5 more lessons from our annual meeting

Going over more notes from our annual meeting and thought I would share a few more observations:

1) Does anyone read PowerPoint slides? Or is everyone just expecting to be able to download and print the presentation later. Now more than ever I'm on the side of simply using slides to reinforce key messages. If I could just get the speakers to go along with that...

2) Attendees don't like change. Well, not too much change, anyway. New features -- fine. Big changes -- not so good. We've used the same basic schedule outline for years (this happens Monday morning, this happens Monday afternoon, etc.) and the attendees like it that way. Frankly, no one seems to pay much attention to the outline of the schedule until they show up onsite to pick up their registration packets.

3) The digital divide is still there. Basically, the proportion of attendees who are wired, who want PDFs of registration material, who are concerned about wireless access, who want to dive into things like social networking, etc. has not changed significantly over the last couple of years. That's my experience, anyway. Several years ago, I was all hot to make our registration materials available for a quick download to a PDA, and now no one carries one of those. The ones who aren't wired want stuff electronically -- they just want to have their assistant download it and print it out.

4) There's no substitute for having a great A/V crew. And so I'm giving them a plug -- we use Advanced Video, and hopefully always will. Never have to worry about them, never have to worry about a glitch, they never let anything fall through the cracks, and they've got that "can-do" attitude that lowers the stress level by 1000%. I don't know what I'd do without them.

5) On my wish list for next year -- let attendees download program materials onsite to a USB drive. Haven't worked out the kinks in this one yet, but it's on my to-do list for January 2009. I know, I said the non-wired crowd isn't getting any smaller, but the wired crowd wants their downloads yesterday. I'd love to be able to offer that on-site as part of our "cyber cafe" setup, and get someone to sponsor giveaway USB drives.

Tagged: Associations, Meetings, Conferences.