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Adapting National Events for Regional Audiences
 Each year, my company holds a three-day national conference for our business clients. While attendance is always good, we know there are plenty of clients who can’t make the trip to the event, which we hold in a different part of the country annually. Given the current state of T&E budgets (and the likelihood that they’re going to continue to get hammered), we’ve decided to bring the event to our customers. Our plan is to create a scaled-down, one-day version of our three-day conference and take it on the road as a series of regional events. Are any other companies doing this? If so, how do they successfully scale down and condense their event content so that it delivers maximum value to attendees?
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“Best of” Report
Microsoft MIX is a major, four-day conference for the Web industry, held annually in Las Vegas. Attendees include Web designers, developers, business and information-technology decision-makers, and anyone else doing work on the Web. The agenda includes keynotes, formal sessions, and plenty of open-space time — which they call the Sandbox.
It’s important for developers here in Ireland to engage with the annual MIX extravaganza. But it’s not always an easy decision for those of us living overseas to attend to the event, as it requires about a week away from home and work, including travel time. So last year, the organizers of Microsoft Ireland’s third annual Irish Microsoft Technology Conference (IMTC), an event for Web professionals in our part of the world, were looking for ways to bring the best of MIX to the IMTC, in the interest of growing awareness of and connection to the larger international event.
The solution was a one-man show. IMTC had booked Phil Winstanley, a U.K.-based Web-industry expert, to present at the event in Ireland, which would take place in early April. Coincidentally, Winstanley also was planning to attend MIX, which was scheduled for early March in Las Vegas.
Winstanley carried a camera to Las Vegas and recorded as many of his MIX experiences as possible. He then distilled his images along with video content grabbed from a MIX Web site into a highlight reel, and devoted an entire session at the Irish conference to sharing his experiences — and the event content — with attendees.
Through his entire presentation, Winstanley underscored the value of the Las Vegas event by showing essential shots and clips from interesting keynotes and talks; referring to and commenting on some of the more crowded and interesting sessions; giving attendees an overview of all of the major news items and announcements to emerge from the conference; and talking about how he personally benefitted by attending.
But he also kept the tone lighthearted and fun, recognizing that a big part of the event experience takes place outside the sessions. Interspersed among his discussions of important and innovative MIX content and takeaways were stories and pictures that illustrated Winstanley’s entire MIX visit, from his boarding a plane in the U.K. to arriving in his hotel room at MIX. His images and stories brought attendees with him from the networking receptions to waiting in line to ride the roller coaster.
The result? The mutually beneficial event summary brought learning and insight from the Vegas event to the IMTC attendees, while helping them to feel part of the global community at MIX 08.
 Martha Rotter,
developer evangelist,
Microsoft Ireland, Dublin
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DON’T DOWNSIZE: REIMAGINE
Each year, the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) holds an international conference in a major city. For the last seven years, our UPA Boston chapter has held a smaller, homegrown event called the UPA-Boston Mini UPA Conference. The conference started small, but has grown tremendously. Last May, it sold out in advance, with 400 people in attendance.
One of the reasons we’ve enjoyed so much success is that our attendees like the one-day conference format. They appreciate that our event features regional speakers and fosters knowledge-sharing and networking among usability professionals on a local level.
So instead of making your regional event a watered-down version of your larger conference, my advice is to re-imagine it as something entirely different.
One way to do just that is to select high-quality speakers from your region. Having local speakers and luminaries in attendance means that attendees have a chance to see what is going on regionally in terms of issues and opportunities facing the industry.
At UPA Boston, one of our objectives is for people to feel like they can easily talk to speakers and to each other, and to ask questions and interact. So we intentionally keep things small. We also limit the number of speakers, and we standardize all presentations to 45 minutes in length, so that each session has at least 10 to 15 minutes dedicated to mingling, networking, and knowledge-sharing among participants.
An energizing and budget-friendly approach we’ve discovered is to involve local students who are passionate about our industry. We offer discounted student registrations and hire student volunteers who get into the event for free in return for helping us out. We also accept proposals from student presenters. This may require a leap of faith, but you’ll be surprised by what some students can do when given the chance.
 Chris Hass,
president, UPA Boston;
usability consultant,
Bentley Design
and Usability Center,
Waltham, MA
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NO SHORTCUTS ALLOWED
Developing a one-day regional event is no easier or more difficult than planning any other type of event. Even if your event is going to be just a few hours, it still needs to support your company’s objective for the coming year. Just because an event is scaled back doesn’t mean its design should not still focus on making sure it contributes toward a defined business objective.
Once these all-important definitions are in place, it’s time to think of the tactics that can help your event further corporate goals. Here are some tips to help you maximize the opportunity.
 Focus your content. A one-day event means that you’ll have limited time to make your message stick. That’s why it’s so important to make sure that the event only focuses on content that will resonate with the most people or reach those at the highest levels of a client organization. By doing so, you’ll increase the odds that attendees will take your message back to their companies and cascade it down to others.
Think before and after. Think carefully about what you can do before and after the event to lay groundwork for and then extend the event experience, so that when attendees gather face-to-face, they can focus on defining the action items to work on post-event that will deliver the most value.
Make it a working session. There’s no better way to get attendees excited about attending an event than to put responsibility for the event experience in their own hands. So consider a different format — such as a “working” meeting, a task force, or a special-interest group. Then, work with your audience ahead of time to identify specific needs and use the event as a forum to address them.
Do your homework. If you differentiate your event based on regional needs, be sure to conduct research that takes these regional differences into consideration. Since this will be the first year of your event, you don’t have old registration and conference-evaluation data. But you might consider mining data from your larger, national conference and slicing and dicing the information by region in order to determine what the hot topics are. Also be sure to tap the insight of regional managers, directors, and VPs, and all other personnel who interact with customers on a daily basis.
 Dianne Budion Devitt,
president, DND Group Inc.,
Riverdale, NY
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