Crowd-sourcing, or using the collective wisdom of your attendees to define what will be discussed at a conference, is currently all the rage. But should you crowdsource content for your event?
Jeff Hurt sparked an interesting online discussion with his blog post “Two Reasons Why Crowdsourcing Your Conference Content Won’t Work.” His assertion: If you let your attendees choose and vote on what they want to hear, they’ll end up choosing mediocre content and “experts” that may have substandard presentation skills, rather than sessions that will expand their knowledge and speakers who will challenge them. Over time, he asserted, this “popularity contest” model of education selection and lack of quality content will drive attendees away from your event.
And, he’s right.
But with a little moderation and guidance from the event planners (with or without an education development committee), crowd-sourcing can be an excellent way to solicit feedback and engage your audience.
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How democratizing the event design process can enhance your event
Consider this: Our founding fathers loved democracy. But when it came time to outline how America would be run, they didn’t think a full-on democracy would be the best political system, so they opted to make the United States a republic, which better preserves minority rights and individual liberties. Everybody can vote, but the electoral college makes the final decision on who becomes president. You can say whatever you want, but there’s a system of checks and balances in place to prevent mob rule.
In the same way, it is important to know what your attendees want so you can engage them, but that doesn’t mean that you should chuck out all your plans and structure everything around what the outspoken majority says they need, because they may not know what that is. Or, as Hurt says, “Attendees don’t know what they don’t know.”
If you were planning a medical meeting, you wouldn’t ask the doctors in attendance to teach each other about the latest technological advances or newest medical theories if they’d had no lab or clinical experience with either, because it wouldn’t benefit them or their future patients. You would bring in people who had access to the research and experience necessary to teach the doctors new skills or give them insight into new industry trends. So why would you let your attendees determine everything they’d like to see and do at your conference?
That being said, there are instances in which pure crowd-sourcing of content can work very well: During a gathering of high-level experts in a specific area, for example, or at a small conference on a niche topic. But if you’re looking to serve the educational needs of thousands of people, you’re going to need a smaller group of people to take their suggestions into consideration. Only in that way will you be able to develop a compelling mix of content that balances what they think they want with what will challenge them, help them grow, and succeed.
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Love it! Thanks for extending the conversation and I agree with everything you wrote. It provides a great balance and helps frame the conversation with some fantastic, practical examples.
Thanks for continuing the discussion!
Thanks, Jeff. I noticed that Michael McCurry is taking a similar approach in crowdsourcing suggestions for the upcoming PCMA educational conference. (http://www.michaelmccurry.net/2010/02/01/help-pcma-crowdsource-session-topics-for-june-education-conference/ ). At our PYM LIVE Events, crowdsourcing works very well during our educational sessions, but we’re not meeting the needs of 1,000s of people at a time, just the concerns of our intimate audience of planners.
Nice article Kristi,
Jeff and I have had a lot of conversation about this. I completely agree with him that you should not crowdsource decisions regarding session content.
As you have stated here, I think it is very healthy to engage attendees in developing session topic ideas for consideration. As you pointed out we did this for the PCMA Education Conference coming up in June.
The hang-up, if there is one, is do you call that crowdsourcing, or is it just collaboration. There is not a clear-cut, consistent definition out there of what crowdsourcing truly is. If you look in Wikipedia, it uses the word collaboration as part of the definition.
So, anyways, thanks for writing this article as I do think you correctly pointed out the democracy versus republic model and a system of checks and balances to ensure the best decisions are made.
Good stuff…. great contributions by all to the conversation!
@michaelmccurry
Thanks Michael-
The way that I’ve seen crowdsourcing most often defined by conference organizers is you get attendees to give suggestions, vote on what they want to see and then, in some organizations, have volunteers step forward to lead those sessions. In small tech conference circles, it’s been very successful. But in larger settings, such as SXSW, the reaction to the content provided hasn’t been as positive.
As a speaker, I’ve been approached by organizations to create sessions based on what their attendees want to see — the session I gave at the PCMA annual on “Making Cents” was an example of that — but they put me through a serious vetting process first and made sure that I had the chops as an educator to deliver the content in a way that would also be engaging.
So I do think that whereas crowdsourcing does involve a great deal of collaboration, if you’re trying to meet the needs of a large group, you have to have a final committee who takes those suggestions and can find the right people to lead the conversations or determine whether additional content is needed besides what was suggested. Because if you do run with a pure democratic model you could end up with mediocre content that appeals to the masses, but doesn’t help elevate them at all.
@PYMLive