[00:00:00] Good morning and afternoon. My name is Jesse states and I’m the manager of professional development for meeting professionals international. I want to welcome you to our good morning and good morning. I’d like to welcome you to our 2016 webinars series a before we get started today, I’d like to take a moment to walk you around our webinar platform at the top of your screen, on the right-hand side, you’ll see a flag if English isn’t your your first language, or if you’d like to change the language of the platform, you can do it using that flag coming around to the other side of the screen on the left hand side, just next to your name, you’ll see a smiley face.
You can use this smiley face to raise your hand to agree or disagree with something that the speaker is saying to ask us to speak louder or more softly, or let me know that you need to say. You can also let me know [00:01:00] you need assistance in that window and you’ll find the chat window just below that smiley face.
You can also translate the chats. So again, if English isn’t your first language, feel free to translate the chat into a language of your choice. With that said, I would like to take a moment to welcome our speaker today. Ruud who will be discussing events, design, and a very high concept called the event canvas. Welcome, welcome
so much, Jesse, for them introduction. Let me start off by welcoming everybody. I see that we have 38 people from across the planet that are joining us, which is fantastic. And I see that from what we’re going to be doing today I’m going to encourage you to be proactive and what we’re going to do.
I’ve invited. Brittany that Carter and Amanda Larson to join us today, who are two practitioners of using the event canvas. [00:02:00] And what we want to do in this one-hour webinar is to get you thinking about event design and not just thinking, but also to start doing events, which is the whole purpose of this presentation or this webinar part that we’re going to do before we start doing that.
I’m going to ask you to wake up your fingers and your brain a little bit with a survey question and let me just pop that up on the screen. So tell me when you can see that Jesse, can we just have a quick thumbs up on that there you good. I see that poets are coming in. So I’m going to ask you how many people are involved in your event design process when you’re putting together an event, typically, how many people do you involve in that process?
Is it just you or two to five people, a team of five to seven, seven to 10 people, or more than 11 people. So go ahead and give us your votes on that and we’ll see how big the teams are. If people that are involved in the event design process. [00:03:00] Good. We have about 26 votes and not a 33. Thank you for that.
And I think we’re going to see if we can wrap it up just about there. We got a little more votes coming in. Okay. Let me just show you what that looks like in practice. Sharing the results, I think right now. So you see that more than half of the participants in this webinar today are involving a team of two to five people in their design process.
A few people are even have a bigger team of over 11 people that participate. Some have five to seven people about 11% and then 15% of you. Okay. You are flying solo, you are designing events all on your own. And I hope that with this webinar, we’re going to encourage you to not just fly solo, but also involve others in your event.
Designs. Second question. I’d like you to ask as we get to start it here is this one, which is how much time would you allocate to the event [00:04:00] design for a 16 hour event for a hundred people. So let’s picture this to be a two day event. Two times eight hours, roughly a hundred people will be attending the event.
How much time would you be allocating to designing this events? Go ahead and give us your votes. I see them coming in on.
And whilst we’re doing this, also, if you have questions as we’re going through this, feel free to ask them in the chat box, Renita, Amanda, myself, and Jesse will be delighted to pick them up and answer questions that you have coming in as we’re going through this. Great. So let me go to publish this as well.
It’s exciting to see this, so share the results. Here we go. So we’ve got. [00:05:00] One not, let’s see about more than a quarter of the people spend would spend five to 10 hours on this. Some of you are saying, just get home at 5%. You know, I don’t spend time event design, I’d just get cracking and start doing these events.
And then we’ve got a pretty equal mix around the people that spend over 11 to 21 plus hours. Typically the rule of thumb that we would have for this that we found to be very useful is to say if the total event time 16 hours for this event, times a hundred people equals 160 hours sorry.
There’s 600 hours in total. You would take 1% of that total event, time to spend on the event designed with your team. So let’s with that, let’s get, let’s get cracking. So that’s kind of a rule of thumb. Take enough time to design your event effectively to make sure that the design that you’re working on for the events.
Delivers the results for those 100 participants. Good. Let me go back to to my desktop here and [00:06:00] welcome back Renita and Amanda to this to this call as well. But Nina and Amanda were two participants in the event design certificate program that was held in January at the for the second round of the event design certificate program at San Diego state university.
You can see them here, feel free to tweet out to them or ask them questions over here. If you have any questions tweeted out as well feel free to use hashtag event canvas to, to say that. So if you look at this little blue bar that we’ve got up here, that’s actually what we’re going to cover out of that program.
So it’s this little blip here. This is a little one hour chunk of a three-day program. So it’s, it is limited what we will be covering in this webinar. So let’s get cracking. First of all, for those of you that have not come across. How to design and event a one piece of paper. This is what the event canvas looks like.
And the event canvas is available as a free download under creative comments on Ethan model, generation.com. You can go there and download it. It’s available in six different languages. And it is something that we encourage everyone to [00:07:00] use to design their events on the single sheet of paper. Now, why would you want to do that?
Well, first of all, we want to encourage people to consciously design their events. Second of all, it is a way to articulate your event story in 60 seconds. And third and most important I would believe is it’s a way to bring your team together. So, as I mentioned before, if you’re designing your events solo, see if you can involve other people, because it really brings rich richness to how you create your events.
I created the event canvas with my colleague will fit. Some of you see around the rights and Dennis lawyer, who was our story engagement engineer is a person that really makes the whole visual component of what we’re doing valid. So if you see any of the nice video visuals, those tend to come from my colleague, Dennis, and the whole professor at Wolfensohn.
If you want to reach out to him on even model, Jen will find us on Twitter. If you want to ask questions there as well. So back [00:08:00] to the event of canvas, let’s take a quick peak at a little video that will give you a gist of what the event canvas does and how it works in practice. So.[00:09:00]
I got. So that gives you the 111 second version, and we’ll spend a little time to explore the event. Canvas a little bit further with you. Now, the purpose, why the event canvas was created in the first place was to create a common visual language for events. Now, many of you are already events, experts, or deal a lot with events as MPI [00:10:00] members.
And we know. Events in itself have something very magical in them. Normally when we look at events, we you know, we think of them as there’s something that happens my worldview before the event. And then there’s a new view of the world that you have after you participate in an event. And everything that leads up to the event is prepared very well.
And then everything after the events is something that contributes to that new worldview. The question is what happens inside that tent and inside that event. And this is where the magic happens in your brain, but also of your team members. So when we look at sketching events on a single piece of paper, I’m happy to share some more examples later.
The first thing that’s really relevant for us to consider is that there’s a function in our brain right up on the front of our brain. We would hold our forehead. There’s something called a prefrontal cortex. That is our experience simulator because you’ve participated in many events before. Created many events or potentially attended them or, you know, spoke at them or in some way involved in them.
You [00:11:00] have an experienced simulator that almost functions like a flight simulator, and you may have you know, come across this this little clip where, you know, when you fly a plane and when you practice the different ways in which that’s done, it’s really, really important to practice that in an environment that’s safe.
So when you’re designing the event, what you’re trying to do is to really focus on thinking forward, what will happen if, and what if function of your brain, of the experience brand that you have is very important because no amount of books can stack up to what that experience brings you. Yes, we’ve been caught diligence and figuring out what’s currently known about events.
And then try to map that out into industry. That structure is called the event canvas. And you should be able to sketch up on a back of a piece of paper or even go on the back of a napkin when you’re talking to your event owner or somebody that’s involved in your events. Because very often we see this happening event.
Planners are very enthusiastic and they know they’re like the ninjas [00:12:00] of events. And then the event owner, the person that’s actually the one that’s that’s, you know, getting the events to get, to get off the ground. They have a hard time figuring out how an event works and what this tool does. What the canvas does is it brings people together around that conversation to have a more sensible conversation within that event landscape.
So if you look at it in in a, in a step process, I’d like to take you through the process that we use to analyze what you have at stake. And really there’s a series of steps that you can go through as a team to figure this out. So, first of all, if take one of the key principles of the event campus, which is, it takes multiple stakeholders to have an event sounds logical, right?
So you need at least an event owner and a participants who get together who have two different stakes to create event design. And when you design them events, what you want to do is you want to [00:13:00] focus on one specific stakeholder first really think deeply and articulate their needs. Because the other thing that’s critical, I’m from ROI thinking, I’m sure you’ve come across.
This is that events create value only through one mechanism. And that is through behavior change. So your events need to do something with people. When they come into the events, they have a different behavior that one day go away from the events, the Delta between the difference between the entry behavior and the exit behavior is what you’re designing.
Now you’re probably gonna say, you know, we’re not behavioral scientists, so how do we know what the behavior is? Well, that’s exactly what visual thinking is is for because Dave gray came up with this concept, which is a very easy kind of template to use that you can use as a team called the empathy map.
And I’ll talk you through the empathy map as a way to define what the behavior is. So if you [00:14:00] take the empathy map of the participants you would trust of all, pick your team and put a blow up of this on the wall and then say, you know, post-its and cookie think what does that person actually see in the environment, friends?
And what does the market offer? What does, what does that person sees through the eyes? Let’s pretend that this woman over here, we put a picture of her in the middle and say, what does she see through her eyes? And after about 90 seconds, and you get people to jot this down on post-its and put it on the wall, you then move on to the next quadrant, which.
What does she actually think and feel what really counts major preoccupations or worries and aspirations. And you’d gather again, those inputs from the different people. And as they write it down on a post-it and put it up on the wall, you will see, they read out loud, what’s on the post-it. It will spark the brain of the other people in the room.
Then you focus on what’s coming in through the years through the audio parts. And when you’ve done that you are really in the skin of this person, you can now articulate, [00:15:00] what does she actually say and do what’s her attitude of public what’s her appearance. And how does she behave towards others? Now, this is what you’re after.
This is what I would call the neck, Qatar of what you need to get from that one specific stakeholder. The Sandra is what you see through the camera. If you would point a camera at that specific people at those specific groups of people, and from that behavior, you can deduct. The pains, like what are the fears and frustrations, the obstacles as well as the gains, the wants the needs and what it feels like when they, when they’ve gone over those obstacles and what success looks like, what you’ve just done is you’ve analyzed the entry behavior of this one person.
What you’ve done is you’ve emphasized with one of these stakeholders, the participants before the event now would we like to do is picture this and put this up on the wall and you would see that you have a timeline before, during [00:16:00] and after the events. Okay. So if you’re, if you’re first focusing on this behavior that you have over here, you know, what needs to fit into this box, which is the entry behavior, actually, you’ve done that you want to figure out what is, what, as a result of having attended this event, do you want that person to do differently?
So what does this person say and do after the. That’s different from what she said before, the events, and this is exactly what you’re designing for. This is your exit behavior. That’s what’s over here. Okay. So this allows you to actually take those components and insert them into the canvas, as well as the pains and gains that you put into this, into these sections that you have over here.
So the gain. So the pains go from here to here and you take your games, all the post-its that you collected from there, and you stick them over that. What this does is gives you a start to your event, canvas, to start creating a frame for your design. [00:17:00] So the first thing you want to determine is what the event name is, who it’s designed for which stake you’re analyzing, who’s designed by, and then the data which has made on the version.
So you add the names of the people that are involved in your event design, and you already have collected the behavior like. You’ve collected the exit behavior from the empathy maps is collected the paints, and you’ve also collected the gains that this person expects to get from attending this events.
Now, everything that you have now, including the expectations on the satisfaction that’s found here, the two left pillars of this canvas are what we call the change, right? What is the change of behavior that we’re designing for? Is that going to complete the canvas? Just like you did with the event events, empathy map, and you asked your team, what type of commitment do people need to make to come to this event?
Be a participant [00:18:00] commitment here would be anything that is the opportunity, cost and time. What compromises do that to make for being at your events? You think the return, what do they walk away with after the events and what would he or she expected return for attending the events? You already mapped out the expectations because.
This is what they expect based on previous experiences or word of mouth or social media marketing messages. And then we have the satisfaction, which is to what degree has the expectation has the event been able to deliver on that expectation? And very often you have a financial framework for your event, which is the cost and the revenue side of things.
This is what we would call the bottom line. So the emotions on the top bar, the behaviors in the left on the right hand bar and the bottom line is, would be what the finances are about. What you’re doing at this stage is you’re still framing the design, right? So you’ve framed the design and now you’re a have articulated what [00:19:00] jobs does this specific participant he took upon whether they do or do not go to this event, this job would have to get done functional jobs, social jobs, emotional jobs, some basic needs that they need to have fulfilled.
And these are the things that are on there to do that. You then look at the promise. What, what is the event promise that specific participants? I know we always try to put this into a tweak, right? So if I would tweet out the promise of my event for that participants, could I put that in a tweet? That’s kind of the litmus proof of one of this is working or not.
And only after you’ve done that, now you’re going into the event design mode because were designing the experience journey, which is what most meeting planners are very good at doing and is all the chronological touch points that you experienced before during an actual event that shaped the intended behavior change.
And then the other part that’s very critical that interacts with the [00:20:00] experience journey is what we call the instructional. And instructional design is everything that the person needs to learn, skills, knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, it’s all these practical things that come from the programming of the networking that you’re plan for of the instructional things that happen at your events.
All of that together would be considered the event design. Now, the important thing about this is that once you’ve selfish designed for one stakeholder perspective from this participants, you now go back to a second or a third stakeholder, and you do the same exercise for that person, because if you’re very selfish in the design from that one person’s perspective, you are trying to cater for exactly what that person needs.
Now, the interesting thing is when you start combining these different needs of one, two or three years, sometimes up to 10, 12 state stakeholders, because this is when you really start to see the complex. [00:21:00] But also start to train even more specifically what each, each person wants to get out of their attacks.
So to recap that you have these 14 building block puzzles we used in which you have design constraints around the outside perimeter and something on the inside, that’s called the event design.
I’m going to pause for a minute because I’d like to think about this and, you know, 2d first, like we’ve just done and I’ll introduce to you a 3d view of that same world, because we do not live in a 2d world, 3d world when we’re doing events. So if you look at it in a 3d world, then this is kind of what the process looks like in three steps.
First of all, we said, you emphasize what that specific person you think of that entry behavior, their pains, their gains, and their expectations. And then you think about the exit VAV. Remember we use the empathy map to articulate the same day [00:22:00] and you bring them out of that specific event in a different way.
Now, the differences in that behavior is how you’re done creates value. We then said, you need to create a frame around you design, which are the jobs to be done that commitment in time, the expected return, the promise that you make the costs and the revenue, because those are all limitations or things that frame what you can and cannot do within that event.
You have the frame set, which is critical without a frame design is called arts. Okay. So you really need to think about how that reset before you start prototyping. I’m thinking about which events. And the experience journey, and then the instructional design will work best to change that behavior. So that in itself is the event design process.
It’s really good fun to do as a team. I would like to to start sharing a couple of examples of [00:23:00] what this what this means in practice or how this can be done when you actually get down to business with a number of people and I’d like to welcome any questions we have at this stage should Jesse, if there’s anything that we can address already.
And I’d like to prepare Renita and Amanda to, to join the call as well for this next part, because you’re going to, you’re going to look at actually some examples of how this is being applied in practice, and if I may and if I may, from that just quickly park on this slide to welcome Renita and Amanda.
Thanks so much rude, and this is Jessie and I just also want to welcome Renita and Amanda, and also let you know that I haven’t really gotten any questions yet, but I’m keeping an eye on that chat window. So if anyone does have any questions, be sure to put them in there. Great. Yes, absolutely. I’ll just quickly share this on my screen, if you will.
Just, so we see where everybody’s participating from. You can see that we have participants 47 users in total 82% of you are from the United States. They got in some of their [00:24:00] Canada and Switzerland, which I think would be myself. So let’s go back to let’s go back to this slide over here and again, feel free to shoot any questions, yell at us whilst we’re doing this.
So maybe I could start off with Amanda, are you on the line? Hi, this is Amanda. Yes. Wonderful. Thank you so much for the introduction. And thanks for letting me be a part of this and being able to share my expense with event design and how it’s really changed my approach to, to what I do on a daily basis.
So I guess, and just to give you all kinds of a background of how I got involved with all of this you know, as was said, I was part of the EDP program earlier this year in San Diego. So, you know, I’m kind of new to the whole event design process. And I really only been using it since January, but since then, it’s really changed everything that I do.
I was asked to be trained in the event planning. I went to school for it, I’ve taken some courses and things like that. And I found myself always poking events from the details [00:25:00] as your time as mentioned earlier, you know, I found myself, I get so caught up in the planning and let’s get right to it. You know, you worry about who’s going to sponsor you and who’s going to come and how much money.
And you really forget to take that critical step back and analyze the event purpose. And so it sounds almost elementary when you say it out loud, but it’s a rev. It’s a really revolutionary way of thinking. Or at least it was to me really walking away from San Diego. I felt like I was picking out furniture for a house that I haven’t built yet.
That was really kind of what I took away from all of this. So, you know, now knowing this event, design approach and, you know, going through the process that Ruth just shared with all of you, I find myself, you know, first and foremost asking the big questions, like, why am I planning this event and what am I trying to do?
And I really find that, you know, you, you lay the foundation with those principles rather than trying to connect them in later. And it’s so much more powerful. So a background on me, I’m a, I’m a marketing director and event [00:26:00] planner for a software company. So I do a lot of trade shows and conferences, and I plan a lot of big parties and things like.
But more recently, I just got a job consulting with this new conference series called founder made, which are a few of the images on the screen that you can see. And I was really excited because, you know, I really got to start applying this event design way of thinking from, you know, my first day on the job.
And I actually used it in my interview and I felt like it really positioned me above others. And even just the way that I go about talking about events, it’s much different. And I felt as more of an expert than just this experienced planner. So to kind of give you an idea of founder made is just in a nutshell we have two events coming up in October, so that’s what I’ve been planning.
Founder made, we began as a 30 person dinner networking group, and in just two years, we’ve now grown into this over 1000 person conference that was originally based in New York. This year, we’re going by coastal and by the end of but by the end of this year, we’re [00:27:00] going by coastal and then we’re going international in 2017.
So we’ve really exploded as an event, as you can see. So founder made as a group. We, our whole mission or mantra is that we focus on entrepreneurs and empowering startups by connecting them with investors and distributors and retailers and just helping the startups grow their business. So we’ve done this really great job at getting some incredible keynote speakers and some really big sponsors.
And we vocalize these successful founder stories to help share their knowledge and educate the new founders that are just kind of figuring out their way. So circling back to event design and what. You know, being new to the sounds of 18, I really found that by applying this event, canvas in this way of thinking, I was able to answer a lot of the questions that my co-founders a founder made, never really thought of, you know, th they’re not event planners.
That’s why they brought me on board and here they had this wonderful vision and this mission that they wanted to accomplish, but they really didn’t realize how to design the event [00:28:00] in a way that directly accomplish these goals. You know, they, once again, they got so caught up in all the details that by taking kind of breaking it down and pulling off, you know, all the details you really were able to get to the nitty gritty of it and answer that underlying question.
So, you know, I felt like in even the two months I’ve been with them, we’ve been able to transform the event completely. And honestly, instantly ever since looking at the event, canvas with them I mean, if anyone on this call has had any experience scaling a conference or an event series, or, you know, as I kinda mentioned, we’ve exploded this past year and I want to make sure that we’re not putting the cart before the horse here.
So if anyone has any insight or feedback, I’d love to connect with you, please tweet at me, you know, find me on LinkedIn. I’d love to pick your brain and talk to you about this. Are there any questions or rude? Is there anything I kind of left out that you’d love to hear or, yeah. Excellent. Well, thanks.
Thanks Amanda. For your, for your for your insights on that, I was curious like you said, I mean this, [00:29:00] this event, I remember you sending out the email to your colleagues that were at the BBC class in January saying, you know, here’s this event that’s just completely gone from zero to 150 miles an hour and you know, and no time, how do you deal with such amounts of success in the event?
How do you, how do you contain or how do you make that sustainable? Right. So, and I think that’s a terrific question that, you know, the conversation got started on, on here. You are you now, you know, strategically helping them develop the events? I think you know, w w we’ll give people a little bit of time to also react in the, in the main chats on maps and reach out to you on.
At Amanda underscore underscore Larson. If you want to reach out to Amanda about her, you know, managing the success of an event that’s growing so fast, I think it’s a very exciting challenge to have it’s a lucky challenge to have. Yes, yes. But also I think it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a challenge to understand why is it that a group grew so fast and you know, how do you make sure that an event is not a one-shot [00:30:00] wonder if it’s something that needs to be sustained or, you know, what, what’s the dynamic you’re putting in place over multiple events.
Like you said, to support the mission and vision of the people that have created the events in the first place. Right. And I think this is where looking at a portfolio of events over years in an event event, horizon is something that I find particularly helpful. You sometimes have situations where let’s say an event’s been around for 15 years and.
Going through really fast at first, and then it’s kind of slowing down over time and you’re trying to figure out why that is. And then you can dissect the success literally, right? You can look at it in hindsight, which is always easier than looking forward. And you know, by, by understanding where the success was created, how much behavior actually changed by which stakeholders, and also asking questions about, you know, do we have the right stakeholders out of there?
Sometimes when we design events, we figure out that maybe it’s better when one of the stakeholders is no longer [00:31:00] welcome at the events. And that sounds a bit strange, but sometimes by uninviting a group of people or splitting them off into another events can be a good way of creating focus. And I see that founder made has already Let’s say it has a number of different subjects like food and wellness and beauties that’s sounds like a very focused kind of environment that you’re working in.
But I’m sure that the participants have, you know, good, good ideas about how how you can deal with that type of success. So I welcome your feedback there and the meantime I’m on I’m I’m gonna, I’m going to jump over to Bernita to, to join the call as well. Regina, can you dress? Yes, I can hear you guys.
Hi everyone. Nita. And this is Jessie, so I was just going to step in. I have, there has a question. So I just thought, you know, before we move on to the next segment, maybe we can, we can get that in route. Yes. So Heather, I think your question, do you think completing the event canvas is best done by your entire group?
That’s involved in the planning of the events. This looks awesome, but I will [00:32:00] need to sell the reason to increase their time that they’re put into. I can hear the response. You just do it with a big smiley face. That’s that’s a terrific question. Heather, and thank you for that question. I see more questions coming in, which is great.
And Jen Donovan has the same challenge of saying I’m told that, just get it done. And others don’t want to know about what goes into it, our care to have the discussions about foundational things around the event. Well, I think this is the, this is probably the most difficult challenge that you’re going to come across when you talk to that design, you know, and I’ll say welcome to Madison Reno’s remarks in that in a couple of moments, we found that claiming the, the right amount of time for the four event design prior to starting execution of events is the most difficult thing to do.
But also the most important thing to do, the reason why I started off the webinar, asking you the question. How many people are typically involved in your event design. And the second question was how much time would you spend on an event for a hundred people that take 16 hours, that’s 1600 hours [00:33:00] of total event time.
We always go back to the sheet and say, see if you can, are no, do not, do not start designing the event or even executing these different cannot allocate at least 1% of the total event, time on event design, to understand what this event is supposed to do, who the stakeholders are, what behavior you’re trying to change, what the restrictions are of your design prior to starting designing and validating that against the event owner, to ensure that their event success is actually in place.
And and it sounds so easy when you say it out loud, but at the end of the day, we found that that’s really the only way. By not starting the execution of an event, unless you have that all sorted out. And if you consider 1% of the time of a team to prepare an event effectively offset against the total event, time of the people at events [00:34:00] out on top of that, the efficiency that you get when you start executing an event that people agree on what it should be, how it should be trend, it makes the whole execution of the events much more seamless.
And a lot of the errors usually get made in the interpretation of what somebody actually wants out of the events. If those are all assumptions, it could be real, your whole planning process. And it cost you two to three times as much time and trying to fulfill the requirements that you didn’t understand really clearly at the, at the get go right at the upfront.
So that would be my, my answer. And you have to be pretty rigid in terms of accepting how you, how you approach the events. But maybe I’ll, I’ll I’ll circle back to the Ranita or Amanda. Do you, do you have any suggestions for Heather, for Jen, with regards to these claiming events, design time?
Hi, this is your Anita. I wanted to say thank you for inviting me rude, but also Amanda. Congratulations. It sounds really fantastic. I’m sorta in the same position with you has there and [00:35:00] within working in nonprofit. So I work in nonprofit working for the national urban league and sort of the self-taught event planner because I started this and they had a youth summit and at the end of the day it was you do it and just get it done.
And so in the beginning of all this before. Design. I was actually doing the same thing that everyone else was doing. You have people who don’t want to know about the, the basics that you’re working on. They just want to get it done. They just want to get it done. They just want to get it done. And that’s the unfortunate way of working.
One of the things that like I learned with doing event design was that it gave me a chance to think outside of the box and with our stakeholders, our stakeholders is not only the national urban league, because we do have a charge and what we need to get done for the community. But also I have the uniqueness of working with young people, ages 12 through 18.
So of course the whole gambit of everything changes. My event venue changes I’m on a college campus. I’m not doing exhibit hall. However, I have to always be [00:36:00] paired up with our annual conference, which have three to four to 5,000 people where I have somewhere between 350 and 400 young people and their chaperones.
The hard part is getting other people to pay attention to what you’re doing. And it’s going to be a flow process for you because a lot of times you’re going to have to walk in the door. Just saying here, here’s what we’re doing. Here’s the event canvas. And this is why it works. One of the beautiful things about event canvas.
When you look at it, even if you start by yourself is that you can look at the areas that rude was pointing out to you, even in the empathy map and doing it as the event owner, you can pull out those areas that you already know and experience, you know, what your company feels, know your company thinks about the pains of spending on money and in finding the venue.
And you kind of know what they come into already, but you also know if, if you’re looking at your company, I have to look at what we were told to do at the end of the day. Our thing is called [00:37:00] project. Getting these ready for college work in life. But at the end of the day, I know that what I have to promise when I do the youth summit is that we guarantee that every young person coming to the event is going to have a college going experience.
Now, when they get ready, we’ll also make sure that during the experience they’re going to meet adults who will give them that preparation for after college and work, and then they’ll learn some what other people would call soft skills, but there’ll be also ready for life. Well, that’s our guarantee from the national academy that we have to do and working with event design this year really gave me an opportunity to not only think about what I already do, but they also kind of really sparked us fire in me that wasn’t there.
It hasn’t been there for awhile, which was working with the young people as our stakeholders. And we have two stakeholders outside of just not only the sponsors and not only national urban league, but our young people, our stakeholders for our adult chaperones with [00:38:00] con. And so. Leaving the EDC class in January, February 29th is when I got a chance to put this all in action.
And I was basically floating on my way to Baltimore, to work with a group of young people. I got a chance to work with my colleague and I I got a chance to train my colleague actually on event design while I was doing it because I had him help me do it. I got a chance to introduce the idea of event design, but also how you look at something to young people and as well as other adults who are working with us.
So that was exciting in itself. I got to work with the two stakeholders and got them to think outside of their own needs, the needs of everyone who’s coming in as that stakeholder. So with young people who were there, I think their ages were 14. Through 18 years of age, they got to think about other young people who were not only coming from Baltimore, but they’re going to be coming from about 36 different cities across the country this year.
So are hoping for taking it from one area to the next was just being able to implement that. With them now, the hard part like you guys [00:39:00] are talking about is getting other people coming back and working with the team of people. I have a team of people that I’ll be working with and unfortunately not being the person who makes all the decisions.
So I’m working as a team member trying to. Change the aspect of team people to being able to do this as well. So I do understand that working into it, you’re going to have to sell it little by little, by little, every chance you get to talk about event design. You want to be able to talk about the areas that you’re touching and most importantly, what routes that is that your experience that you’re showing and you’re having with your events is that it has to change behavior.
It has to, you know, your, your event is doing something wonderful when it changes that behavior. And you can look at it and say, what is the behavior I want, if I’m selling cars and people are not buying cars in America, I know I want people to feel good about buying that car at the end of the day, when they come through it.
If I’m with a young people, I said before we practicing, and we have to make that promise that when you [00:40:00] leave our summit, you’re going to be. Ready for college work and life. You won’t physically be ready for college work and life for we go backwards and say, you would be aware you would have experienced living on a college campus.
You would have spoken to people who are in the world, in the, in the work world. And you would have worked out how to, to, you know, talk to people and navigate the system. Those are the things we can promise at the end, our young people that walk in don’t have that there they come in with, why do I need to go to college?
I want to be the next Beyonce. I want. They come in with that. And our adult chaperones come in with. We don’t have enough equipment at work. I’m stressing out over time being here. And at the end of the day, everybody is going to get something and their experience coming to the youth summit will change them.
And when they go back, kids will be, Hey, you know what causes an option? You know, I can do that and adults will be, Hey, I can do my job and I can work a little bit better because I’ve gotten other experience and other tools here. So we vent as I really did help. [00:41:00] Being able to have that conversation while I was here, I was able to talk to my colleagues and my bosses or my SVPs my, my senior directors and tell them about the work that they were doing and how as we work through this.
They are able to utilize their own skills, that they have their own thoughts that they have. But they’re able to understand what we’re trying to create is this experience at the end of the day. So it really is about the experience that you can create with event canvas and working as a nonprofit, we have less money.
We have to deal with sponsors all the time and trying to meet with the sponsors, desires want, but for me, the most important people and stakeholders were the ones who actually got the benefit of coming to that conference. And that is the young people and that are my colleagues in the field who are. The workers who do what I do.
So those were the people. So even canvas really did help just as Amanda was saying, it just makes you think about things so differently. And so sharply. And one of the things that we learned with Ruud also is that you you’re going to walk away when you get to the [00:42:00] event design portion of it. You may come away with four to five, to six different ideas you want to do.
Calm yourself down to at least three of those ideas that you want to guarantee you can do within your event. And then after you do that, you know that the next year that when you come back, you have some idea of that are leftover, that you can then sit in and say, hi, how about we add these to our event?
And then you can fleet further. That’s the other thing about event design. It helps you see beyond just the event you’re doing, but it helps you look forward to the next event, to the next event, to the next event, because you’ll begin to set in place some things that might not change in your event. And you go back and say, Hey, my canvas doesn’t really change at this place here or this place here.
But the stakeholders might not change, but the age might change. You might be serving millennials. You might be saying, you know, serving a RP, those kinds of things might change. But some of the basic things in your, in your canvas won’t change, but it is really, it’s exciting to learn it. And that’s one of the things I can [00:43:00] honestly say when you go and like meeting Amanda, Amanda was great to work with in our team, even though it was small, we’re really a wonderful group of people to work with because it helped us spread our ideas out.
It helped us to look at things differently, not only in the world that we work in, but in the world that other people worked in as well. Yeah, so you don’t have to come from the same place. You don’t have to have the same experience, your experience that you have within you is going to make for your experience with doing event design.
So no one has to come in as master of anything. If not looking like that is really is saying, what do I know of this world? And what is it that I know I can add to this? And that’s what you’ll be doing. It was really a great experience. Amanda, I get to see what this experience turns into in about a month.
Our youth summit is July 12th through the 17th on Baltimore. So I get to go on site on July 7th, I’m out of here. So this is my multiple for everything, but I’m still very much excited by the work that we did with the young people. Actually I had a group of [00:44:00] about 20 people that we worked with.
We worked with eight young people, eight to 10. 10 young people. And then about eight to 10 adults were in the room at the same time. As I said before, I was actually training my colleague as I was going through it so that he could see how even canvas was working and got a chance to work within there and say, wow, you know, this is really something because we were able to pull out those items that we wanted to make sure that young people got an experience.
And one of the things I did with them was just the talk about, he said, you know, in the promise area, your promise areas should be a, what is it? 144 characters, so you should be able to tweet it. And so the theme that the young people came away with was be bold, be brilliant, be you be more. And of course, we’ll be in Baltimore this year for best their theme for this year from it.
That’s my, my tweet, if anything, for this year. Wow. That’s, that’s really exciting. Rainy. I’m so glad you this is working out so well. Three things, three things I pick up from what you said. You know, the stakeholder analysis takes a bit of time, but it’s also a thing that everybody can do [00:45:00] very easily.
Right. Everybody can think like somebody else, and that’s actually a really important skill to have and to learn. Right. I remember at the, at the EDC class, we, you know, you, you won the pitch of, you know, who’s events, will we be designing during the three-day class? And so she got the other participants to help her come up with prototypes, which was kind of the easy easy way to have.
But I really enjoyed that. Rena, you went back and read it, the whole design with your with the youth involved as well. And your colleagues. So you actually had, you know, two prototypes coming out of two or three coming out of the class, and then you went back and did the process again with the actual participants in the room being used.
How difficult was it for them to go through the process when you got them? The young people were very open. And so where the adults that we were working with. And so they were open to the whole process especially if I began to tell them what a stakeholder was and what they were doing, that they were not.
I told them that they were my event design team. I started them off with that, that they had a challenge that they had to help design [00:46:00] the experience. If I didn’t tell me where to design a new conference, they were designing the experience and that there had to be some goals that they would have. When they came through with a youth summit, what did they want to do?
They wanted to meet more people. They wanted to get more information about colleges and they actually wanted to be exposed to careers that were something that they could do in the future. Cause they, they were like, well, we don’t really know what we want to do. Well, when you’re about 14, 13, 14, you really don’t.
But let’s see what we could do for you so that they were, they were very open to working with it. And when I gave them, like, just like Rick was saying, you know, you shouldn’t stay more than 90 seconds on an area. Cause you wanted to be very quick. I want you to think about it or break it down. That helped also.
And I’m making them timer. One of the things we did talk about is that there are roles. When you do event design, you can give everyone a role. If you, depending on how large a group is everyone can have a role that they participate in. So you have someone who’s your timekeeper. You have someone who.
He is putting up your, [00:47:00] your events and taking, taking notes. Then you have someone who’s over here doing something else. I can’t think of all the things cause I had the kids doing it and they felt very much a part of the process. And it wasn’t as hard as it, as it was. They thought it was once we got the canvas up there and I began to put the notes in place where they could see how everything was coming together.
They were like, wow, okay. This is really fantastic. And then we started talking about even design itself or the exact experience. But once you get people to think about it if you already know your stakeholders, if you know already know your sponsors and you come into it and you say which two people are, which stakeholders you want to concentrate on, that helps you also in the beginning.
Sometimes you want to say, where do I start? If you already know your stakeholders, that’s where you start with you say, okay, I’m going to start with those people. I already know. So that’s why I was able to start with the kids and with the the chaperones. Well, thanks so much from, you know, that that’s really helpful.
The, the third thing I forgot to mention is that you said after you’re finished, you don’t just come out with one [00:48:00] design. You kind of, you come out with multiple and you come out with the stakeholder analysis. So the stakeholder analysis doesn’t dramatically change over time, unless your events change the behavior dramatically.
Right. Which usually if they’re extremely good, that can change lots of behavior in one scoop. Right. But most events change behavior incrementally. Right? So so the stakeholder analysis is not something you have to do every single time you do the event, you just tweak it every time you look at it. So you would go back to the one that you did for the past event and say, okay, is this still correct?
Or have something dramatically changed? You could just revalidate that with the individuals and then start, you know kick-started right from this part, right where you already have a number of those insights. The other thing, you know, if you have multiple designs coming out of one round of events we always say that, you know, there’s never a wrong design.
It’s just the wrong time for that design. Right? So like you said, maybe your stakeholder group changes in age, right. Or maybe you know, over time because destination changes [00:49:00] that would work really well in one destination, not in the other. And you can go back to your repository of prototypes of things that you’ve created in rough sketch quite early on.
And then you can start working on the details and all the nitty gritty of planning out the event, which is, as we know a lot of work, right. That’s what we’re really good at. Sometimes we say that most event planners are most comfortable in this part, in the experience journey, right? We love doing this stuff, right.
One are the chronic, all the touch points before, during and after. How can I make that whole experience as seamless as possible, et cetera, et cetera. And sometimes we forget the bigger picture of stepping back and zooming out and reframing. You know, how good does that experience actually need to be? What is the instructional design, but most importantly, how did we actually frame the design prior to starting to create that middle, but right.
Cause if something changes in that frame, if you haven’t trained properly, remember it’s called art. I’m not design. Great. I see that we have seven minutes on the clock. Amanda, do you have any, any observations or feedback from, [00:50:00] from the things that Rita was addressing and, and claiming the around design time and, and how easy or difficult to processes?
Yeah. You know, even rude kind of touched on it in the very beginning, but once you kind of walked through this process, You know, more and more, a few times you get better and better at it. So even though, you know, walking through step by step, it might seem like a lot, you know, you’d be surprised how quickly you really can fly through it, especially touching on what Renita said.
You know, you kind of already know your stakeholders, you know, where they’re coming from. So, you know, being able to kind of dive into what you already know, you’d be surprised to how quickly you can really get to. And you know, even if you have to go through it by yourself, the first time you’ll kind of learn the verbiage and the things you discovered doing the process, going to your stakeholders after with that presentation might really change their mind on what you have to say.
You know, Johnny has to on a paper napkin, even, you know, once you get good at it and understand how to do it, it’s, it’s a really quick process. So although it might seem like a lot up front, I think [00:51:00] that once you kind of apply it and get used to it, it’s really a powerful, quick tool, or it can be thanks to my now, the thing that we found and something we apply in the event, designing a certificate program is actually something that we call the events, facilitation simulator kits.
It’s actually a box that has the whole process built into it with the role cards and everything you need to start designing. And trust me, once you put up this big wallpaper on the wall, which is part of it here on the back, I have it’s about 12. Three feet, you know, so it’s something you can not really go around.
You create your little defense war room, right? So if your office turns into the event war room, and you start when somebody asks you for your next event to say you know, here, let’s in this event and you start asking the right questions and say, well, how many people do you think are going to be at the event?
And how long has the event going to be? So this is the total event time. Do you mind prior to us jumping in and selecting destinations and venues that we stand still for a minute into, what is it that we’re designing these people to do [00:52:00] differently? And then how can we involve the team that’s going to deliver on that to become part of that connected.
All right. We like to call it a positive conspiracy because once you get people on board in that conspiracy and you give them a role and they become part of a design thing, then it becomes really good fun to do, right. It’s something that you can actually very easily put into practice because then the people start giving the answers.
Right? You can see an example here on the screen of, you know, how, how an event design starts. And then you say, well, when does this event need to happen? And you’ve got a six month window. And then here, we said, you know, well, let’s, let’s stand back and think about who are all the different stakeholders that are involved in this event?
Let’s map out when things need to happen. And then we actually stood back and took each stakeholder step by step. And we look at them very carefully and was actually a way to bring the team together, to get all the ideas into one. What we call an idea car. Map out all his different stakes and it gets really messy before it gets [00:53:00] cleaner.
Right. And then what we’d like to do is to then visualize it into something that can be told as a story. So that the story of your event is something that everybody on anybody can repeat in 60 seconds, if you can articulate the promise of your events in 60 seconds, like Renita was just saying, you know, for the summit, if, if people know that here’s what we’re trying to achieve with this event, and this is how we’re going to do it, then it becomes really good fun to do.
You know? So whether you’re called, you know, Facebook are whether you are, you know, sign mantic are the nuclear security summit or somebody’s eighth birthday. It doesn’t really matter what it is. We like to use the visuals because it really helps people to understand that really well. But most of all, it also gives you a token of what you’ve participated in.
No, you can do it with post-its. Or you can convert it into something that’s more colorful, but people then have to work. The brain has to work for its lunch to tell the story. [00:54:00] All right. So I realized that we are almost on top of the hour. We have two minutes to go. I’m dialing in from Switzerland.
So I, I, I really need to make sure that we begin and stop on time. I’d like to wrap up with, with, with a couple of things. One of them is if you feel like designing new event from scratch is too difficult at first, here’s the recommendation. See if you can take a past event and just document it, just write down what you know about that event and put it down into an event.
Canvas. You could just pictures to see what it to see what it looks like. And then you can tell the story, just using pictures, which is very easy to do. It gives you gives you a kind of a. An easy way to write down what you already know about the events. Let me just put up a quick example here on the screen.
So you can see that. So here with documenting in family, just by everything we know about the events, it turns videos, couple of post-its. And by this, you can just very simply tell the story of your event. It doesn’t have to be fast and drawings are stuff that’s really worked out, [00:55:00] or you can use pictures and things together, right?
There’s there’s different combinations I can do, or you can just use post-it. So depends on how you want to deal with it or a combination. And I think by thinking about your event designs in that way really helps you to, to start learning how to articulate how you event creates value. Then prototyping people love to probe with prototype and decision makers.
Don’t want to be confronted with one solution, give him two or three alternatives. Preferably a fourth one, have a well-validated story around which one you think is going to work best, or your team thinks is going to work best because you did your homework. And then you’ll be surprised at what you can get from your event owner, both in time and in budgets that you hadn’t expected.
And the last one that helps them to take a more educated decision on an app design, which for them is the biggest insecurity points. Your event owner is freaked out about owning an events. Trust me, owning an event is a daunting task, and they’re not used to doing that. So they need your help. And [00:56:00] by designing the events, you’re going to make that a lot.
And you’re going to make that decision a lot easier on them. I’m not going to feel more comfortable knowing that there’s a team there to support them in that decision. I see a question from eco one last question. What’s the formula used to determine how much time to spend planning on events? Ah, so this is we’re talking about time spent designing the event is 1% of the total event time.
So the example we gave at the beginning was if you have an event for a hundred people. For 16 hours, that would be 1600 hours of total event time. The amount of time that people spend with the events we then say is that it’s reasonable to spend 1% of that total event time, which is 16 hours on designing the events.
I, 16 hours seems a lot like a lot of work for an individual. If you bring four people together for four hours and you design the events and those 16 hours that’s, that’s no, that’s a reasonable way to deal with a team of people to spend time on event design. Good. I’m conscious that we’re slightly over time.
Join the practitioners across the [00:57:00] planet that are using this. There’s some 3000 people that are doing this. So you can also join us on one of the upcoming trainings. Together with the MPI, you’ll see that we are delivering a training called the event design certificate program. You will find this on the MPI website as well as on a certificate in event design, a certificate in event design.
Which is a process that’s Benita and Amanda went through last last January. And they’re the second class in line. We’ll have a program in Amsterdam and in San Diego again in the summer at the end of the summer. So we’re delighted to thank you again, Amanda and Renita for joining us. And thank you, Jesse, for hosting us in this webinar.
Absolutely. Thank you so much. Rude, very much. Appreciate it. And I know that we put several resources in the chat window. So feel free to download the tree event canvas. If you’re interested in more information about the class, either email me or I have the link that’s in the chat window as well.
And I also linked to some of the [00:58:00] tools that are available for you before you leave today. If you do have time, and I know that some of you will have to jump off for other meetings and events that you need to hold. But I’m going to go ahead and open up the session survey for. We use a survey just to evaluate how the session went, whether we met expectations for the session itself.
And also to ask you, if you scroll down using the black bar on the side what other topics you’d like to see covered as part of our webinars series? So I’m going to go ahead and leave that open for everybody to complete as you leave. We really appreciate you coming today. And again if you want any more information about the event canvas you can reach out to rude or to meet, and I can make sure that we connect you to more information about getting processed started in this meeting design process.
Thank you so much. Thank you, Jesse, and have a good day, everyone. Bye bye.[00:59:00]