Attendee’s want unforgettable event experiences, less friction and lower costs. As margins slip, event professionals are being pressured to hold or lower event expenses. The three categories attendees value the most are also the ones that are escalating in cost faster than inflation (30%+ over the past four years). The big three expense areas include food & beverage, A/V + production and speakers/entertainment. Any cut-backs made in these categories can negatively impact your attendee value proposition. In addition to negotiating and locking in pricing, consider some of these tactics.

For more information:

• https://velvetchainsaw.com/2023/10/26/two-tensions-keeping-senior-event-professionals-up-at-night/

       

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On May 7, the PCMA Foundation will recognize industry excellence with its annual Visionary Awards.  We are proud to share that Dave Lutz will be honored with the Lifetime Achievement – Educator award.

This recognition reflects the impact Dave has had on the meetings and events industry for decades—and it’s one he richly deserves.

Dave’s career spans leadership roles at Conferon, ExpoExchange, the founding of Velvet Chainsaw Consulting, and long-standing advisory relationships with associations, destinations, and corporate leaders across the industry. He’s a trusted voice through his long running Convene column, a frequent and sought-after speaker, and a steady guide to boards and executive teams navigating change. His work has helped shape how organizations think about conferences—not just as events, but as strategic business platforms.

What truly defines Dave’s leadership, though, is how he shows up: thoughtful, generous, curious, and grounded. He challenges assumptions, translates complexity into action, and brings a deep belief in the power of face-to-face experiences to drive results.

We look forward to celebrating Dave on May 7 at the Washington DC Convention Center. Tickets will be available soon on the PCMA website.

The Velvet Chainsaw Team,

 Lisa, Sarah, David and Michele

       

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The post-con survey is key to measuring the success of your event and planning for the future, but planners continue to find it a challenge to get participants to respond to them. Unless you require them to complete the survey to earn their CE credits, your post-con survey response rate could be 10 percent or lower. Here’s how to better your odds.

First, if you can’t or won’t act on the feedback, don’t ask the question. Avoid asking leading questions (How satisfied were you with our staff?) and questions that you should already know answers to, like: How did you find out about the conference? Were our emails and website helpful? How would you rank each one of these conference elements? How was the registration and housing process? How would you rate the quality of facilities, food/beverage, or logistics? Did you use the mobile app? How helpful was it?

Recommended Questions

To capture deeper and more constructive feedback, follow up rating questions with open-ended prompts. I recommend these four primary question buckets and prompts:

1. Firmographics/Demographics

Most surveys ask these questions first. To encourage survey completion, we recommend asking them last (see below under More Insights).

2. Satisfaction

Ask participants to indicate their level of satisfaction with the primary conference elements (i.e., general sessions, concurrents, networking events, and exhibit hall). Use a likert scale to indicate satisfaction — extremely, very, moderately, slightly, or not at all. Follow up these ratings with an open-ended question that asks, “What feedback or advice can you share for improving any of these conference elements?”

For benchmarking purposes, we recommend including the Net Promoter Score (NPS) question: “On a scale of 1–10 (10 being the highest), how likely are you to recommend ABC Conference to a colleague or peer in the industry?”

3. Value of Attendance

Some questions to consider in this section include:

How important is attending [event] to your business/organization?
How accurate are the following statements about your experience attending [event]?

• I learned something that I can apply to my business or career.
• I made new (and strengthened existing) professional connections.
• I feel inspired.
• Attending [event] is a worthwhile investment.

Can you share your thoughts on what would make a future [event] even more appealing and valuable to you?

4. The Future

This is the final opportunity to get insights. Questions can include:

• Do you plan on attending [event 2026] in [destination]? Definitely will, probably, probably not, definitely not. If not, why?
• What is missing from [event] that you want to see in the future?

For another helpful resource for improving your conference feedback loop read the PCMA article, “4 Common Problems With Post-Meeting Surveys — And How To Fix Them”

More Insights

When it comes to collecting data on demographics (categorizing individuals) and firmographics (categorizing organizations), consider possibilities for slicing and dicing responses into at least two, but no more than four, segments. Ask about:

• Job level — C-Level/VP, Director, Manager
• Primary role — Leadership, Sales & Marketing, Finance
• Number of times attended — First time, two to three times, four-plus times
• Number of years in the industry — Less than five, six to 10, 10-plus years
• Type of organization — Professional, Academic, Consultant, Supplier
• Size of organization (number of employees) — 20 or fewer, 21–100, 101–1,000, 1,000-plus

Additional best practices:

• Send out the initial survey 48 hours after your conference concludes. Leave it open for two weeks, max. Send no more than two reminders to those who have not responded — one week and then 24 hours before the survey closes.
• To encourage participation, consider offering an incentive.
• Test to make sure your survey is mobile friendly.
• Communicate the changes you will be making based on the feedback received.

Adapted from Dave’s Forward Thinking column in PCMA’s Convene. Reprinted with permission of Convene, the magazine of the Professional Convention Management Association. ©2026.

       

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Attracting NextGen attendees continues to be a top priority for conference and trade show organizers. What we’ve learned is that success has less to do with age and more to do with shifting workforce dynamics and rising expectations for practical, immediate value. Conferences that emphasize relevant learning, intentional networking, and flexible engagement are seeing stronger results.

For more information:

• • Learner- And User-Design Key To Next-Gen Audiences

  • En Route For Next-Gen Conference Audiences

       

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Concurrent sessions are the meat and potatoes of professional conferences. Use AI to improve the recipe.

Evaluating, scoring, and slotting sessions can be a monumental task for staff and volunteer peer reviewers. Here’s where AI can really help, by streamlining these processes and more importantly, raising the quality bar.

To get the maximum benefit from incorporating AI into the session selection process, you’ll want to train your AI Large Language Model (LLM), much like you would train conference committee members or session submission reviewers. You should leverage AI to complement the work of volunteer subject matter experts, not replace them. Smart people with influence are a much greater competitive advantage than just relying on AI alone. Here are three practical use cases:

1. Initial Submission Ranking

Similar to resume screening, AI can help identify the strong and weak submissions. Eliminate the bottom 20 or 25 percent from the peer-review process.

Benefit – Peer reviewers can focus their time and effort on the sessions that are most likely to be part of the final program.

Training Input – Provide your AI solution with the scoring rubric used to evaluate session submissions. We trained our solution to score based on relevancy (50 percent), originality (30 percent), and ability to inspire action (20 percent) — and included definitions for grading to increase accuracy.

2. Elevating Session Titles, Descriptions and Learning Objectives

Ask AI to score each session on these attributes individually. Only work on editing the ones that score low and need it most. Be careful with this one as it can ruffle the feathers of your speakers.

Benefit – Your conference program and marketing communications will be upgraded with improved consistency.

Training Input –We trained our solution to make sure that titles, session descriptions, and learning objectives followed best practices (as shared in this Convene article: tinyurl.com/2y8s3m29). We went a step further by providing Bloom’s Taxonomy (tinyurl.com/yc62eu5k) with the instruction to use verbs that fall into the Application or Analysis levels.

3. Smart Slotting and Personalized Agendas

Two common challenges that prevent attendees from getting the most out of their learning experience are 1) competing session content over the same time slot or 2) no sessions that align with their priorities. AI can help identify potential scheduling conflicts or holes on the front end. To enable personalized agendas, ask attendees during the registration process to select their top two or three priorities from a pick list.

Benefit – Intelligent recommendations are the holy grail for improving the attendee experience. To set the stage for that outcome, leverage AI during the review and slotting process stages to reduce or eliminate conflicts during a concurrent session time slot.

Training Input – We scraped and uploaded the concurrent sessions’ day, time, track, title, description, and learning objectives from a recent major industry conference. Next, we created four of our own learning pathways: 1) increasing event attendance, 2) improving education and experience, 3) growing non-dues revenue, and 4) managing event costs. We added keywords and phrases to further define the learning pathways.

Before you consider making a leap into incorporating AI into the session management process, it is highly recommended that you prove the model using real-life test data. Feed last year’s program into your AI tool using the prompt insights above and compare the results.

Choose Your Solution Wisely

The use cases explored in this article can be completed by nearly any AI solution, free or paid. When it comes to content submissions, however, it is strongly recommended that you select a solution that enables you to own/control the data, proprietary prompts, and outputs, as well as protect your members’/submitters’ IP. Moreover, you want to use a tool that progressively gets better the more it’s used.

More than likely that means you want a paid — and possibly an enterprise/team — subscription.

Adapted from Dave’s Forward Thinking column in PCMA’s Convene. Reprinted with permission of Convene, the magazine of the Professional Convention Management Association. ©2025.

       

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Last month, I was able to experience InfoComm, billed as “The Coolest Pro AV Gathering on the Planet.” Here’s what I took away from that experience.

InfoComm, held June 7-13, attracted nearly 31,000 AV professionals to Orlando. One of the events highly engaging features was the handful of large theaters on the show floor. Three of my big takeaways that may be insightful to convention organizers include:

1. Location — The theaters were positioned in high-traffic areas of the show floor, not in the rear of the hall.
2. Sound — None of the theaters used headphones or overpowering sound systems. The audio speakers were placed a few feet off the ground and positioned near the audience providing a surround-sound like experience. Take a page from the AV experts: It worked well.
3. Broadcast — The AVIXA Xchange LIVE theater attracted standing-room-only audiences while creating FOMO for those that couldn’t be there in person.

Theater Experience Considerations

Whether your theater sessions are pay-to-play or content curated by you, consider applying these design principles:

Content 

Each theater should have a theme for the entire show, like innovation or sustainability, or for the timeframe programmed — use your session tracks for alignment. Use naming conventions like “spotlight,” “feature,” or “showcase” stage.

• You want to have a lot of audience turnover. Lean into micro-learning with presentations that are no longer than 15-20 minutes. Group three to four presentations into a threaded timeframe.
• Encourage the use of case studies, not demonstrations or sales pitches. If it’s a panel format, keep it small — two experts plus a moderator. Any more participants than that is a party, not a panel.

Environment

Whether you’re setting the theater up for 25 or 100-plus people, intimacy should be a guiding design principle. To best accomplish this, keep the stage at no higher than one foot. Don’t put barriers, like lecterns or head tables, between the presenters and audience.

• Set the space with a variety of seating. Include informal — couches, benches, or curved theater seating — with room for observers to stand in the rear. Don’t use classroom or roundtable seating.
• Consider providing a lounge space off to the side of the theater for Q&A or networking between presentations.

 Management

Deploy a dedicated staff member or contractor to manage or emcee the theater and to help instill confidence in the presenters.

• Contract at least one AV technician to help cue up each presenter and to quickly fix any issue that arises.
• Use digital signage and slides to communicate what is going on now and what’s coming next.

Sponsor Benefits

At many events, show-floor theater slots are priced at a premium. To optimize that model, ensure that you include meaningful benefits to provide ROI and earn sponsor renewal. Benefits could include:

• Coaching to ensure that they deliver thought leadership, not a sales pitch.
• Marketing assets to make it easy for them to promote their theater session(s).
• Digital signage that includes their logo.
• Attendee badge-scanning for potential leads.
• A video of the session provided to the sponsor after the event.

Adapted from Dave’s Forward Thinking column in PCMA’s Convene. Reprinted with permission of Convene, the magazine of the Professional Convention Management Association. ©2025.

       

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Our friends at Tagoras are conducting a survey to help guide your association’s future learning strategy. We’re sharing this because Tagoras has a great track record of doing high-quality research and sharing the insights with those participating in the survey. To contribute and learn about the trends that will have the most impact on association education in 2026, complete the survey here. Survey closes on September 30, 2025.

The survey aims to collect data and provide insights on:

• Where opportunities for growth lie
• New approaches to products and pricing
• The sate of AI adoption and implementation

This kind of knowledge can be very useful for making strategic decisions, supporting budget requests, and, in general, making sure your organization and its staff are staying up to speed in a critical area of association work.

        

**Lost Post written five years ago. This blog post was published in Convene, but not published on our site in 2020 due to the pandemic and changing priorities during that time**

My wife, Margie, loves to dance. To ring in the New Year and new decade, we went to one of our favorite hangouts. As part of the night’s festivities, we both got to experience our first silent disco, complete with neon headphones.

There were three different genres of music available. If you were on the blue channel, you could be jamming to the latest billboard hits. The green channel was more diverse, with a sampling of favorite dance songs from several decades. Meanwhile the red channel was rocking out to Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.” If we saw someone else boogying down to a song with a different color headphone, we just had to check out their station to see what we were missing.

As conference organizers strive to develop more innovative session formats and bring learning to open-space environments like expo-floor theaters, headphones are being used more often. What began as a novelty has now evolved into a seemingly essential element in our tool kit — but we should use headphones purposefully and wisely.

When They’re Helpful

The best-use cases for headphones will be in these settings:

1. Multi-Channel Experiences — Much like my silent disco experience, spaces that offer multiple screens with separate audio feeds are ideal for headphones. We see this deployment often as a solution for overflow seating/viewing. Some larger conferences are creating community spaces that livestream multiple sessions. Attendees can literally surf concurrent sessions by changing the audio channel and focusing their eyes on a new screen.
2. Adjacent Theaters — Sometimes we need more breakout space or want to keep the learning as integrated to the expo as possible. When two adjacent theaters each have amplification, disruption will follow. It’s best to equip one of the theaters with headphones.
3. Mobile Walking Tour — Some conferences conduct walking tours of their exhibit or poster areas. Headsets are ideal for these kinds of on-the-go learning experiences.

When They’re Not

Sometimes we need to look beyond the shiny, new object and go old school.

1. Conference Sessions — The most effective, full-length conference sessions will include participant discussions and activities. Sessions where you expect learning to occur are not appropriate settings for headphones. Also, it’s awkward for people to ask questions wearing a headphone and using a mike.
2. Non-Adjacent Theaters — Conferences and trade shows that integrate show-floor theaters with the exhibit booths don’t need headphones. Expos should have some noise and buzz. Work to make these spaces intimate — with seating surrounding the presenter, for example — and use directional small sound systems.

Headphones Meet BYOD

One of the pet peeves/issues with headphones is sterilization between uses. Some attendees aren’t thrilled with the idea of using headphones that are still warm from someone else’s use. Well-funded conferences get a sponsor for branded personal ear-buds to overcome this objection. It won’t be long before we start deploying scalable solutions that enable your mobile phone and AirPods to create your personalized silent disco or conference.

Adapted from Dave’s Forward Thinking column in PCMA’s Convene. Reprinted with permission of Convene, the magazine of the Professional Convention Management Association. ©2020.

       

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**Lost Post written five years ago. This blog post was published in Convene, but not published on our site in 2020 due to the pandemic and changing priorities during that time**

When it comes to making your event more attendee-centric, even adding a few inches between chairs can go far.

For my first job, I did banquet setups at a Marriott in suburban Cincinnati. I worked my way up to banquet manager at the Cleveland Marriott before jumping over to professional meeting planning company Conferon.

Once there, I had to unlearn much of my hotel training when it came to room sets in order to put the attendee experience first — yep, user experience design (UXD) for meetings was alive and well in the ’80s. On the hotel side, we had standards for how much space to put between theater-style rows. Sure, the rows had nice symmetry but that setup didn’t accommodate how participants actually behave: They tend to take the first chair in the row and everyone else has to climb over them to get a seat.

How well participants learn and make connections has a lot to do with the environments we create for them. We need to sweat the small stuff. Here are some simple tactics you can apply to your next meeting.

1. Flow.

Figure out where attendees are coming from and which entrance is most convenient. Make sure they are entering from the rear, not the front of the room. For main room or high-capacity sessions, have staff or hotel employees help attendees find empty seats. Block off seating at the back of the room with stanchions for latecomers so they can easily find a place to sit without disrupting others.

2. Dialogic and variable sets.

Conferences are social learning and connecting experiences, yet we often set rooms in straight rows so attendees are passive learners. Where possible, use at least three different types of seating in each session room. At PCMA’s Convening Leaders, instead of having classroom tables in straight rows, they’re angled towards the front of the room with five chairs around each. Some theater-style seating may come next followed by belly bars in the back for those who prefer to stand. Mixing up the seating like this is conducive to small-group discussions and making new connections.

3. Three more inches.

One of the simplest improvements large conferences can make is to specify that the spacing between theater-style seating should be three inches greater than what the hotel or convention center usually uses as its standard. We will never stop attendees from grabbing the seat on the aisle. The extra three inches makes a world of difference in another attendee’s willingness to move themselves to an available middle seat.

4. Don’t set it and forget it.

Convention center policies have stifled our innovation. Many conference organizers set a room one way and leave it that way throughout the entire course of the event. This makes your event seem stale to participants. Think about how to keep things fresh — it can as simple as removing registration stanchions after the rush.

Lights up

Many conferences dial down the lighting in session rooms. Low lighting is ideal for experiences where we want to be entertained, like a movie theater or concert, but not optimal for learning and connecting. Instead, bring the lights up so attendees can see one another. If the lights are too bright on the projection screen, have the hotel or AV company unscrew bulbs above the screen.

It would be a good thing if hotels and convention centers started adopting more of these attendee-first design principles.

Adapted from Dave’s Forward Thinking column in PCMA’s Convene. Reprinted with permission of Convene, the magazine of the Professional Convention Management Association. ©2020.

       

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It’s really hard to provide advice for navigating changes that could significantly impact your next meeting’s performance. Trade shows and gatherings with a significant deal-making benefit could end up just fine. It’s the scientific, academic, and research meetings and those with a large international attendance that potentially face the strongest headwinds.

We’re all seeking answers to big questions: Will international attendees feel welcome and safe? Will inflation cause corporations to scale back their professional development, travel, and marketing budgets? What impact will tariffs have on meeting costs and supply chains? What cuts will be made for the Oct. 1 Fiscal Year 2026 budget? For example, proposed budget reductions for the Department of Health and Human Services are 26 percent or $33 billion — which includes funding to research institutions like Harvard.

Proactively plan during these uncertain times, by considering these five strategies:

1. Registration pace tracking

Most organizations use weekly pace reports for tracking registration and housing. A better early performance indicator will be monitoring the registration pace by primary attendee segment. Develop individual goals and pace reporting for international, academic, government, and industry attendee segments. If you have a global audience, track the top 10 countries traditionally representing 70-80 percent of international participation.

2. Just-in-time content

Most conferences havetheir program content finalized 16–20 weeks out. Consider holding back 20 percent of your slots for emerging, just-in-time learning. These sessions should be curated in the final 12 weeks and dripped out in email marketing with “this just added” messaging. Your agile and relevant programming will ensure this is a can’t-miss event.

3. Contingency planning

Think about how to:

• Accommodate speakers who cannot make it in person to present live via a virtual platform.
• Capture and schedule post-conference replays of your top sessions.
• Identify sessions and presenters who could fill in for last-minute speaker cancellations.
• Deliver a hybrid conference.

4. Reducing attendee risk

During times of uncertainty, fewer attendees will register during your early-bird timeframe. To mitigate their risk, offer early birds softer cancellation policies — if not a full refund, then options like applying all or part of the registration fee to a future event or virtual experience or donating to your foundation.

5. Fine-tune your newsfeed

Some tweaks our team is making include:

• Reaching out to get insights from meeting organizers whose event is coming up soon or recently concluded. Many won’t share details in online forums or listservs.
• Adding U.S. Travel and Tourism Economics to our newsfeed. These are the two best sources for getting the pulse on international inbound travel trends.
• Making it a point to consume news from both far-right and far-left media outlets. While the truth is often somewhere in the middle, perceptions will drive behavior.

Force Majeure?

If your meeting performance is impacted by government regulation or another situation beyond your control, will your organization be liable? That’s the million-dollar question that will be debated by our industry in the coming months. A few things to consider:

1. Some force-majeure clauses include stipulations for partial performance vs. entire cancellation. You want both.
2. Make adjustments in good faith. If you think your meeting is going to be impacted negatively, take early action to reduce room blocks and space for potential resale. This could help your negotiating stance.
3. Use today’s uncertainty for hotel negotiations. The seller’s market will be shifting and contractual provisions are going to soften.

Adapted from Dave’s Forward Thinking column in PCMA’s Convene. Reprinted with permission of Convene, the magazine of the Professional Convention Management Association. ©2025.

       

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