How to plan a successful unconference in 10 steps

File this in the "worked for Ben, maybe it'll work for me too" folder.

I recently organized an unconference for my association and was very pleased with the results. Many association execs I speak with these days seem interested in holding unconferences or unsessions within larger conferences, so I thought I'd share my experience. Here's how I did it, step by step.

1. Secure a location and date. Our unconference was for real estate bloggers, so I wanted a location that could accommodate about 30-40 attendees and that had wifi access for the same number. I also wanted a setting that would encourage collaborative learning, so flexible space without fixed furniture was a must. I also wanted an LCD projector. I booked the space about six weeks in advance. Fortunately, one of our local associations was willing to host us for free.

2. Set up a wiki. To get organized, I set up a free wiki with wetpaint.com. One of the pages has been taken over to organize another event, but otherwise, you can still see most of the content from our unconference wiki. I set up pages on the wiki for a pre-unconference happy hour, special dietary requirements, a space to ask questions of a special guest lunch speaker, the meeting location, a draft schedule, and most importantly: the "talks".

3. Collect proposals to talk. I intentionally did not call for "speeches" or "presentations". Peer-to-peer learning implies that everyone has something to share or teach, so in order to create an environment in which all attendees could feel at ease about sharing their knowledge, I tried to keep the language more informal. I seeded the list of talks with a couple of topics that I'd be willing to talk about, and asked a few friendly members to propose talks of their own.

4. Spread the word. I used a variety of means to tell others about the unconference. Twitter was actually the place where I placed most of my efforts. I also blogged about it on our association's blog, some other blogs that I contribute to, and put it out on event pages like Upcoming. I also encouraged everyone who RSVP'd to tell others.

5. Take registrations. Unconferences are known for being free or very cheap. However, meeting planners know what a nightmare free meetings can be to accurately plan for. We asked registrants for a $10 donation to Habitat for Humanity in order to reserve their spot at the unconference. This way, registrants at least had some skin in the game if they decided to cancel.

6. Pre-uncon. At least once a week leading up to the unconference I sent an email to all registrants reminding them to contribute to the wiki, especially encouraging them to suggest a talk to review the talks that had been proposed, and to ask a question of our guest lunch speaker.

7. On-site unconferencing. We started our day with one minute participant introductions and then voted on which talks we wanted to hear. We voted by show of hands, giving each participants three votes to select from the 20 or so topics that were proposed. Introductions and voting took about 45-60 minutes. After determining the schedule, we started straight into the talks. Each talk got 45 minutes to an hour. We took a quick break to get lunch and then listened to a guest speaker as we ate. Our meeting officially ran for six hours, but many people lingered for another 30-60 minutes after we adjourned.

8. Stay out of the way. Other than playing emcee and helping with one talk, I mostly stayed in the background, trying to make sure we got through all the talks and stayed about on time.

9. Document it all. We did this in several ways. The first was unplanned, but not unexpected: The unconference participants spontaneously crowd-sourced the note-taking by posting their thoughts to Twitter. Several participants brought cameras or used their cell phones to snap pictures and posted them to twitter, utterz or flickr. I attempted to get everyone to tag their stuff with a single tag, but had mixed results. Also, a member brought along a digital camera capable of taking one hour of video on a memory card, and he recorded several of the sessions. Finally, we posted an mp3 of the radio show we broadcasted from the unconference and all of the aforementioned stuff to the wiki. What radio show? Read on...

10. Go out with a bang. We have a member who hosts a call-in internet radio show who proposed doing his show live from the unconference as his talk. He showed the participants how he sets up his radio show for 10-15 minutes and then we went live. Everyone in the room whipped out their cell phones and called in for the show so they could hear the other guest callers. In addition, the participants were invited to approach the mic and share their experience. This was quite possibly the most amazing educational experience I've been a part of. Find something a little "out there" to do together at the end, or at least find a spot for it at some point in the unconference.

Those are my 10 steps to running an unconference. It worked for me! Your mileage may vary. Check out the unconference article at Wikipedia for more planning help, if you want it. Please share any good or bad experiences you've had in organizing an unconference! I'll be doing another one in September and I want to improve.

Tagged: Association Management; Associations; CAE; Certified Association Executive

Re-conceiving the Unconference

This article on Unconferences and the value of participatory events on ZDnet.com got me thinking deeper about unconferences. Of the unconference experience, one of the attendees, Microsoft's Chief Architect, Kim Cameron, said:

participants floated in and out of sessions that self-organized around an ongoing three-day hallway conversation - the hallway actually being the main conference room and event! So we got to engage in all kinds of one-on-one (and few) conversations, meet new people, work out concerns and above all work on convergence

Sounds great. I love the hallway track. The pictures, though, got me thinking deeper about unconferences. Look how few people are in those rooms! Because there are so few people around the table, and because they're opting into rooms around a topic of interest, I also get the feeling that they had a lot in common in terms of the problems and issues they grapple with. In short, they have a high degree of shared context -- those rooms are high context environments.

I keep thinking about an unconference for the association community. But it's becoming clear to me that it probably wouldn't work. I don't share enough context with professionals in government relations, public relations, education, etc. to truly provide value to them, or get value from them in a high context environment.

An unconference for association professionals, as I'm beginning to re-conceive it, would be most valuable for people with a great deal of shared expertise. An unconference would be perfect for Membership Directors at manufacturing trade associations, Government Relations Managers in the legal field, etc.

And I'm not saying that meetings of professionals in unrelated fields aren't valuable. I certainly believe they are. But I don't think an unconference format would be the best way to elicit the best experience from those meetings.

As you can tell, I'm still trying to work this out. Got any feedback for me?

Tagged: Association; Association Management; Associations; CAE; Certified Association Executive; conferences; context; education; hallway; learning; meetings; unconferences

Register for Association Social Media Unconference

Jeff De Cagna is spearheading the Association Social Media Unconference. You can register by adding your contact details to the wiki.

Tagged: Association Management; Associations; CAE; Certified Association Executive

Geeky cool stuff to do at ASAE2007

This blog post is old news for "the regulars" but I sure would appreciate it if you would help spread the word about this stuff. Please e-mail this information to friends and colleagues coming to ASAE & The Center's Annual Meeting, tell people about it on-site, or get BABY GOT BACKCHANNEL shaved into the back of your head. I'll be posting this information to the Membership and Executive Management section listserves, as well as to Acronym.

You've heard a lot recently about Web 2.0 and social media and the way that they're transforming human interaction. You've probably also heard the Chicken Littles of the world describing how Web 2.0 could spell the demise of associations. They say that associations are being disintermediated from the very constituents they claim to represent by the evolution of social structures and networks which can now be supported by the Internet. The best way to understand how the social web can transform the way you interact with an association, its members, and/or its programs is to actually participate in some Web 2.0 activities and experience it for yourself. So, if you're attending ASAE & The Center's 2007 Annual Meeting -- or even if you're not -- here are three ways you can enhance your participation -- or participate virtually -- by tapping into social web things going on next week in Chicago:

1. Subscribe to the ASAE2007 mobile interactive backchannel. The backchannel is like a listserve for your mobile phone. Those who subscribe to the backchannel will be able to both send and receive short text messages about the Annual Meeting. What will the chatter on the backchannel be like? I'll be posting my thoughts on sessions I'm attending. I hope to read the same, find out what special events my friends are attending and discover where the best food is at the receptions. Go to http://tinyurl.com/377qc3 for details on how to sign up for the backchannel.
2. Watch the following page throughout the annual meeting (http://www.technorati.com/tag/asae2007) or if you're hip to RSS, subscribe to this feed: http://feeds.technorati.com/search/asae2007. Why? Watching this page or subscribing to that feed will let you follow blog posts, videos and/or pictures that are tagged with asae2007. Several people will be uploading content about the annual meeting and will be tagging their stuff with asae2007. If you care to upload your own content tagged with asae2007, use www.Flickr.com to host and tag your pictures, www.YouTube.com to host and tag your videos, and check out www.Technorati.com for details on how to tag your blog posts.
3. Attend Association Bloggercon 2007, Sunday, August 12 from 10:30 - Noon in McCormick Place room N230B. Maybe you've heard someone utter the word unconference. This informal gathering of association bloggers is like a miniature unconference. There is no set agenda, and may the conversation take us where ever it pleases. But you can be sure there will be plenty of talk about how to engage members and constituents through blogs, podcasts, wikis and other funny-sounding terms. No need to RSVP. Just show up and join at least 20 others who have said they'll attend.

If you need more information, drop me a line! bkmcae at gmail dot com.

Tagged: ASAE2007 Association Management Associations bloggercon CAE Certified Association Executive Social Media Web 2.0

See me in DC this Thursday for some social media marketing mayhem

Scott Oser has put together a lineup for DMAW's Sixth Annual Association Day that can only be described as social media marketing mayhem. There's still time to register for Thursday's event at the Capital Hilton.

At 9:45 a.m. I'll be presenting a session called Conference versus Unconference that I swear will be more interesting than that title (I assume full responsibility for its suckiness). In my session, you'll hear about my real-world experience organizing and promoting not one, but two unconferences, and how the tactics I used were, well... Let's just say I'd never done THAT before! Plus, I'll explain how I took what I learned from recruiting people to attend an unconference and applied it to recruiting members to a more *ahem* conventional conference. I'll be sharing some cool, cheap, and creative stuff in my presentation and I'll leave plenty of time for Q&A.

Of course, DMAW has done me no favors in scheduling my session opposite two others that I'd like to attend if I weren't presenting. One is led by the Social Fishes (Lindy & Maddie) and the other by Kevin Whorton. I hope you'll come to mine, at least for a little while.

Here's my differentiation strategy: I won't use nearly as many big words as Whorton, and I'm sure that will be appreciated by those who aren't yet fully caffienated at 9:45 a.m. As for the Social Fishes, well, I'll just have to resort to bribery. These are tough economic times, or so I have read. I'll do a re-run of this gimmick I pulled at the first ASAE Technology Conference. Be the first to ask the question during my session and get paid like Misty did!

Unfortunately, I can't stick around for the whole meeting, but I hope to see you on Thursday!

Tagged: Association Management; Associations; CAE; Certified Association Executive

How I hacked my comments feed

Warning: It's about to get a little geeky in here, but there is some non-geeky stuff towards the bottom.

Because Blogger, my blog host, doesn't offer a comments feed, I decided to create my own. Here's how I did it:

1. I'm using a service called Mailbucket that creates an XML file from e-mail received by its server. So, all I had to do was configure my Blogger account to e-mail Mailbucket whenever someone leaves a comment. I did this in Settings >> Comments.
2. Then, I grabbed the URL of the XML file that Mailbucket creates, and routed it through Feedburner so I could track subscribers. (By the way, Mailbucket's homepage says you can pick up your feed at mailbucket.org/slurp.xml. It's actually www.mailbucket.org/slurp.xml. The www has to be in the URL. Took me a while to figure that out.)
3. Finally, I posted the Feedburner URL in the right nav bar on my blog, and you subscribed (hopefully).

It's an imperfect system, and I may make a few tweaks here and there. For instance, I'm thinking about routing the e-mail to Yahoo!Groups (which also offers an RSS feed), because Mailbucket doesn't seem to be wrapping lines in feed aggregators.

I've been thinking about the association opportunities for services like Mailbucket. The best I've been able to come up with is around the whole unconference idea. For instance, what if you said to your conference attendees:

Subscribe to our Onsite Conference Activities RSS feed using your Yahoo Alerts account, and direct the feeds to SMS your cell phone. Then, we'll arrange and let you know about spontaneous meet-ups throughout the conference for intimate speaker roundtables, lunch with the board chair, and other subscriber-only opportunities. We'll also send meeting room changes and other important updates to this feed. And, you can even arrange your own meet-ups by sending the details to onsiteconferenceactivities@mailbucket.org.

I also thought it would be cool to offer an easy way for members to add content to web pages by sending e-mail to a mailbucket.org address. I'll be blogging shortly about making Web 2.0 available to more people via e-mail.

By the way, because of the lack of a pre-installed comment feed for Blogger, I've taken a look at WordPress (which does have a built-in comment feed) on the recommendation of David Gammel. It looks pretty good, but I'm sticking with Blogger for the time being.

Tagged: Certified Association Executive CAE Association Management RSS email unconference Blogger Mailbucket Web2.0

ASAE & The Center's Unplanned Unconference

If you're not an Executive Management Section (EMS) Listserv subscriber, let me bring you up to speed...

Over the past week, participants on the EMS Listserv have uniformly condemned ASAE & The Center for ending their support for Prometheus, a small open-space retreat for senior association professionals. Most listserv participants seem to believe that ASAE has pulled the rug out from under a most valuable program. ASAE & The Center staff are signaling a willingness to make it work; although what "it" is has not been explained.

Apparently the October 2006 Prometheus was the last one for the foreseeable future. I have never gone to Prometheus, but having heard about it from our CEO and others who have attended, I understand it is one of the best programs ASAE runs, if not the best. Past attendees affectionately dub themselves prometheans and they almost uniformly feel a strong affinity for the program. So they are obviously distressed over news that ASAE & The Center is even considering changes. Some of the program's founders are airing their displeasure at not being consulted about changes that were made to the program over the past few years, as well as not being asked for input about the decision to stop supporting Prometheus. Some of the listserv posts seem to teeter on the edge of member revolt.

In light of all of this, several EMS listserv participants are calling for volunteers to support and run a Prometheus retreat outside the auspices of ASAE & The Center this spring. No fees will be paid to anyone. It will be an open space meeting, the agenda gets created on-site, and whoever shows up is the right group of people. A true unconference! Personally, I think this might be a good thing. ASAE rids itself of a program that is highly valued by a few, but doesn't deliver an acceptable ROI. The program continues for those that are willing to support it. I could even see an association-industry consulting firm taking on the project as a marketing initiative. Still, this program delivers far more value than what appears on the financial statements, supporters argue.

Several elephants in the room have been pointed out in the course of this conversation. Some have complained about the high cost of room rates at Prometheus, which are in line with room rates of other ASAE programs, in my experience. Others have decried the expense of the program itself (which is similar in price to most 2-3 day conferences from ASAE & The Center). Still others, when participants suggest a DC-area replacement to hold down expenses, lament the DC-centric bias of ASAE & The Center (which I personally think has improved).

Let me rant for a minute on ASAE's room rates. I think they are unnecessarily high. Another association I belong to, The Virginia Society of Association Executives (VSAE), seems to negotiate far better room rates than ASAE. This seems counter-intuitive. Even when just a dozen or so rooms are guaranteed at The Jefferson, a five-star/five-diamond facility in Richmond, room rates there are about $150 for the VSAE. And this is for a five-star/five-diamond hotel. At VSAE's annual meeting in May 2006, the room rate at a brand new Hilton on the Virginia Beach oceanfront was under $100.

It's not too much of a stretch to assume that ASAE & The Center are taking almost all the incentives and concessions these properties are offering to maximize profits, and leave members to pick up a larger hotel bill than necessary. I understand that concessions and incentives are often a zero-sum equation, so if the room rates go down, ASAE might be forced to raise the registration fee. I think I'd rather spend more money on a registration fee than on a hotel room.

But in fairness, the advertised rack rate for the Marco Island Marriott, site of the upcoming Great Ideas Conference is $539, and conference attendees are staying for less than half that amount. Still, it seems to me that generally speaking, there is room for improvement in ASAE's negotiation of room rates for its members. I can recall getting a phenomenal deal (around $150/night for an apartment-sized suite) at a golf resort in Florida when I attended ASAE's Future Leaders Conference back in 2001.

ASAE staff has done a pretty good job engaging in this online discussion. They're getting plenty of good feedback in a public forum without having asked for it, which is difficult to handle. I'd encourage ASAE staff to capture everything that's being said, summarize it and then post it back to the listserv for additional input. I'd also suggest that key staff post their direct-dial extensions with an invitation for interested members to contact them directly with further feedback.

This challenge has all the marks of a classic association management decision. It will be interesting to see how this turns out. Will ASAE stick to their guns, or will they break under the pressure of a few vocal one-percenters?

Tagged: ASAE Association Management Associations CAE Certified Association Executive Prometheus

2008 Association Predictions

The last several posts have been focused on 2007, but now that we're into 2008, I feel some predictions are in order. I have placed a call to the Psychic Hotline, and here's what they had to say about the things that will happen in the association industry in 2008...

1. There will be a really cool new association launched that will generate huge buzz in the association community.
2. Six more blogs about associations will be hatched.
3. Everyone will complain about the new IRS form 990.
   
4. ASAE & The Center will debut two new research projects. One will be great, the other... not so much.
   
5. Acronym will get redesigned and the President & CEO of the Center, Susan Sarfati, will start blogging there.
6. Associations will really get interested in Facebook. Meanwhile, something like Second Life, but better, will be introduced and there'll be another land rush among early adopters.
7. People will be saying "As good as Nashville" in the San Diego Convention Center during ASAE & The Center's 2008 Annual Meeting (that would be a compliment, for readers who didn't attend 2005's Annual Meeting).
8. The backchannel will be back and better than ever.
9. There will be another Association Social Media Unconference or perhaps a Blog Camp for association folk.
10. There will still be no movement on an EMSAL.
    

Tagged: Association Management; Associations; CAE; Certified Association Executive

ASAE & The Center Launches New Conference

I'm honored to be participating in a panel discussion of association community bloggers at ASAE & The Center's brand new Technology Conference. If this new conference is anything like the last new conference The Center launched (Great Ideas Conference) then this one should be a hum-dinger.

The discussion I'm participating in is on Web 2.0. This term has been tossed around quite a bit, and even though its demise has already been named, nobody has really come up with a definition for Web 2.0. However, someone has figured out what it isn't. Web 2.0 is all backed by a bunch of geeky code and API's I don't care to understand, but it's cool stuff.

When I first started in the association business, everyone was doing the chicken little routine about Web portals. When the dust settled, the alarmists were proven wrong: The industry survived, and the portals didn't. But Web 2.0 could be a more serious threat or opportunity.

Web 2.0 has been called "the participatory Web," where people interact in virtual space to collaborate on something meaningful. Hmm, take away the "virtual space" and it sounds a lot like a membership organization. For instance, my participation in the Business Experiment is an example. If you've left a comment on a blog, welcome to Web 2.0! Got a Flickr or Del.icio.us account? Web 2.0, baby! How about an unconference? Web 2.0 can make it happen.

I'm excited about this conference and this panel discussion, and I promise the panel will be lively. Hope to see you there!