Meetings and events offer the best possible platform to help millennials expand their networks, customize their self-education, and personalize their career paths. That’s why millennials are advocating for more effective meeting design and better ways to connect, both physically and virtually, in a shifting and highly competitive global marketplace.
Meetings Means Business, an industry-wide coalition of meetings industry suppliers, in partnership with Skift, a provider of marketing research for the travel industry, created a report entitled “What Millennials Want in Meetings.” In it, they offer these key strategies for engaging millennials attendees.
- Create hybrid meetings with exclusive virtual content. If millennials like sharing content digitally while participating in face-to-face events, then make sure they have something to share. Meeting planners can start slowly to build their online virtual content to test what engages attendees with stakeholder messaging most. As this part of meeting planning matures, so will sponsorship opportunities that can be packaged for individual sessions or larger portions of the event.
- Include millennials in social media and website development. Even though many millennials are still developing their skill sets, they want to feel like their opinion is respected and they’re helping co-create meeting content and experiences. Create a millennial task force for special projects so they can work together on shared goals like new social media campaigns, pre- and post-meeting online content, app content conversion to Web-based platforms, etc.
- Kill the cocktail reception. Well, maybe not kill it, but definitely add some interactive knowledge sharing that helps millennials develop either personally or professionally. Many millennials say the traditional cocktail reception is intimidating because it feels so unnatural to them to just walk up to someone to try to start a conversation without some kind of shared interest beyond the event theme. Apps like MeetingMatch, where attendees can find people with similar interests, are becoming popular.
- Create young professional SIGs. Everyone loves special interest groups (SIGs) because they’re smaller gatherings with people who really identify with a niche subject. Planners should think about creating one solely for young professionals, especially at association conventions, where millennials can let their guard down and network in a more relaxed ambiance.
A link to the full report from Meetings Mean Business can be found in the Additional Web Resources box at SalesandMarketing.com.
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