Make your conference less complicated and your community will thank you!

We've all been to those mega-conferences

You know the ones; multi-day, multi-stream. Overwhelmed, much? You're not alone!

Conference organisers and stakeholders want to provide their attendees with a wonderful, learned experience and know that it's a fine balance between too little and too much.Traditional conferences break the day up into different 'streams' which turn their focus on to one particular but still broad topic or theme, and the attendees choose which sessions they'd like to go to. Something similar to this, for example:

But if there's any more than 3 streams, you encourage the confusion. What can you do about it?

If you're thinking about having a massive conference, I recommend you take a step back and look at your strategy.

• Why do you want to have this conference?

Why not have a smaller yet more focused conference, 1 or 2 streams tops, and supplement that conference with more frequent but smaller events throughout the year?That way, you still have your flagship conference that is a bit different to all the others around town, you can keep the costs down, the planning time down, the preparation less complicated and your attendees more engaged.You also get more contact time with your community by scheduling more frequent events throughout the year, leading to better engagement while still sharing the knowledge, wisdom and brand awareness you wanted in the first place.