The OpenWater Blog

3 Tips to Collect Content at Your Conference

There are countless ways to collect content at your conference: Social media, surveys, and other tech-based solutions included. This content will serve a critical role in marketing your program and establishing legitimacy in the future. After all, future entrants and attendees will want to see what happened at previous conferences to better understand whether they want to attend your upcoming event.

However, many organizations make one critical error: They consider the content they want, without considering the means by which they’ll get it. But with the right technology and techniques in operation, this doesn’t have to be a problem.

In this article, we explore 3 simple tips you can use to collect content successfully at your next conference.

1. Test Before the Event

While this isn’t a “technological solution,” it sets you up for success in the rest of the tech-based efforts you use. After all, you can’t test your social sharing, mobile app, and other tech platforms for the first time at the live event itself.

It’s best to recruit testers that are representative of your conference audience. For example, if you’re going to have a diverse base of both young and old users, it’s important your audience represents this. Moreover, you should always make your technology as simple as is necessary for your most basic user.

2. Collect Small Pieces of Content

Another easy tip is to collect content in the smallest pieces possible. Even the most motivated attendees won’t share if the burden to do so is high, time-consuming, or otherwise complicated.

For example, you should seek short quotes or images from attendees rather than a full write-up of their experience. Or, if you’re using surveys at the event to get feedback in real-time, ask questions with a spectrum of pre-written responses rather than requiring attendees to type out all of their answers.

3. Anticipate Problems

No matter how simple your system for generating and collecting content at your event, attendees are bound to run into problems. This means you should designate staff members to serve as technical support and, more importantly, encourage attendees to share content throughout the event.

The best way to do this is to set up stations throughout your conference designated for this task. This way, attendees will know where to go when they need help rather than trying to figure it out on their own in your crowded conference. This is important because many attendees will consider the cost too high to share content if they encounter a problem, which can pose challenges for your marketing goals and other content-related purposes in the future.

How Will You Collect Content?

How you collect content is more important than the content itself because without a proven process in place, you’re unlikely to have any content to share. As such, it’s important that you consider how you will collect content, the content you’re asking for, and what you’ll do to support attendees, should they encounter a problem.

By doing so, you can practically guarantee that your conference will be an excellent resource of content you can use, hopefully until your next abstracts conference!

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