Alternative Education

Everything you need to know about planning an educational event you learned in kindergarten.

Or at least a good chunk of it. Because when it comes to keeping adults engaged in learning, many of the same elementary rules apply.

• “If you don’t keep them busy, they’ll get bored,” says Tracey Smith, a meeting planner who recently founded Tracey Smith Events/Marketing after 15 years as a corporate meeting planner. “Adults are a lot like kids. You need to provide activities or hands-on training for them, because that will help people enjoy what they’re doing and remember it longer as well.”

• As more demands are placed on people’s time, the need to offer something substantive becomes more critical. The best way to encourage participation, planners say, is to think outside the box for each and every event.

• “Attendees have higher expectations of meetings than ever before,” says Stacy Steine, director of strategic accounts for Minnetonka-based Triad Conferences, a corporate-event–planning firm. “The bar has been raised. You can’t redo the same meeting or annual convention over and over again. People need a new reason to attend every year, and if it’s going to be the same thing, it’s just not worth it to them.”

Spice up Standard Fare

Breaking out of the box doesn’t have to mean abandoning PowerPoint presentations or keynote speakers. It does, however, require a more thoughtful approach to these industry stalwarts.

“Lecture-style presentations are still the most popular, although they are probably the least effective,” Steine says. “It’s definitely the easiest, and it’s hard to get out of that box. But we have found that in an hour-long lecture, adults remember the most from the first 10 minutes and the last 10 minutes.

The key to making the remaining 40 minutes more effective is to encourage some sort of audience interaction. Simple solutions include incorporating a short question-and-answer session or breaking into small groups for discussion. For something more elaborate, use a high-tech audience response system, with which attendees can instantly and anonymously answer questions posed to them and give feedback to the presenter.

“You can use an audience response system to poll the attendees about almost anything,” says Shawna Suckow, president of Eagan-based Compass Event Organizers. For instance, a CEO addressing her employees might present a new marketing strategy and ask for feedback. “It makes the audience feel like they’re involved, and it gives them something to do with their hands during the presentation.”

Spacing out the speakers also breaks up meeting monotony. “We recommend during content-planning meetings that they don’t have back-to-back talking heads,” Suckow says. “You can’t have someone at the front of the room talking at the attendees all day long.”