THE UNCONFERENCE: LESSONS FROM THREE OFFBEAT B-TO-B EVENTS

If you’ve ever attended a session taught by a cowboy poet around a campfire, spent hours affixing stickers to a crowdsourced art installation or pitched a session with a Post-it note, then you’ve probably been to an unconference. While not a new category of b-to-b events, it’s a growing one fueled, in part, by a younger b-to-b attendee demographic craving hands-on learning, ample networking opportunities and above all else, anything but a ballroom.

We tracked down the organizers of three offbeat b-to-b events to learn about their event models and see how marketers might incorporate some of these principles into traditional conferences. Ahead, some fresh ideas for rethinking your format to encourage more organic sharing and deeper discussion.

Bringing the Outdoors… Out

And we begin at high altitude in Breckenridge, CO, where the inaugural Camp 9600 (named for the elevation) took place in September. The Breckenridge Tourism Office organizes the two-day marketing and storytelling conference for folks in the travel industry, which is supported by local sponsors. An intimate event that helps attract business to the area during the offseason, about 175 marketers typically attend.

Camp 9600 takes place on the Breckenridge Creative Arts campus, which has a mix of new and old structures like a converted horse barn, but there are by no means boundaries on how attendees and speakers interact. A typical day begins with a breakfast session followed by an outdoor adventure. Hikes and bike rides are built into the agenda, where attendees can network, collaborate and have discussions about what they learned that morning on the trail. Speakers may opt for an unconventional setting for their sessions—one this past year, a speaker hosted a small group session on a fly-fishing excursion. And then there was that aforementioned campfire cowboy poet.

“It’d be pretty easy to get the best presenters with the best content and have them stand up and do presentations one right after the other, but I just don’t think that makes deep connections for attendees,” says Scott Fortner, director-marketing at Breckenridge Tourism Office. “We’re trying to share good information and do it using the outdoors to break down barriers in what you might find in a stuffy meeting room space. Speakers are a little more willing to give away their secret sauce than they would otherwise.”  http://www.eventmarketer.com/article/the-unconference-offbeat-b-to-b-events/