Unfortunately, as before quarantine, 70% of this vortex consists of feces.
After attending another time-waste event and once again being amazed how the organizers manage to ignore all the principles of moderation and common sense so selflessly, I realized that I could not remain silent.
At one time, I organized and moderated more than a dozen events of various formats and sizes. And he developed a set of basic principles, the observance of which distinguishes good events from bad ones.
Here they are.
0. The most important thing is moderation
Moderation is incredibly important. This is the crucial thing for any good event. The role of the moderator is fundamental, it depends on him whether people get pleasure and benefit or lose a couple of hours of their lives.
What happens at meetups without moderation:
- On networking, introverts look at their phones and leave without opening up, without new acquaintances.
- At pitch sessions, the loudest / arrogant participants take all the airtime, and the rest remain unheard
- People ask speakers irrelevant questions and waste time
- Speakers talk, drift off topic, and waste time / blur focus
A good moderator, like a conductor, manages the event and maintains its quality level.
But how can you be a good moderator?
1. "Is what is happening now benefiting the participants?"
This is a universal question that the moderator should ask himself every 10 seconds.
Is the topic the speaker is discussing relevant to the audience? Maybe it should be directed a little?
Is the question asked from the audience important to the rest? Maybe this is too narrow a topic, and you should politely refuse and pass the microphone to the next person who wants it?
Do people get to know each other at coffee breaks or scatter in the corners?
You must understand who your audience is and why they came to you. If at the moment they are not getting any benefit, and you just sit and hesitate to send a speaker or hint to a participant when he has gone beyond the time limit, you destroy your event and destroy tens (or even hundreds) of man-hours.
2. Introduce people to networking
Networking is not about gathering many people in one place. Networking is all about creating a context in which it will be easy for them to get to know each other. Ideally - so that acquaintances also occur between people who are useful to each other.
A good networking event starts with a moderator introducing the participants. Give everyone 20-30 seconds for a short intro. Start with yourself - lead by example.
Too many people? Divide them into groups of 8-10 people, and then mix and arrange a new circle.
30 seconds for 10 people is only 5 minutes. But during these 5 minutes, everyone will mentally note: who seemed interesting to him and with whom he would like to communicate better. Moreover, it helps to establish a dialogue: agree, “Hello, are you doing online retail? Oh, how familiar, but I, as you heard, create online stores. Can you tell us more? " much better than the standard "Hi, I'm Vasya, what are you doing?"
Experiment: ask people to name the weirdest thing about themselves or tell them about the craziest fail. Such frankness always becomes a good basis for future communication between the participants.
Try different dating games that create a relaxed context for communication. This is the essence of networking meetup. Anyone can simply record a meeting on Facebook.
3.
Reports do not always agree in advance. And this is great: there are interview formats, there are questions from the audience, there are many options that allow speakers to reveal topics in a free form, without prepared slides and a script.
Experienced speakers do this well. But much more often the speaker is a professional in his field: design, development, management, whatever. But not a master of public speaking. He can worry, he can lose the thread of the narrative, he can go into unnecessary details or go beyond the timing.
Help him. There is no need to sit and watch a person fail the performance, and the audience quietly leave the hall. Yes, interrupting and interrupting a person can be unpleasant, but it is necessary: not only he will be grateful, but also all the spectators, whose precious hours of life you have saved.
There are many ways to do this in a polite and tactful way.
"Alexander, this is incredibly interesting, but I'm afraid that few in the audience understand X so deeply. You mentioned Y - I think this is a much more popular story - tell me in more detail how you solved it?"
“Maria, you know amazingly much about X, and I'm sure you can talk about it for days. But alas, we only have a couple of hours, so I have to narrow things down a bit: could you tell us more about Y, which is a popular thing today? "Smile, be polite and kind. You are not an educator scolding a person who has gone out of timing. You sincerely want to help the person share their most rewarding experience with the audience.
There is nothing sadder than seeing sad speakers at the end of an event with a half-empty hall. It hurts especially when people come out right during their performance. "I started talking about X ... Apparently, here it was not interesting for everyone ...". But if a good moderator was around, everything would be fine.
4. Moderate questions for speakers
Some formats assume free questions from the audience. Unfortunately, very often there are holes in moderation here: people ask super-niche questions that are interesting only to them, ask toxic (passive-aggressive) questions, ask strange off-topic questions, or ask 10 questions at once.
First, for some events, this format is, in principle, not quite suitable. Do you have a pitch session? Gather a cool jury - let them ask questions and give feedback, not the audience. This guarantees good and thoughtful expert questions, the answers to which will be interesting to everyone.
Okay, does the format of the event require a dialogue with the audience? Feel free to cut or change questions.
“Sorry, but I'm afraid this is too narrow a topic. Better to catch the speaker after the speech and discuss her tete-a-tete "
“I will allow myself to supplement the question: it seems to me that everyone would be interested to hear not only about X, but also about the entire segment as a whole”
"Sorry, this question has already been answered a little earlier."Etc. The hall is chaos, it is a lot of different people. Some of them formulate questions poorly, someone gets distracted and asks what has already happened, and so on.
Do not follow the lead of shyness - politely deny the person a question and pass the microphone to the next one. The rest of the audience will thank you.
Afterword
Moderating events is a snap. Politeness, accurate phrases guiding people, a desire to help them open up are the main tools in a good moderator's arsenal. Always keep in mind the answer to the question "Why did people come to you?" And constantly help them get it.
Remember that 15 minutes of useless time at a meetup of 100 people is a man-day wasted.