A new year brings new challenges and also an opportunity to reflect, adapt and evolve. The danger is that, sometimes, in the rush to renew, the baby gets thrown out with the bath water and all hell breaks loose.
We recently had a client who wanted to do exactly that; cancel all their events and start again from scratch. We counselled against that (successfully) on the basis that the programme was working to a degree, it just needed some long-term development planning and redefining.
The problem was that the events and been left untended for quite a while: the formats were stale and had similar for twenty years or so. The whole programme was loss-making, but that’s because no benchmarking of sponsor or exhibitor rates (or delegates rates for that matter) had been done for a long time, leading to revenue significantly below market rates. Both members and non-members were still coming, but numbers were starting to dwindle.
I was reminded how much an annual conference is like a garden, which, to obtain the best result needs to be tended to regularly, watered and fed. If you leave it, nature tends to take over after a while, which can be a good thing. However it can equally be devastating as the beautiful parts that you really enjoy start to wither and die.
Your event is often the shining pillar of representation of your organisation to your membership. It needs to be treated with due care and attention, and often, to keep it alive. In my experience, and for the best results, consider where you want it to be in 2-3 years’ time, and plan around that change.