Association meeting planners deploy a variety of strategies to get attendees mingling and networking: cocktail events, dedicated connection lounges, snack centers in the venue hallways. But engagement is often imperfect, and those infamous "hallway conversations" always feel too short. Is there a better way?
Lee Gimpel, founder and principal of Better Meetings, an events consulting firm, says that there is, but it requires planners to take a step back and ask some baseline questions about the meeting's purpose.
"The first big question I would ask [as a planner] is, 'Why do people go to our conference?'" he said. "I think a lot of associations get this wrong. They say, 'Attendees really love the content.' But people almost never say, 'My God, I loved the PowerPoint presentations.' They'll say they met a research collaborator, or a mentor or they got a new job because they went."
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