Sizeable opportunities abound for event organisers skilled and able to satisfy people’s increasingly insatiable appetite for connection.
In this article, author Peter Mandeno (PhD) combines years of global event-design experience with the latest academic design-research and insights from a diverse mix of event organisers, strategists and practitioners to break down the nature of the opportunity and outline how you can make the most of it.
An opportunity open for the taking
The world is craving connection.
Feeling let down by the unkept promises of social media, witnessing increased polarisation in practically every public domain, and living lives or working in jobs that are becoming increasingly isolated and remote, people’s appetites for authentic, in-person human connections with new kinds of people have never been stronger.
Seeking to satisfy what is ultimately a fundamental human need – the need for connection – people are (re)turning, in their millions, to events.
“It’s the biggest factor,” explains Gabby Aludo, co-founder of Vibes in the Park. “It’s what people are coming for. It’s filling a void.”
The events people seek, however, are not necessarily those that were sought-after before the pandemic. The make-it-different-and-they-will-come philosophy that was undoubtedly effective in the 2010s is no longer enough.
Sure, event-goers still seek novelty and spectacle. They want to feel special. They want to capture and share what they experience as a reflection of their identity. But increasingly they are wanting more.
“Some people try so hard to create unique, once-in-a-lifetime, bespoke experiences that they often fall short,” explains Maggie Spicer, experience strategist and founder at WHISK, a brand strategy and hospitality design agency. “Because there ends up being so much attention on the ‘umbrella’ of the experience, that the connectivity is lacking.”
Event organisers who thrive in this new age will be those who are intentional about designing and delivering experiences where experiential novelty is not an end in itself but a means to a greater end.
The winners will be those who shift their perspective from seeing human connections as a by-product of a unique event experience to recognising human connectivity as the primary factor that drives the event concept, design process and value proposition.
“For me, connectivity is the principal purpose for having an event,” explains Colin Campbell – innovation ecosystems architect at Nectis, a UK-based agency specialising in network optimisation for innovation.
“If there’s no connection, there’s no event!”
Larissa May, founder of Half the Story
While this shift represents a huge opportunity for event organisers willing to think and act differently, it’s not as easy as it may first seem. Just as the factors outlined above fuel the demand for connection-centric events, other factors are simultaneously challenging event-goer’s abilities to make and maintain the connections they seek.
If you, as an event organiser, are able to understand and either amplify or mitigate these factors, you will be perfectly positioned to consistently deliver value to your newly motivated attendees.
We gather to connect
Humans – as the saying goes – are a social species. Feeling a sense of connection to others is a fundamental human need. This need drives an important human behaviour that underpins the entire existence of the events industry. Humans are gatherers, and I don’t mean gathering in the sense of foraging. I mean gathering in the sense of getting together. We refer to such gatherings as ‘events’.
The reason events are so powerful at connecting people is that they create shared experiences. Shared experiences, in turn, create common ground. And it is on common ground that people find each other, literally and metaphorically, despite their differences.
When completely different people share an experience, they then have something in common. Having things in common is a powerful connecting force. Numerous studies have shown that even trivial commonalities, like sharing the same birthday or being told someone else likes the same fictional abstract art, lead to people behaving more favourably toward each other.
“I think that is where the biggest value for human connection comes from. When you create an environment where people that would otherwise not meet organically get to know each other.”
Kitty Leering – experience designer and programme curator at DutchBlend
Humans have been gathering since the dawn of time. Our very early ancestors gathered mostly for reasons of safety and access to food. Today, with safety risks greatly diminished and food easily accessible from a local market or online retailer rather than a community hunting exercise, we gather at events for other reasons.
What has not changed since those early days is that regardless of the practical intention of getting together, we still gather to connect.
The lives of early humans were social by design. They lived in small, close-knit social groups. There was less need to seek out connection as a separate activity. Fast forward to today and many people live in partial isolation. Proportionally few people live in the neighbourhood where they grew up. People are increasingly transient, moving to other parts of the country or the world in search of opportunity.
And those opportunities, especially in the context of work, are themselves increasingly isolated with more companies embracing hybrid or even completely remote work models.
“In their daily lives, many people just aren’t making the connections they need,” explains Marquita René, founder of Black Velveteen Yoga.
Your guests’ motivations to connect at your events can be explicit – with a specific person or goal in mind, or implicit – where it’s more about being part of a group.
When the connectivity-related motive is explicit, guests are typically seeking to fill a gap or solve a problem. For example, networking and dating events are generally designed to help participants find a specific type of person from a co-founder or investor to a romantic partner.
When implicit, guests may not have a specific problem or type of person in mind. This implicit motivation is described beautifully by Gabby Aludo as “looking to be around people who represent themselves, in order to feel seen and to feel like ‘they get me and are welcoming me into this space’.”
The better you’re able to help your guests satisfy their need for connection, the more value you’ll deliver and the better their experience will be. They’ll be more likely to come back. Perhaps more importantly, they’ll be more likely to share their experience and tell others about what you do. This is also true when a person’s intentions are transactional.
“Even in the most commercial events, you still have this. You have to connect first with people at a personal level before you can do so at a business level.”
Kitty Leering
A common misconception is that it’s the content – like the entertainment, keynote or activity – that’s of most value to your guests when it’s often the connections they make while engaging in that content that prove most valuable. A good way to reframe your thinking is that content provides immediate sensory value whereas connections can provide multiple forms of value for weeks, months or even years into the future.
If it’s so important, why is it so dificult?
A central paradox of human connectivity is that although people recognise connections to others are fundamentally important for both practical and social reasons, most people struggle to connect to others, at least in some situations.
In the context of events, your guests are prone to behave in counterintuitive and counterproductive ways.
“People need a road map to connection. Because, unfortunately, it’s more second nature as opposed to human nature nowadays.”
Larissa May
Counterintuitively, even though event-goers say they participate in events to make new connections, studies have found that many people tend to seek out others they already know. And counter productively, other research has shown that in certain situations people believe they would have a better time keeping to themselves, but when nudged to engage with others they report a more positive experience.
As an event organiser it can be easy to forget that this might be your 20th or 100th iteration, but for your guests it’s their first.
The primary reason people struggle to connect with others at your events – or in almost any other context for that matter – has to do with a deep-seated fear of rejection. In early human times, being rejected by a group had dire consequences including predation or starvation. While being rejected by a group today generally doesn’t lead to these same outcomes, our primal brain still thinks it could.
In other words, when it comes to connecting to new people, event-goers have the odds stacked against them. Signals from their primal brains warn them of potential harm. And unfortunately these signals seem to be getting stronger due to ongoing geo-cultural trends such as continued globalisation, which mean that participants at your events are increasingly likely to be different from each other, culturally or professionally. This is critical because humans are known to be cautious of others who appear different from themselves.
This sense of caution is greatest for those who aren’t naturally social, which is a greater percentage of your guests than you may anticipate.
“Many events are still designed for extroverts. And as a result, introverts and ambiverts can feel left behind.”
Maggie Spicer, founder at WHISK
Here lies the central challenge for you as an event organiser.
You design events that may attract all kinds of people. Even if your guests don’t realise it, part of their motivation for attending your event is to connect to or share an experience with others. At the same time, because the potential of rejection – which is immediate and painful – is more salient than the potential long term value of connection, your guests may gravitate toward the safety of the people they already know or avoid connecting altogether. Event-goers need support in connecting. That’s where you come in.
A mindset shift: from intuitive to intentional
Supporting event-goers in connecting at events has historically been an afterthought, or at least a lower priority than delivering a unique experience. This is understandable.
Throughout the so-called ‘experience age’ there was an almost insatiable hunger for all things weird, wild and wonderful. Fuelled by the exponential growth of social media platforms and the proliferation of smartphones – meaning everyone had a camera in their pocket – people demanded sensational over social, preferring instagrammability over interactivity.
Since the end of the last decade, and particularly since emerging from the pandemic, the general mood has changed. As highlighted in Eventbrite’s TRNDS2024 report, while event-goers still seek quality unique experiences that make them feel special, demand has grown for authentic experiences that allow people to show up as themselves.
People seek events where they can connect with others who are different to them, but who share their interests and values. To be effective in satisfying this growing need, event organisers need to adopt a connection-centric mindset.
Adopting this new mindset comes naturally for some, but not all. Most event organisers don’t have formal training in sociology, psychology, or even in experience design. Instead, you’re more likely someone who is passionate about a topic, activity or place.
Next to your day job you started gathering people to share in your passion and then, as the saying goes, the cart started leading the horse. Your idea began leading a life of its own. Your contacts started telling their contacts and so your community grew. Soon you were seeing more new faces than familiar faces. Connecting people wasn’t a priority. You focused on your passion and the connections sort of happened by themselves.
Now you’re at a point where you want to take your events to the next level. Maybe you even want to quit your job or go part time to focus on your event concept. You’ve seen the positive impact your events have on people and you want to do more.
Achieving success in this next phase of your concept’s growth requires a mindset shift, from the intuitive approach that has served you well until now, to a more intentional approach that will help you make the right decisions and focus on the right things.
It means being intentional in seeking to understand the connectivity-related needs of your growing community and ensuring the events you create are satisfying those needs in the best way possible. It means defining success in the eyes of your guests and intentionally seeking feedback in more organised ways to know how you are doing.
This intentional approach to human connectivity will do more than just deliver value to your guests. It will create a kind of stickiness that keeps them coming back. It will transform them from event-goers into evangelists.
Your role as Creator, Conductor and Connector
As a first step to being intentional about human connectivity you should consider the different role(s) you play in the context of your events.
Think about how each role brings with it a different set of connectivity-related objectives. Most event organisers assume a combination of three distinct roles, namely: Creator, Conductor and Connector.
Creator
In your Creator role you are focused on your overall event concept and the value it delivers to your participants at the highest level.
“I think about what the total experience is going to be, in order to make a real impact.”
Vanessa Flowers, creator of Flower Girls Meet
What you create and how it’s communicated will affect the types of guests you attract and the mindset they arrive with. This means being thoughtful and intentional. It means blending the operational aspects of organising events with the creative aspects of designing experiences, or what Maggie Spicer refers to as the “nitty gritty of architecting the experience”.
It means being clear about what you’re creating and who you’re creating it for, acknowledging biases and removing pain points or sources of friction to ensure all of your guests feel comfortable, included and welcome.
Conductor
In your Conductor role, you decide how all of the different components of your event come together. Where creating is about establishing the concept and setting the right stage, conducting is about intentionally facilitating (inter)action between the various components of your event.
“I look to orchestrate an evening where all the details are thought through in advance, similar to the concept of the Japanese philosophy of omotenashi” explains Maggie Spicer. Omotenashi is about going above and beyond, anticipating guests’ needs before they do.
Conducting includes the design of the space itself and how people are able to flow through it. When I was running my global social experiment – Wok+Wine – I sought to “maximise collisions and minimise bottlenecks”. I ensured guests moved through the space in such a way they would naturally bump into each other but never get stuck in any one place.
Conducting may also include the activities you design into the experience that prompt, nudge, or otherwise provide people with opportunities to connect.
Connector
In your Connector role, you are hands on, literally connecting event-goers with each other. As the host, your guests will look to you as the source of connections, believing you probably know everyone. Depending on the size of your event, it may not be possible to spend time with more than 20 or 30 people over the course of an event. That said, your actions will be noticed and your guests will follow your lead.
Being effective in your connector role requires taking a genuine interest in who attends your events and thinking of ways you can add value to them through personally supporting them in making the connections they seek.
Real success is achieved when you begin sharing your roles or even delegating them to others.
“We always have cheerleaders, like fun people at the front, and then we have people walking around doing the same thing that we would do – just meeting people and starting conversations.”
Tiffany Taylor-Ross, co-founder at Vibes in the Park
The more you can involve your guests, the more powerful this becomes. Not only does it give them a greater sense of ownership of the experience but it also helps to demonstrate your intentionality. You lead by example and then so do they.
Zooming out: Events as journeys, not moments
Another important mindset shift you should make to maximise the connectivity potential of your events is to see them as journeys not moments. Thinking (and acting) in this way can deliver ongoing benefits for yourself, your organisation, and the people you do it all for – your guests.
In broad terms, events can be thought of in three phases: pre-event, the event itself, and post-event. It is the cumulative effect of all three phases working together that translates into maximum connectivity-related value for your guests.
Pre-Event
In the pre-event phase, there are multiple things you can be thinking about to support your guests in connecting.
“Connectivity begins well before the event,” says Colin Campbell. “It has to do with who you’re involving in order to organise the event; where the space is and how it feels; the architectural setup of it; and how you’re enabling individuals to engage more effectively.”
You need to be clear on your overall event concept and how you design, market and communicate it. What expectations do you want to set?
“I often like to say that the connections begin before you even make it through the door. Giving people context for connections is really critical.”
Larissa May
When the Vibes in the Park team are planning their events they share openly with their community. “As we’re making decisions, we’re also putting out little fillers on Instagram,” explains Tiffany Taylor-Ross. “So when you’re at home, you can think – ‘okay, this is the tone they’re setting’.”
Involving your audience early will influence the types of people you attract to your events. It will ensure they arrive in the right state of mind and it will deepen their collective sense of ownership of the experience.
You can also be thinking about the potential of pre-connecting participants, either for promotional purposes (e.g. ‘invite a friend’) or to set people up with a buddy to arrive with. The pre-event phase is your moment to capture relevant data about participants’ needs and expectations, to facilitate omotenashi and ensure everyone feels equally included.
“At one of our events we went so far as to ask people in advance how they took their coffee. Our goal was to have people feel welcome and at ease when they arrived, so they wouldn’t feel anxious or awkward entering a room where they didn’t know anyone.”
Maggie Spicer
The Event Itself
How you support guest-connectivity during the event itself will largely depend on the scale and nature of your event. Remember, you have been living and breathing your concept for weeks, months or even years and for your guests it may be a completely new experience.
What’s obvious to you won’t necessarily be obvious to them. They’ll be looking to you for cues regarding how things work and what’s expected of them. They may even be looking for more hands-on support such as introductions to others.
“I go around and try to say hello to everyone for the first 30 minutes of the event, Because I find that I am the tie to the community.”
Tiffany Taylor-Ross, co-founder at Vibes in the Park
Remember that your guests will want to connect but, left to their own devices, their behaviour will likely be counterproductive and counterintuitive. Provide them with the permission they need to connect and the support they need to do so.
“Personalisation at an event is really important,” suggests Larissa May. “So people feel like they’re part of something bigger, but they can still find something that’s for them.”
Communicate clear expectations and be creative about the activities, props and other tools you might use to facilitate connectivity. Involve your guests by sharing your connector role, so you have more people actively connecting others.
Post-Event
The post-event phase is a critical but largely overlooked part of the event journey. You’ve done the clean-up, packed away your gear and the lights go down.
There can be a tendency to breathe a sigh of relief and unplug. You had a great time but you’re glad that one’s done, but this is when you need to be fully switched on as it is here that the biggest human connectivity gains can often be made.
Your guests are primed. They are grateful for the experience you created for them. They didn’t want it to end and they’d do anything to make it last a little longer. They want to give back to you. Don’t miss this opportunity.
“We let people give us feedback and we feed off of that. We’re not going to change our complete image, but what are people saying? What are they wanting? What are we hearing? So the next time we bring them into another environment, we’ve listened, and they can feel that,”
Tiffany Taylor-Ross, co-founder at Vibes in the Park
If you’re intentional about human connectivity, and as long as your approach is authentic, you can create a perfect win:win whereby your guests are able to prolong their experience and they do you a huge favour at the same time.
Supporting your guests with ways to become and remain connected will transform them from event-goers to evangelists, motivating them to introduce your concept to new people in their own networks. People who become your future guests and your existing guests’ future connections.
10 key takeaways for event organisers
Huge opportunities await event organisers who create experiences that help guests to connect effectively and authentically. Achieving success in this new era of event creation requires a deep understanding of changing guest needs and increased intentionality in event design. It requires shifting your perspective from seeing the experiential aspect of what you create not as the end in itself but as the means to a greater end – human connection. Here are ten key takeaways to support forward-thinking event organisers looking to amplify your impact and grow your business in this new era of event creation:
- Prioritise human connectivity as a core objective of event design.
- Be clear about your connectivity-related objectives. Start with those of your guests and make sure they align with your own.
- Your participants have likely never been more diverse. Be wary of biases and assumptions and help them to find commonalities despite their differences.
- Consider your unique and distinct roles in the context of your event. Think about how you might include or delegate certain roles to others to amplify your efforts.
- Your participants won’t always behave in their own best interest. An intentionally designed experience can help them get over their apprehension and connect naturally.
- If you’re using technology, see it as a means to enhance, not replace, human connections.
- Use content as a stimulant, not a safety-net. People are fantastic entertainment, so long as you create the conditions for them to be themselves.
- Your participants will help you to connect to others, providing you include them and give them something worth sharing.
- Think in terms of journeys, not moments, and don’t forget to design for the moments in-between.
- Quantity is a short game. To win in the long game, focus on quality.
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