- A strategy for events that gives criteria to decide which events to attend/sponsor.
What sets events apart? What are the best ways to engage with events? To know what sort of events to target it is useful to look at metrics around the AAARRRP funnel (if available). If the metrics indicate a significant drop off then these are the areas you will want to focus on.
Within the AAARRRP funnel events can generally cover awareness, retention, and product. They do not and should not be used to target revenue increases. People tend to dislike being sold to at events, especially when they are not the primary decision makers.
Awareness, especially for bigger companies generally comes in the form of direct marketing efforts and recruiting efforts. Note that recurring exposure increases the likelihood that people will assign more trust to a product. [2]
If your objective is retention, then giving back to the community and remaining relevant will be important to you. This can be achieved through different ends:
- contributing to open source and going to events to show off your involvement
- building an ecosystem around your products
- building a community around your products or becoming part of a community
If you are in the events space to obtain feedback then you will be able to obtain first hand feature requests and hear about problems. There's a human aspect when you're at events which means that you will likely hear different views (rather than just the loud people you see online).
- Decide where the created resources should live (GitHub/Google Drive/...) and ensure this is accessible to the team.
Looking at the segmentation analysis you completed in step 1 will give you the first hint at what type of events you should be attending.
Events are set apart by the following factors
- Event Impact - will this event influence our metrics? How many people can we send? How many people can we reach?
- Attendee Potential - what's the target audience out of the entire population of attendees?
- Attendee Experience - How experienced are the attendees?
- Attendee Access - How much access do you have to attendees?
Choose a few events that you have gone to or are going to go to and check how these align with the above factors. For each event decide whether you should or shouldn't attend based on the above factors.
| Factor | Event 1 | Event 2 | Event 3 | Event 4 | ... |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Event Impact | |||||
| Attendee Potential | |||||
| Attendee Experience | |||||
| Attendee Access | |||||
| Should you attend? |
To help you, see below for a summary of the features of different tech events.
- Meetups
- can be language/tech specific or random (e.g. HackerNews)
- free/cheap for attendees
- outside work hours
- organised by volunteers
- highly technical
- non-commercial
- attended by any sort of dev
- Things to look out for for inclusive meetups:
- pick events that do not offer the usual pizza and beer
- pick events that enforce a code of conduct
- pick events that have a diverse speaker lineup
- Things to look out for for inclusive meetups:
- check meetup.com for inspiration on which events to attend
- before sponsoring a meetup, go as an attendee to check out the space
- Conferences
- tech-focussed or ecosystem-focussed
- set apart by:
- # of days
- # of tracks
- expo floors
- organizers
- generally not free for attendees
- during work day or weekend
- often backed by a company
- technically diverse
- commercial
- larger
- attended by people with jobs
- Hackathons
- many students
- check out Major League Hacking
- either company or community/volunteer organized
- often free to attend for attendees
- often during the weekend
- technically diverse
- non-commercial
- medium/large events
- in Europe student hackathons tend to be much smaller/more intimate than in the US
- many students
- Startup Events
- Office Hours
- Pitch competitions
- companies can pitch tools
- fundraising
- expo floors
- free to attend for attendees
- during work days/weekend
- organized by incubators
- low on tech content
- often attached to events or accelerators
- attended by businesses and investors
Out of the above you should have gained an idea for what type of events you should/shouldn't attend in general. In this exercise we will determine how cost and your team factor into which events you should/shouldn't attend.
Let's look at the costs of attending a local 100 person conference and the cost of attending a remote conference:
| Local 100 person conference | Remote conference | |
|---|---|---|
| Sponsorship Package | $1000 | $5000 |
| Branding | $200 | $800 |
| Swag | $600 | $2000 |
| Human Hours | $1000 | $2500 |
| Travel & Accommodation | $500 | $2000 |
| Price per person | $28/person | $24/person |
If you are on a tight budget keep this cost difference in mind when making decisions. Note that this does not factor in the opportunity cost of you attending a conference vs doing something else useful.
Aside from potential resource constraints, your team will also influence which type of events you should choose. This includes the tech-specificity, locations, cultures, and languages your team covers.
Tech-specificity means that generally your team members will have certain languages/frameworks that they are more familiar with and for which it will make more sense to attend events. Note that your team members need not be talking about your products exclusively. If they attend a Python conference and they speak about something that is not related to your company, them wearing your company swag already lets you benefit.
Location is another obvious one. The opportunity cost of having a team member travel far for a conference is relatively high. If you have a small team you will likely want to choose mostly local events.
Less obvious factors include languages and cultures. A language or a culture barrier can make it a lot harder for your team to be effective at events. Giving talks in English at a conference where the main language is not English will make the talk less accessible, for example.
A cultural barrier can be as simple as not knowing how to work with the crowds while giving a talk or what swag to give out or how to interact with locals. The same jokes you make in front of a crowd in the US will not work in the UK and vice versa. Again this can make attending events less effective (even if you do research in advance).
Overall, when your team members travel, they will generally be at a visitor disadvantage because they are not local. This is also referred to as backpack evangelism. If you travel around a lot you are likely not really effectively engaging with any community. It can be more beneficial to embed with local communities or with communities where you will spend significant time. Think about focus vs spread.
For this exercise, list out constraints that affect which events you can and should cover.
The three main factors that determine your event strategy are event factors, people factors, and segmentation.
For the first part of this exercise:
- Choose 2 previous events and add 3 random other ones (e.g. Droidcon London, Pennapps, and the WaffleJS meetup in SF).
- Evaluate events for team factors and dev segmentation.
- Note what would have to change for them to become relevant.
Note that event selection is a continuous process. Once you have done the above for a few events you can work out a short event selection guide. Document this guide so that current and new team can refer to it when unsure about whether or not to go to or sponsor an event.
Keeping track of decisions on events (and the reasons for these decisions) can help you save time in future. If you decide against a number of events based on a missing support for that language, for example, you will have a list of opportunities in case you ever choose to do more with that language.
On top of that you should make sure to measure the quality of events you attend to be able to base future decisions on it. The quality of events can be measured quantitatively and qualitatively. Booth traffic and especially the engagement to crowd ratio and changes within that ratio for similar events will be useful as quantitative measures. Tracking for sign ups/ site visits can also give you insights. Getting the infrastructure to cross-reference event attendees with the further stages in the AAARRRP funnel can be difficult but if this is possible it can give you valuable insights (e.g. tracking changes in signups, change drivers, changes in target audience signups).
Note that business cards collected / emails collected are generally vanity metrics. On top of that you should track whether the organization of the event was good, how much visibility your brand had, whether you got what you paid for in the sponsorship package etc.
The best metrics should be valuable to the bits of the AAARRRP funnel you care about. They should be quantifiable, comparative, and divided into leading and lagging metrics. If you can manage to influence conversion rates and show your influence then you really know that your efforts are working.
Check out:
- Eventbrite
- Meetup.com
- Social media
- scrape other companies attendance off Twitter...
Call For Papers (CFP) tips & tricks
- look at https://tinyletter.com/techspeak
- papercall.io (standardized CFPs)
- submit often, early, and multiple times (with different topics)
- expect failure
- if you go maximize exposure by also sponsoring
Ensuring event success:
- be visible
- be proactive (set ooo emails)
- optimize (add multiple events or organize mini events around it)
- follow up with external people you meet
- follow up internally by showing off event info
It is important that events you host, attend, sponsor, and speak at are diverse. The reasons for this span obvious moral reasons but also the fact that you do not want to be associated with events that spark outrage like this one or this one.
If you notice that an event you're associated with has diversity issues you can work with the organizers to remedy the issue if and only if this you notice early enough. Once the line up has been announced, it is generally too late to change. Generally potential diversity-increasing speakers will not like to be asked to speak as an alibi-speaker. In this case withdrawing attendance/sponsorship or, if it's your event, canceling the event is the only right choice.
A good way of ensuring you will not run into diversity issues by being associated with the wrong events is making sure that the organizing team of an event you get involved with is itself diverse. In addition you may of course ask the team about how they plan to ensure a diverse event. You will want to make sure that the organizing team advertises CFPs in diverse groups, offers mentorship, has a code of conduct etc.
[1] Much of this is based on hoopy's training.