Event co-creation at a glance

This page explores the event co-creation approach I developed earlier this century for building online communities around physical events, and using online communities to design better physical events.

It was written in support of Event co-creation on the Atmosphere, which looks at how these techniques can evolve in the Atmosphere, so you might want to pop up there for the wider context if you landed on this page directly.

What is it?

Event co-creation means involving your community in the definition of the event's content. Members' involvement can take several forms:

• submitting formal proposals for workshops, individual speeches, networking sessions, etc (call them "event items")
• commenting on "provisional" event items (published for discussion by the community, but not yet in the final programme - see below) to help Organisers identify which generate the most interest
• online discussions amongst organisers, proposers and attendees to combine good proposals to create better event items.

This does much more than help Organisers identify the most interesting Submissions - it is where Members discover other Members with similar interests, and encourages them to network online before they meet face to face.

By the time people actually do meet, therefore, they will have been discussing the event content for the preceding months, and so will know exactly Who they want to meet and What they're going to talk about (as well as When and Where, thanks to the messaging & coffee table booking systems we also built into the site).

Why do it?

Benefits for Attendees

What we discovered back in 2002 was that ost conference attendees were very keen on this approach. Why is not hard to understand - as an attendee:

• getting a place in the conference programme:
  • means you're helping set the agenda of the event
  • increases your visibility
• the online discussions before the event
  • also raise your visibility and develop your network
  • help you discover the people you should meet in the limited time you have available on the day, and make them want to meet you.

Benefits for Organisers

The most obvious benefits for the organisers are that this approach:

• ensures the event actually reflects the interests of the attendees
• is more valuable to each Member in terms of networking

But it also turns each member into an ambassador: being selected for the provisional programme, after all, is a very good reason to promote the event to all of your friends, so they can support it.

Finally, it injects massive energy into your online community, which can support your organisation's work throughout the year. It's therefore really useful to see event co-creation as an integral part of your community strategy - using event co-creation for your annual event, for example, means the community you assemble for this year's event can come back to take part in the discussion about next year's event, and so on.

The Process: Key Milestones

The trick is to get started early.

A good process for an event held at T=0 looks something like this:

• T-6 months: launch your event website with the simple "save the date," follow us on social, and subscribe to the newsletter messages, so that you can then follow up with your followers and subscribers for...
• T-5 months: launch your open call - in a traditional event co-creation process, users describe themselves as they join your community so that they can propose ideas for the event programme (workshops, speeches, papers, presentations, networking sessions, etc. - it's up to you)
  • If you already have a community then your existing members should be able to simply compose and submit the proposal.
  • while those who have not yet joined your community now have a very good reason to do so.
  • In both cases it helps enormously if your members are submitting ideas directly into your website content management system, not some separate system (online polling tools, Google Sheets, etc.)
• T-4 months: Close the call, and read the proposals:
  • Mark the bad ones as rejected and inform their authors.
  • Mark the others as provisional. Importantly, there should be more provisional ideas than you actually have room and time for.
• T-3.5 months: publish the Provisional Programme, thus opening the event co-creation discussion phase
  • invite your community members to comment and rate the ideas
  • Encourage people with similar ideas to combine forces.
• T-2 months: close the event co-creation discussion phase by publishing the final programme - basically this means
  • Rejecting some more ideas, and informing the authors
  • Changing the status of the others from provisional to final.
• T-2 to event: continue to encourage the conversation around the final programme.

Of course you don't need to follow those dates exactly, but it is important that people know what the final programme is one or two months before the event so they can make logistics arrangements.

Multiple Co-creation Phases

For those first co-created events 25 years ago, in fact, we often launched the event website 8-9 months before the event, as we had several phases of discussion:

• a first call at T-6 asked people to submit ideas for workshops or individual presentations for the Conference Programme (which was a mix of science and policy)
• when we finalised the Conference programme we opened a second co-creation phase in T-3, for the Networking Programme, which focused on networking scientists together across Europe and took place in and around the exhibition. The people who didn't "make the cut" for the conference were encouraged to present networking event proposals, which most of them found them more valuable for their purposes.

The last time I was involved, we had over 8,000 comments on the provisional networking programme in the month of August, 2006.

Key Success Factors

From 25 years of experience, the critical elements are:

1. Early launch - start 6+ months before your event
2. Integrated systems - proposals submitted directly into your CMS, not external tools
3. Provisional phase - publish more items than you have room for to stimulate discussion
4. Clear timelines - community needs to know when decisions will be made
5. Multiple touchpoints - combine the website with email notifications and social media
6. Ambassador effect - leverage the fact that selected speakers will promote the event
7. Year-round community - use the annual event as an anchor for ongoing community engagement

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Up to: Event co-creation on the Atmosphere