Conference Myth: Early Bird Registrations

The early bird gets the worm. This is mostly true for sales on Black Friday, getting work done before anyone else arrives in the office, or getting the best seats at the cinema. So how does being an early bird work for conferences?

What’s in it for attendees

The most obvious benefit to attendees is financial, typically a 10-15% discount from normal registration rates. For a conference with $1,000+ registration fee, this saving is material, and if you are definitely going that’s basically free money.

There are other soft-benefits, such is letting people know you are going, ability to make travel plans (better travel deals), using budget money when available, and for people who like things well organized ahead of time, nothing could be better.

What’s in it for organizers

There are three main reasons organizers offer early registrations:

• Get cash in the door: Much of organizers’ expenses is committed early in the process. This represents an investment and risk for them, so receiving cash early is a good way to ease cash-flow.
• Opportunity to promote: Organizers need a reason and a sense of urgency to make their marketing emails stand out. A time-restricted discount is a great way to do this, good for a few email blasts weeks or months before the event.
• Feedback: It’s often difficult for an organizer to know how many people will eventually attend the event, which makes it a challenge to plan. By getting early registrations, they can get a sense of potential attendee numbers.

It’s clear that the benefits are stacked in favor of event organizers. For them, giving away a small percentage of fees is a reasonable cost of mitigating some of the risk in organizing an event. This is the core motivation of the three reasons listed above.

However, for attendees looking to justify going to the event, early bird savings are trivial compared to the full cost of attending (registration, travel, time, opportunity cost, etc.). Many would gladly pay for registering later, thus enabling them to keep their options open.

Tipping the advantage to attendees

Thinking beyond the financial, there are other benefits attendees can consider early on, before committing to go. Treating conference attendance as a strategic outreach and engagement will deliver a much better ROI of your time and budget. Seven reasons come to mind in considering early engagement:

• To make sure that the event will be the right one for you and your business.
• Time to engage online with other attendees to discuss the merits of the event.
• Make specific plans to meet clients, partners and colleagues during the conference.
• Fine-tune your marketing message from a better understanding of attendees and their context.
• Decide if others from your company should also attend, or for them to attend instead of you.
• Time to connect with speakers (or if you are a speaker, to connect with your audience). Also to connect with exhibitors (or as an exhibitor/sponsor, to connect with attendees).
• Knowing clients and partners in the vicinity of the event, you are able to arrange other meetings around the conference.

The reasons listed above come down to a precious commodity: time. Time to decide how best to participate in the event (to go or not to go), and time to plan your engagement with others also thinking of attending. Advance planning will also minimize the need to waste the first few hours at an event desperately going through lists of sessions, speakers, exhibitors and (if available) attendees in order to prioritize your valuable time.

Summary

Conferences that are aligned with your professional agenda can make a huge contribution to your business. The challenge is to know this ahead of time, which would truly justify the axiom “the early bird gets the worm”.

Do you have strategies and tactics you rely upon to decide which events you attend, and how best to maximize your time at events?