have given huge space to allow people to interact, produce and network.

I also fantasized about seating in comfortable meeting rooms instead of walking through aisles and trying to work out a map.

After that I imagined the satisfaction of attendees who actually could have evaluated content instead of flashy lights, good looking supermodels, free champagne and oysters. Not that I don’t like all of the above, but what does it have to do with the way I do business and trade.

On the other hand, I also figured how sponsors would have been more interested in saving money and being allowed to pitch instead of grabbing people as they walked by.

A question then popped up… How do you do that with 15,000 people over 3 days…. I don’t know but put 20 event people together and make them find a way around. You’ll probably have a new concept in 2 hours.

And then another question…. What could 15,000 people together create… Picture if they had gathered to actually produce a document, a project, a roadmap, a publication about the industry. Think about the results!!

I must say that after 45 minutes walking around the aisles and a bag full of promotional materials I went back to my hotel and had a chamomile tea.

My final thought of the day was that Confex was a great trade show, but the only relaxing feeling I had was the dream of 15,000 people together, collaborating for a purpose.

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