From the book
Ideas Worth Gathering Around
Ideas and concepts from Acts of Humanity: The Power of Purposeful Events that can make your next gathering more purposeful. A short film for each, a one-page brief where there is one, and the essay behind it.
No. 1 · Essay 4.8 · Scarcity
Kill your early-bird pricing
Sixty-nine percent of business events discount early registration. Zero percent of sixty consumer entertainment experiences — concerts, stadiums, Broadway — do anything of the kind. Those events often sell out.
Discount goes to people who have already decided to come. A Maritz study of 360,000 registrations found early-bird pricing counter-productive for exactly that reason. And there is no uptake percentage that rescues it: too few takers and nothing moved, too many and you have repriced the whole event.
Cap the number instead, and sell something worth more than a discount. You get urgency, early registration, and predictability — everything the early bird promised and fails to deliver.
Read the essay excerpt →
One-page brief · PDFNo. 2 · Essay 4.2 · Purpose & People
Your audience is more than a sea of nouns
Your event is not 3,500 attendees. It is 3,500 individuals, each one arriving feeling something — hopeful, skeptical, exhausted, curious, already late.
Open almost any persona deck and you will find nouns. Job title, industry, company size, seniority, region. All of it true. None of it tells you what the person is doing. Three people own the same car: one is restoring his father’s, one bought it for himself, one races it on weekends. Same noun, three different doings.
Describing is not knowing. Rewrite one persona sheet in verbs — feeling, thinking, knowing, doing — then mark every moment of your program for which of the four it touches, and cut the moments that speak to none.
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One-page brief · PDFEssay 1.4 · Hearts, Heads & Hands
Leave out the emotion, and you leave out the heart
Information alone has never changed a gathering. People decide with their hearts, justify with their heads, and act with their hands — and an agenda built only for the second of those three will be forgotten before the flight home.
Design for what people feel first, then what they understand, then what you want them to do. Skip the first and the other two never arrive.
Read the essay excerpt →More ideas are on the way. Twenty-four essays sit behind them.