5 Lessons I Learned from Planning a Conference
In 2018, my work leadership voluntold me to assist with planning a conference. This conference is our biggest conference of the year, and it’s one of the most important because it brings together leaders from all across the company to share lessons, interact with each other, and take back what they learn to their work locations.
I’ll save you the self-imposed drama of helping with this conference and tell you guys up front that I don’t want to plan a conference again.
But I learned quite a lot from helping, and those lessons translated into the rest of my work life and even my personal life. And it’s increased my enjoyment of how I show up at other conferences — which I 100% enjoy attending. (As long as I’m not planning it.)
It’s a Lot More Work Than My Manager and I Expected
From about April through the conference in September, I’d estimate that 50% of my time went into managing, planning, and dealing with conference logistics.
I could be overestimating, but looking back, I spent a LOT of time dealing with venue communications, food selection, vendor contacts, registration details, and so many emails that people didn’t read.
It drove me nuts.
My manager reluctantly agreed with those in charge to volunteer me, but he wasn’t happy about it. In fact, he agrees with me that I shouldn’t get roped into something like this again — it wasn’t my job, and it still isn’t my job to run conferences.
But at the time, they didn’t have the organizational and planning skills that I do. No good deed goes unpunished, amirite?
With the schedule and workload, I have now, I’d never willingly accommodate planning a conference among all the rest of my responsibilities.
What I Learned
For the longest time, I hated talking on the phone. I hated calling people, answering calls from people I didn’t know, and generally everything about what happens when you have to dial a phone number and then talk to someone else.
Saying it like this now makes it sound ridiculous, but that’s how I was.
Planning this conference forced me to make phone calls to vendors, answer phone calls from vendors and the venue, reach out to the restaurant and activity coordinators to make plans for over 160 people, and so on.
One of the best ways to get past fear is by “exposure therapy.” The more exposure you have to something — like talking on the phone — the less scary it becomes until you realize just how ridiculous it is to fear of making a phone call to people you don’t know.
Now, I have almost no problems with talking on the phone, answering calls from people I don’t know (though I usually avoid doing that on my cell phone anyway), and thinking and talking on the fly.
It’s helped in my personal life too. That kind of fear stops people from solving problems with a quick phone call.
People Don’t Read Emails
I’m the kind of person who hates having unread emails, and I re-read any replies at least once to make sure I’m getting my point across in the clearest way possible.
So it frustrated me whenever I emailed our vendors with important information about the conference, only to receive a reply moments later from them asking a question that I’d already answered in the email they replied to.
People don’t read emails.
This shouldn’t surprise me, but it did, and throughout the months of conference planning, communication with the vendors (especially through email) was a sticking point for me.
What I Learned
I’d like to say I learned how to manage my mind around what other people do and don’t do, but I hadn’t discovered The Life Coach School Podcast yet.
I learned instead how to write clearer emails. If there’s an important point, put it up at the top. (Sometimes people didn’t even read the first line; they’d respond without reading it to ask for the information that was already in the email. So my mileage on this varied a lot.)
If I have multiple points or multiple pieces of information, it might be better to send multiple emails. Calling things out with bold and highlight, especially if it’s time-sensitive or important information, works better than hoping people will read the entire email.
People will do what they’re gonna do, and I can’t change them even if they’re not doing things the way I think they should do them.
Funny how that’s a truth in life that goes far beyond just planning a conference.
Something Will Always Go Wrong
Murphy’s Law says that if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong. And that’s true for any conference! I don’t think I’ve been to a conference where everything went exactly according to plan.
You also can’t please everyone. That’s impossible, too.
At our conference, we had a few hiccups:
- swag shirts didn’t arrive until after the conference thanks to shipping errors
- the restaurant wasn’t big enough
- vendors didn’t listen to instructions
- vendors got drunk
- we forgot our own projectors and had to use the hotel’s at a cost not budgeted
What I Learned
The lessons from our hiccups were all pretty straightforward.
- order swag at least a month in advance
- get written and verbal confirmation from the restaurant(s) that their venue can, indeed, hold 160 people at once
- managing people can be a challenge; keep improving our communication methods
- don’t put certain vendors next to the bar
- use checklists to make sure we don’t forget things
It’s funny how a lot of the lessons learned here apply to every part of life.
Give yourself enough lead time on projects and deadlines. Ensure clear communication between all parties when planning a get-together or just practice clear communication in general. Managing people is hard, and props to all the 100X Leaders (affiliate link) out there like my manager. Don’t set yourself up for failure. Checklists save lives, people!
Companies Need Dedicated Conference Planners
With the number of conferences we put on, you’d think we’d have a dedicated conference planner, but we actually don’t. At least, not anymore. What happens is that each conference is managed by new people in a rotation, and they’re assisted by the same woman each time, but she’s not in charge — the other people are.
That means that the quality of each event depends on the management style of the people running the show.
We’re definitely big enough and have enough conferences to have a dedicated conference planner, but alas, ’tis not to be.
What I Learned
I don’t want to be a conference planner, for starters. While I learned so many things from helping out on this particular conference, it drained me and ate up so much time that my manager has my back against any request to use me for help in the future.
Every company large enough to hold multiple conferences every year needs someone dedicated to running those conferences — and that person has to love (or at least enjoy) doing it. Sometimes this job falls into the laps of people who don’t want to do it, yet they’ve been voluntold or it was added to their job description after they started.
“Other duties as assigned,” right?
Good at It, Don’t Like It
This is a prime example of doing something you’re good at, but not something you love. I’m good at organizing and coordinating and keeping everyone on track — herding the cats if you will — but it’s 100% not something I love doing.
I was like this with math in high school. I was good at it but absolutely hated my math homework.
Are you doing something you don’t love doing, but you’re good at it? Can you feel it sucking your soul away, slowly, almost unnoticeably? Pay attention and try to do something about it before you get in too deep.
As some people say, don’t be so good at something you don’t get to do anything else.
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