Meet Filip! Filip was a successful event organizer, well recognized in the event organization industry. You ask yourself why „was“? Well…. Let us tell you a story.
How did all start
It all began after Filip graduated. He was young, smart and full of energy. He was working in a very perspective industry and one day a brilliant idea occurred to him. He noticed that his industry needs one big central event which will gather experts from the whole industry and also spread knowledge and trends from all around the world.
Filip made a team from a few colleagues who he knew to be very committed and trustful people. He made a plan and strategy. He brought the best speakers, he rented a very popular Event venue, he made great Agenda and they started with an aggressive marketing campaign.
The star was born
The response was more than good! In a short period, a big part of the community heard about his event. It was recognized as a conference with great content and not so expensive tickets.
Every year the event had more and more participants. Year after year popularity got higher, as well as the income. He attracted many companies and the number of sponsors and exhibitors was increasing. Filip was thrilled! After some time, he made a mechanism that started to work by itself. Income was always great, and he didn’t need any innovations.
Is it less always more?
This was working for a long time, but then Filip noticed some changes. The conference started to be less important to one part of his business niche. Other events started to attract more attention than his. He started to ask himself what went wrong? He had a perfect organization, good content, great cocktail dinners, and awesome sponsors’ packages (with a lot of traditional benefits). He knew this was a proven concept of event organization and he didn’t want to change anything. Even though some of his team members had some suggestions he didn’t want to accept them. In his opinion, digital innovations were monkey business and just a waste of money.
Something was missing out, but he couldn’t tell what. What could go wrong when a recipe was good?
Your comfort zone will kill you
The real truth was that he was afraid to change his well-beaten path. In his opinion, it will just give him an unnecessarily headache and he was sure that he can overcome this crisis. Unfortunately, that wasn’t a case. After a few years, the number of visitors was too low for any profit, and after falling into debt, Filip decided to officially close the story about his event.
After some time of researching, some of his conclusions were:
- Many people didn’t see the value in one-day networking anymore. They wanted to know who they would meet at the event, what kind of material should they prepared, who will be their target. In the era of Facebook and LinkedIn, they don’t want to be limited to only physical connections.
- People were sick of standing in the registration line and waiting for accreditation they anyway didn’t need. After online ticket purchases, this was a step backward.
- This was one more annoying thing for all participants: tons of paper material. Brochures, leaflets, agenda, presentations – this is all nice, but the download button is much nicer.
Filip asked himself, (how) can he solve these problems.
You can(‘t) teach an old dog new tricks
In attempt to regain old glory of his conference, he started visiting new conferences, hoping he can see what to change or upgrade, or to find someone who will. He was surprised at how everything has changed. Starting with live streaming, online live sessions and event managing apps. Everything was digitized – question and answers, surveys, agenda, announcements, even networking. He wanted to find new partners and he started approaching. He didn’t have a lot of success because, during the coffee break, everybody was busy talking on their phones and checking their emails.
After a few tries, he finally succeeded in starting a small talk with a young businessman and he finally got the first answer: – “Hey bro, thanks, but just find me on the app”.