Road to Hyderabad: Lesson #8

Lesson #8: Engage Your Participants in Setting the Agenda (and well before the event takes place)

This should be a no-brainer right?  Too often though, it is much harder a process than it really should be.  Emails sometimes go unanswered, brainstorming calls trail off into "ummm yea that sounds good" and different parties often have different priorities for the same event.

Its tough to get the feedback you need from the particpants you want before an event, collaboration or important meeting (though much easier after) but that doesn't mean its not possible.

Here are a few tips we are using to make sure we get the feedback we need from the Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows coming to the event and from our other participants as well

1. Email will rarely give you what you need. Get on the phone or, better yet, go see the future participants in person to find out what they are thinking.  Do a trial run with them to see what they like and don't like.  For instance, my colleague in Singapore just found out from a few Fellows that the site visit that we are planning for the event in Hyderabad (the one we are so excited about) is actually much less important to them than having plenty of unstructured networking time.  So now, with that feedback, we are looking at making the site visit optional.

2. Give people a basic outline, draft, or a few bullet points of your vision for the event to respond to in addition to asking more open-ended question like "what would you like to see..." There are many more editors and critics in the world than there are writers and inventors and even writers and inventors get too busy to be creative sometimes.  It will be easier and more convenient for some of your target participants to tell you what they like or don't like about a "straw man" agenda that you've already come up than it will be for them to come up with original ideas for what they want out of an event or meeting.  Plus, the feedback you will get on a draft agenda or plan is usually pretty specific, and thus often the most useful.

3. If you have enough lead-time, get feedback from people as they are signing up for the event while it is still in the front of their minds.  If you are using an online registration tool like Eventbrite, you can even use survey questions to elicit quick and required feedback for your event.

Next week we will be back with some more lessons from our recent regional Ashoka-Lemelson collaborations in Singapore and Chennai.  Until then, stay techy.

Click here to check out The Road to Hyderabad series.

Photo by: flickr/fatboyke