The Spark Camp Playbook
Part 3: Setting The Agenda
Note: This the third of a four-part series from the founders of Spark Camp for anyone who enjoys throwing events or aspires to do so, and everyone wants to explore different approaches to bringing people together, whether for a meetup, conference, or party.
For the past five years, we’ve crafted an event series we think is somewhat unusual for the quality of the connections and insights it produces for participants. We published our reflections on what we’d learned back in 2013. Since then, we’ve experimented a lot, and learned countless more lessons along the way. So we wanted to produce a guide describing exactly what it is we do, how those practices have evolved over time, why they’ve developed that way, and where we think they still need refinement. In each posting, we’ll take you into a different part of our process.
Part 3: Designing the Program
Spark Camps start on a Thursday or Friday night. By the following morning, we’ve turned Campers’ pitches into a final program that is unveiled after breakfast. The program typically includes at least two dozen discussion sessions, each of which is dedicated to a specific topic. Crafting a responsive program is hard work, but takes far less time than designing a program in advance. Here’s how we know we’ve done a good job:
Discussions, not lectures: Discussions are shared inquiries, and they work only when people engage one another. We’ve learned that discussions need to be framed differently than lectures. Whereas the names of lectures often provide attendees a guarantee of some knowledge or perspective, a discussion topic offers attendees a starting place. Some of the best Spark Camp discussions function as in-person lists, like “Things that make me go squee!” or they function like a conversational quest, such as “Why do …?”
Excitement: When we unveil the weekend’s programming, we hope for nothing less than squeals and satisfied sighs and chatter. Our final program isn’t a simple aggregate of campers’ submissions. Campers’ pitches are used as inspiration and ingredients, and their ideas are often reframed to be relatable and provocative.
Difficult decisions: If attendees aren’t struggling to choose which sessions to attend, then we haven’t succeeded.
A diverse group of session leaders: Our Campers pitch sessions and host them (with facilitation help by the organizers). We work to ensure that a variety of people, worldviews and ideas are represented in the schedule.
A well-balanced discussion schedule: As we described in Part Two of this playbook, the first night of Spark Camp is spent composing the discussion agenda for the event. For the most part, Spark Camps feature multiple hour-long blocks of four concurrent conversations, each facilitated by one of the four co-organizers, with some padding time before and after the discussion to ensure it can come to a natural end. Ideally, two of these conversations will be relatively large (20 or more people), but the other two will have fewer participants. Throughout the day, each attendee should have the chance to sit in on both large and small conversations.
Our process:
We don’t recommend bypassing or short-changing any of the steps below. After all, you’re stuck with the results for the rest of the event! Coaching attendees through the pitch process ensures higher quality submissions. And the better the submissions, the harder it is to cast your votes, ensuring that votes are more widely distributed and a more reliable indicator of attendees’ interests.
Step one: Make lots of pitch cards available, more than you think you’ll need. To pitch their session ideas, Campers write a succinct title and description on a note card. We now order printed 3’x5’ cards with Spark Camp logos on them, but index cards will work just fine. Cards should be on the small size. Most attendees don’t bother reading longer pitches, so best to constrain the word count. We typically order at least five (?) pitch cards per attendee.
Step two: Design the physical voting process. You’ll need the equivalent of both ballots and ballot boxes. We’ve tried a number of methods. At our first camps, we gave Campers five stickers and we posted all of the pitch cards in a central location. We evolved to paper voting slips, which Campers dropped into paper bags affixed with the pitch card. We’ve even used old tissue boxes in place of bags. At Spark Camp :: Design attendees actually voted using legos that they playfully stacked on lego boards.
We used to favor a transparent voting process, permitting attendees to see how many votes had been cast for a topic. We realized, however, that Campers started to vote for those sessions which already had stickers or ballots. Now we prefer to conceal how many votes a pitch has received, to prevent previous votes from influencing a Camper’s thinking. Campers typically evaluate anywhere from seventy to one hundred pitches. Storing cast ballots out of sight ensures that Campers don’t shortcut the process by voting for popular pitches.
After many years of iteration, we now rely on a more streamlined method for voting: Campers receive perforated voting cards, which contain two big and two small votes. Campers receive these cards at dinner, since they double as place-setting name cards on the tables. Occasionally we color-code Campers’ voting cards by industry. We do this if we’re interested in quickly seeing how, for example, people from different industries cast their votes.
Step three: Decide where attendees will vote. In just a moment we’ll describe how to move Campers through the pitch and vote process. Before Camp starts we make sure that we’ll have ample space display pitches alongside ballot boxes. This can be tricky. We need enough space to display all pitches, as well as enough room for Campers to walk from pitch to pitch. We make sure that our venue has several spare tables that can be set either at the back of the dining room or in an adjacent room.
Step four: Sort out the program display. We have designed a board to fit 3’x5’ cards and that we pick up from a local printer just before Camp starts. Sometimes we assign a sub-theme to a track, like Ideas or Nitty-Gritty. So, we make sure there’s a place to write that, as well as a designated room.
Step five: Write instructions in advance, paying special care to frame your topic and provide examples. By now, we’ve evolved our instructions to be incredibly simple. Here’s what we tell attendees:
We mentioned at the start of this chapter that we, the organizers, set the topics for the first round of discussions, and Campers are automatically assigned to participate in one those sessions. We do this for two reasons. The first has to do with instruction: those first sessions are facilitated by each of organizers, and our goal is to help Campers learn how discussion sessions work. Second, the topics of these sessions are used as examples during the vote-and-pitch process, and they ensure that Camp gets off to a strong and smart start.
Step six: Time block an all-attendee vote-and-pitch session. We recommend 30 minutes for the pitch process, followed by another 30 minutes for voting.
Step seven: Set aside time for organizers to finalize the program: After the voting has concluded and dessert is finished, Campers socialize or go rest in their rooms. But for the organizers, this is where our real — and vitally important — work begins. We tally all votes and discuss, in excruciating detail, various schedule options. We want to ensure that we’ve been responsive to our Campers’ desires for conversations, but we also want to balance for gender, age, race, ethnicity, geography and industry. And we also think carefully about timing. For example, a discussion about a very heavy subject is best for early evening — it’ll be a disaster as the second session on the first full day of Camp. This process usually takes us several hours, and we are awake well past midnight finalizing the program.
Here’s how we run the vote-and-pitch process:
We wait for attendees to finish their dinner. Then we announce the start of the vote-and-pitch process and direct Campers to pitch cards and pens on their tables.
After a brief explanation of what we’re about to do, and why we’re doing it, we give attendees five minutes to brainstorm and draft two pitch ideas. They are instructed to write each idea on a separate pitch card. This happens in silence. Campers are instructed to come up with their own ideas.
Once the five minutes are up, we move into peer-review. Campers are asked to team up with the person sitting to their right or left. And then they’re given fifteen minutes to review one another’s ideas. We instruct Campers to trade pitch cards and then answer each other’s questions. Campers are instructed to draw a line through their drafts, and then write at least one but no more than two final pitches on separate cards. They’re also asked to hold the finished cards in the air so we know to collect them.
Cards are collected and quickly placed before the ballot boxes. By now 30 minutes have passed.
Campers are then shown how to separate and ready their voting cards. They’re instructed to review all pitches and to then carefully cast their votes, allotting the two larger cards for the topics they couldn’t bare to miss and the two smaller cards for topics they’d love to see on the board.
Campers are given at least twenty minutes to vote. This may seem like a lot of time, but we’ve learned that physically moving 80 people around a room, and asking them to carefully read pitch cards, requires dedicated time. Sometimes more than twenty minutes are required.
How we design the program
Tabulating results is a no-brainer; each large card equals two points and small cards equal one. The tally is written on the back of each pitch, and we then order pitches by vote tally. There are always two or three stand-outs, pitches that garner anywhere from forty to seventy votes. These almost always make it into the final program.
But once we’ve done that, the hard work truly begins. We strongly recommend you go into this knowing that there isn’t an obvious or ideal outcome.
We place pitches side by side, looking for identical or related pitches. Spark Camps typically host eighty people, which means we review, on average, seventy-five to a hundred pitches. We often find at least four or five identical pitches, plus ten or so closely related ideas. This is often a matter of interpretation and debate. We reorder pitches (related and unrelated) by vote tallies.
And then we stand back and ask questions like: What do peoples’ pitches indicate about their interests? What themes are emerging? What is the tone? What subjects repeat themselves?
We identify the subtexts for the event, as well as Campers’ specific desires and interests. We often develop a small but specific list of sub-themes, like “frustration with the boss” (Spark Camp :: Visionaries, Leaders and Managers) to “beauty” (Spark Camp :: Design) to “messed up metrics” (Spark Camp :: Giving) to “voice” (Spark Camp :: Storytelling). We either select a pitch to represent these sub-themes or we reframe Campers’ pitches to speak directly to their concerns.
How many votes a pitch received plays a significant, but not decisive role. We factor in the framing, knowing that a better conceived pitch often lends itself to a better discussion. We also factor in who pitched the topic. It’s important to us that our final program reflects the diversity of the Camp, and that conveners include women, people of color, a variety of ages and a wide mix of industries.
By now, we’ve usually chosen pitches to account for at least half of the program. We begin placing these on the board, using our larger rooms for the most popular pitches. We also make sure that the most popular pitches don’t go head to head in the same time block. More personal topics are slotted for later in the program.
At this point, we’ve been counting, sorting, ordering and debating for at least a good hour. We’re just about half-way done, and we’re tired. And we know that finalizing the remainder of the program will take us several more hours. We set to the side any pitches that received few votes. We consult our matrixes (see: Part Two), looking to make sure we’ve got discussion topics relevant to specific industries and skills sets. We try to identify good but poorly pitched ideas; sometimes we rewrite these.
Once we’ve picked and ordered topics by session and room, we then rewrite the pitches, making sure that the convener’s name is included.
By the end of this process, we have created the weekend’s program. But, as you’ll soon learn, that program is still subject to change.
Spark Camp is a 501(c)(3) organization that brings extraordinary people together to discuss challenging topics confronting society. Spark Camp’s cofounders are Andrew Pergam, Amy Webb, Amanda Michel and Matt Thompson.
