tl;dr Thoughts on hosting our 3rd annual entrepreneurship conference in Fremont, NE

Backstory

A few years ago, I helped found a non-profit in Fremont called the Fremont Creative Collective. Our goal was to create a center for creativity, entrepreneurship and technology in Fremont. Being a small, rural town, Fremont has always self-identified as an agriculture and manufacturing town. We are hoping to give those creative class of individual an outlet to thrive in.

Three years ago, we decided that we wanted to host some speakers that would talk to our community about entrepreneurship. We did some outreach and the responses were overwhelming. We were able to grab some A+ speakers from Omaha and Lincoln, large cities about an hour away. Having these kind of speakers spend their time to talk to the folks of Fremont was a huge win in our book.

Problems

The first year we held our conference, we didn’t know what to expect. We knew we had good speakers and a decent venue, but wasn’t sure how it would received in Fremont. We ended up attracting about 30 individuals, mostly business professionals, from Fremont. The talks were good and we felt encouraged that there may be some desire for this type of conference.

The next year, we wanted to expand and try to attract more individuals. Once again, we found that speakers from the surrounding areas were more than happy to participate, but the participant turnout was not much different. We had around 40 visitors at the peak of the day.

We had awesome speakers, decent venue, half-decent marketing, but no one was showing up. What was going wrong?

2017

For this third year, we wanted to focus more on students. We have a private university, Midland University, located here in Fremont that graduates 300ish students each year. We wanted to gear our talks and schedule to those students.

We have 3 Midland University affiliated folks on our Board of Directors (+1 alumni) so it wasn’t difficult to get the partnership set up. MU was on board with facilitating our lunch, marketing help and donating venue space. We were able to get the message out to the staff and many professors cancelled classes so students could attend or offer extra credit if students attended and wrote a reflection. We had 80+ people pre-register for the conference which came really close to our stretch goal of 100 attendees.

Attendance still suffered. We had around 45 people during the peak of the day, with most speakers seeing around 20 people (professionals and/or students).

Future Notes

Despite our best crack at hosting this conference- with good marketing, great speakers and awesome partnership, I’m not confident Fremont can sustain a level of conference that we’re aiming for. Here are my thoughts for next year:

• It was really cold on the day we hosted the event. As silly as it is, I feel like the biting cold may have kept a few people at home that had signed up.

• Aim for shorter. All 3 conferences we’ve hosted have been half-day or full-day events. Maybe having just 2 or 3 speakers in a couple of hours would be more easy to attend if you’re a professional.

• Give time between speakers. We had so many great speakers that we had squashed them sooooo close together and that left very little room for changing slide decks, bathroom breaks, stretching, etc.

• The MC is important. We didn’t talk about who would MC the event until the week of. We were lucky enough to find 2 students who were willing to volunteer. Unfortunately, one of the students was sick that day and we had to pick up the slack ourselves. The MC has come out immediately after the speaker is done to tell the audience what to expect next- who the next speaker is, when they’ll start, etc. If no one is filling that role of “outro”ing the speaker, it leaves a really awkward time when the crowd has 0 clue what is going on.

• Don’t let people sit in the back. We had reserved an auditorium that had seating in front but also had lots of seats really far away from the stage. Students will ALWAYS trend toward sitting far away. It was really awkward to have 40 seats directly in front of the speaker be empty and all of the seats at the back of the room be full. Makes it hard to get good pictures for social media.

• Don’t move around if you don’t have to. We had the majority of our talks in the auditorium, but also offered breakout sessions in different locations around campus and our lunch session was done in the cafeteria’s meeting rooms. This lead to a lot of confusion and gave people the opportunity to leave and not come back. We had to have multiple locations due to our speaker schedule, but I’m not sure I would schedule the same way again.

• Account for sound issues. The auditorium is used for vocal performance art, so the acoustics are really good. But there was no microphone or speakers present when we showed up. This wouldn’t have been such a big problem, except that there were piano recital practice taking place directly below the auditorium that lead to quite a bit of noise pollution. Even though you may not need it, make sure you have audio equipment available and ready.

• Video the talks. That was my highest priority this year, because I knew the day-of attendance was not a guarantee. You can re-use these talks over and over again online. We were lucky enough to have a decent camera with a wireless lapel mic available. By recording those talks, we can cut them up, share them on social media, post them on our website and use that to drive traffic to our non-profit to get message exposure.

I’m sure there are most things that will come to mind, and I will update this post as they come up. We’ll have to do some soul-searching as a non-profit to decide if we want to try this again next year or if it takes a different form in a different location.

Photos!