If you organize conferences you are familiar with what I am calling herd scatter: your presenter stands before a too large room with lots of white empty spaces between seats of attendees. Since your goal in hiring a photographer to cover the talk is to make the room look full, the attendees engaged and the presenter interesting, having a lot of empty seats in the images is counter-productive.
Here are four tips that can mitigate against that:
- Book a smaller room: if you only have 80 registered attendees and the room the conference centre or hotel has given you sits 400, you’ve got a problem. Often these rooms can be divided in half, or if that’s not possible, ask about any alternative spaces where your guests can still fit but the dead space is cut away.
- Block access to the back of the room: if you can’t switch spaces then cut off access to the back of the room where some conference attendees like to sit because it provides easy access to escape. It also virtually guarantees that your room will have big white holes in it where people avoid sitting too close together or up front. If you want a full looking room, you need to limit the seating options to where you want people to sit.
- Ask people to sit in the front: just like in school when the teacher tells everyone to sit closer, a very simple thing to do is to ask your attendees to move closer to the front as they are entering the room. Most people are easily persuaded to move as they know that the reason they are there in the first place is to pay attention and participate.
- Use engaging presenters: if audience engagement is what you are after, than pay some attention to the ability of the presenter you put in the front of the room to actually engage their audience. Reading long texts, reeling off bullet points and old clip art style graphics do not usually elicit strong reactions from audiences, regardless of subject matter.
Keeping people interested is a challenge when most conference goers hold in their hands a device with infinite capacity to distract. It is impossible to keep everyone’s interest corralled when people get pulled into work emergency emails, but these simple tips can help conference planners manage the way their events look when the pictures get delivered.
