First of all, a massive thank you to everyone who attended our event on the transformative power of IoT, we were thrilled to see so many familiar faces and new ones eager to dive into the world of IoT.
As this was the first event that we had hosted it was safe to say that we didn’t really know what to expect. We have attended plenty of events in the past – some great, some not so great, so we had a rough idea of what we wanted to do, but actually doing it on the night was an entirely different challenge.
This blog highlights some of the challenges and learnings from our experience that may provide food for thought if you’re in the process of planning your own event!
The Venue
Arguably one of the most important decisions to make when hosting an event: where to actually host it. As we had not hosted any networking or speaking events before, (we had hosted a small anniversary event when The Curve turned five years old but nothing specifically around an industry or topic), we had a tough decision to make.
We wanted a venue which ticked a few boxes:
- A lively atmosphere
- Appropriate for a line up of in-person talks
- Suitable for casual networking
and whilst this wasn’t too difficult to find (there are lots of great venues in Sheffield!), it led to our next challenge.
As this was our first event, we didn’t have previous event data to base our attendee turnout on, we had some guidance that we should expect anywhere from 20-30% drop off up to 30-60% depending on who we spoke to, especially as it was a free to attend event. This was something we worried about in the lead up as we didn’t want the venue to feel “empty” if we were to get fewer people on the night.
The counter to this was that we also did not want it to be crowded and packed if there were less drop offs than anticipated. In the end the venue was slightly too cosy for the greater than average turnout, but with a few creative moves of furniture we feel we managed the situation well and provided a good environment for attendees on the night.
The Speakers
All of our speakers provided interesting thoughts and opinions on technology and also recounted their own personal experiences throughout the industry. When we were planning the main parts of the event, we felt that thirty minutes would be a good amount of time per speaker to go into enough detail around their topic whilst still keeping the audience engaged.
After receiving a number of offers from speakers, we decided on having opening remarks followed by three talks – with the intention of making it as valuable / engaging as possible for the audience. In actual fact it was actually asking a lot of our audience to listen and hear from four separate individuals back to back. We introduced a break after the first talk, and as it extended past 30 minutes we did see a few drop offs, which we understand is normal, however if we were to host a similar event in the future, we would likely limit this to two speakers with opportunities to network and socialise either side of a talk to help break up the evening a bit more.
EventBrite
Using EventBrite as the primary ticketing / invitation method worked pretty well considering we had not used it before. Personally, I was slightly worried about how easy it would be to manage attendees and the details of the event but I was actually pleasantly surprised with how simple it all was, even when we had to change the date of our event due to clashes with other events in the local area – updating the event listing and sending out communications to the attendees informing them of the change was very quick and easy.
One of the aspects of the EventBrite tickets that we perhaps should have utilised better was actually scanning them as people arrived. We had put together name tags based on people who had signed up which would form part of a talk and demonstration later in the evening, but in hindsight having a digital list of attendees may have made life easier after the event when looking to connect and chat to people who we didn’t get around to talking to on the night.
How It Went Overall
All told, we’re pretty happy with how the event turned out for the most part, yes we perhaps could have planned the seating areas a little differently but it wasn’t a big issue. We ended up with a turnout greater than we had anticipated which was great, and had a lot of attendees compliment the event overall and some even suggest joint events in the future which is always a good sign!
We have already started planning our next event and with the learnings from this one we should be in a good position to do a much better job next time around, so we hope we’ll see you there and be sure to sign up to our newsletter to keep in the loop of all the important details!