A multi-city event? Yes, you can!

How important is the design of your event?

A few years ago, in 2014, I wrote an article about a very interesting discussion in one of the most popular Linkedin discussion groups on the subject of MICE (meeting, incentives, conferencing and exhibitions).

The range of observations, comments, and anecdotes was at a time abundant and devoid of a shared meaning for "event design". For every contribution, another particular definition. This group had 160.000 members then, about 50% less than today.

So I wrote an article that started by clarifying two fundamentally different types of events:

• Corporate events that are designed with ‘organizational development’ in mind; these include meetings that deal with issues that are constrained within the boundaries of one or multiple organizations, such as sales conferences or strategy planning meetings.
• Community events that are designed with the purpose of getting the members of a community together. These include high-profile events such as large conferences, congresses, and industry trade shows, but also less commercial ones such as town council meetings, neighborhood get-togethers, weddings and other social gatherings.

I also proposed this table to explain the importance of two separate roles – ‘event design’ and ‘group facilitation’ that impact these two types of events differently.

• “Group facilitation” deals with the group processes that happen in a meeting and is conducted by trained professionals (group facilitators). These professionals focus principally on how the group must behave to produce a certain amount of content or to reach a number of outcomes. More here: www.iaf-world.org
• “Event design” - also referred to as “meeting architecture” - deals with all aspects of a meeting event for it to have its own ‘ethos’. An event planner that looks in greater depth at all possible variables that can contribute to a successful event becomes an event designer. He or she becomes like a chef or a movie director who designs an event by combining a number of important varied elements to produce a masterpiece. More here https://www.meetingsupport.org/

The last FRESH Conference took place simultaneously in 5 different cities and a new concept in the MICE industry was successfully inaugurated.

Organized by the Meeting Design Institute (MDI), FRESH conferences are nowadays a renowned reference in the MICE industry, where meeting planners, designers and organisers meet to experience the future in meeting design. So it is almost no news that a multi-city conference occurs at FRESH. Except that this time, the MDI has come up with a highly affordable formula that places this innovative meeting format at the reach of any corporate or community events organizer.

Using the table above, the last FRESH conference is clearly a community meeting with immense economic value because their speakers and participants are the brightest thought leaders and most innovative professionals in the field. As I explained in the right upper corner, an event designer can hire group facilitators for small parts of the larger event. This was exactly what happened here, FRESH fire starter and event designer - Maarten Vanneste - hired me as a group facilitator to facilitate a co-creation session that took stock of the two days experience of this multi-hub event. I worked with a GDSS (group decision support system) provided by one of the conference sponsors (MeetingSphere?) and piloted by Steve Bather to deliver a multi-city world café, that revealed a number of deep insights about synchronous multi-venue meetings sharing the same 'ethos' and social sphere. I doubt that we could have had a similar depth of results with a traditional single venue meeting.

The multi-city formula works

I will explain why. An event design formula is normally the product of an event designer. These professionals are also called "meeting architects". Meeting Architecture is the discipline of designing and executing meetings and events based on measurable objectives in order to improve the learning, networking, and motivation of participants. This work is aiming to influence the participants' professional action, leading to impact and improving ROI (Return on Investment).

The Meeting Design Institute has invested many years of accumulated industry knowledge in coming up with a successful multi-city event formula. In many ways, the design considerations for a synchronous multi-venue event do not differ much from that of any other innovative event that aims to bring a tangible ROI and participants' impact.

The key driver for a multi-city event is that it is eco-friendly. You can lower the carbon dioxide footprint of the participants attending one single and unequally distant venue. Instead, you can have them attending a more convenient location in their local or nearby city. This is even more important in corporate events. Whenever large companies like HP or Oracle run a Global Partners' conference, instead of having 4.000 people scattered worldwide traveling to Madrid or Las Vegas, they can gather a number of multi-city hubs (one per major capital) and have probably twice that number attending a multi-venue conference with similar results. I would risk saying with better results.

Basically, this boils down to two critical elements. The scalability of the multi-conference AV system that needs to be dispatched to each city. This multi-hub system needs to be very cost effective and efficient. Abbit is a renowned boutique AV services supplier that has cracked the code for such delivery. And you don't need to start big, a multi-city event in the UK or in Spain with 5 cities would be covering much of those country's geography making it really cost-effective.

The second element is the addition of a GDSS (group decision support systems) as a compelling alternative to paper and pen workshop facilitation formats. A GDSS is capable of uniting in the same meeting space as many persons in as many hubs you can possibly have. It begs for a multi-city event to become a critical tool and it can provide truly surprising results.

Please join the Linkedin GDSS group if you want to learn more about group decision support systems.

Follow this hashtag: #multihubmeetings