How do I get Millennials to come to our conferences?

Yesterday I had a very long conversation with an Executive Director of an Association who said to me "our event is dying because we are getting older and older and not attracting new younger members." As I was thinking about this and how to help my new client with this issue, I thought to myself.... how many of my associations are experiencing the same problems? It turns out that this is a standard issue. Thus I thought discussing this point would help all of my clients (and some who are not).

The first area of concern is to consider what we are dealing with as older planners. The baby boomer was the first educated generation comprising of about 50 percent with higher education. The millennial, however, is even more educated at about 60 percent. Consider this; they are more educated, younger and more energetic than the baby boomer... thus the needs of this generation are far different than my age.

Millenials love technology. They live with it daily. They wake up and look at their phones, computers, ipads, iwatches, echos, siris, etc., before even saying hello to their significant other. Yes they are obsessed with technology .. thus to get the millennials to be engaged, you must have technology throughout your conference. from registration, to materials, to networking and beyond. It doesn't mean they are experts in technology; they are dependent on it! Use that to your advantage by building a platform that has a substantial use of technology.

Registration: they want to know everything. The who, what, where, and why is very important! Millennials want to know who is going to speak along with who is going to be coming to the conference. Make sure your registration can see other members who are going to go to the event. What is going to be going on, from the activities to the sessions, be specific and clear of the purpose of the event and the information that is displayed? Where, is the location millennial orientated or is it a location more geared to an older clientele? They want a destination that offers far more than just a meeting room and a nice dinner. Then comes the why factor, why should they come instead of using LinkedIn or other social media to get the information they need.

Costs, always a problem with conferences for all attendees, where the average attendee wants to know whether or not there is an ROI for the spend on a meeting... the millennial wants the cost to be lower than usual. Many millennials have severe college debt. Thus the prices of a conference are significant to this generation. Millennials have to pick and choose how and when to spend their dollar on a meeting. make every penny count!!!

Tie in gamification, an area that I am probably not an expert in, and one that I don't get very well.... Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts. Gamification commonly employs game design elements to improve user engagement, organizational productivity, flow, learning, crowdsourcing, employee recruitment and evaluation, ease of use, the usefulness of systems, physical exercise, traffic violations, voter apathy, and more. Start this process well before the conference and get this generation involved.... Their involvement early on will have a direct result of the success.

The bottom line is this, to draw a younger crowd you need to think younger, if this isn’t something in your wheelhouse, and for many of us this may be the case, find a millennial to draw upon their perspective in life and let them develop this portion of the conference for you. Our firm has done just that, the future is in the youth!! We are developing the next generation of meeting professionals to use their perspective to help our clients develop new and innovative concepts for their conferences.