Acronym

An age-old challenge that I don't know any organization has totally conquered. We do need to be better at matching sets to the actual session content. The room for IGNITE was set in rounds, but really would have been just fine (or actually even better) if it had been theatre, accommodating far more people.

Hi Scott,
The irony of almost any over-filled room is that so many of us cluster in the back of the room there is almost always seating up-front. Unless the room is on the corner of a corridor (where you have some doorways that enter into the back AND the side of the room, you're stuck. I go to other conferences where we are asked in advance to indicate which sessions we plan to attend but of course that's easier to do if there are only four concurrent sessions. ASAE rotates topics enough so it's semi-unpredictable ... yet certain speakers always draw a crowd. It's unfortunate that convention centers don't provide for closed-circuit video capture on a flat screen they can put on the wall just outside the door--that way everyone hanging outside the door has to drop back to view the proceedings on the "Jumbotron," and the hallways are wide enough to avoid violating fire codes with a mass of people blocking normal passage back and forth to other sessions. You wouldn't want to or have to do this for every rooms, just a few where the "superstars" are speaking. (I'm sure that experienced meeting planners have at least five well-reasoned objections to this approach, but it would allow that topic to reach the 5% of the audience stuck in the hallway and the other 20% who saw the crowd and moved on but would really prefer to stay there and learn from the speaker they find most appealing in that slot).

How about these?

How about reserving a time slot or two for later agenda where popular sessions are "repeated" for those who couldn't make it into the room the first time? All session leaders would be made aware that they need to be available in case their session is one that will be dropped into that spot.

How about letting the event organizers know (they might not be aware because they're busy elsewhere) about the overflow so they can consider whether the session can be offered again online -- either via live Webinar, recorded Webinar (yes, you can create a recording without a live session first), or re-purposed for asynchronous delivery?

Instead of trying to think about how to avoid the overflow, why not think about how you'd provide the session to *anyone* who couldn't make it (including those who weren't at the conference/event at all)?

Perhaps the IPad App or a similar online conference scheduler can be used. I know I went in and used the IPad App to schedule all of the sessions I was planning on attending. This would be a great way to get some data to see which sessions may be pulling in a larger crowd.

I think the biggest challenge for meeting professionals regarding seating is to think of what's best for the attendees. So often a meeting professional will set the room once for a three day conference and not turn it in the evenings to accommodate different seating options for less or more the next day. ASAE should know from the Great Ideas Conference that the Ignite sessions are popular. They should have placed them in rooms with theater and that could seat more people. And then they should have reset the room to accommodate more once they realized they were out of space.

Sometimes I wonder if the planning team at ASAE even considers which room to put which session in (besides general sessions) or they just do it without intention. When I plan conference, I know which sessions will attract more people because of the speaker, the content or to delivery style and plan accordingly.

Jeff -- not to ignore what you say/ask about ASAE (yes, the meetings & education staff do try to place sessions in rooms strategically, and as so many others have said, it's a difficult art to do perfectly)...

But one thing you said made me think of something else. You said "what's best for attendees." It's funny, what may be best for attendees may not align with what they want -- and it bears on Scott's original post.

I think attendees want space -- certainly all of the Meyers-Briggs I's want it (and I'm one of you). They want to walk into a room and pick out a place to sit that isn't standoffish, away from everyone else, but also not right next to someone either. At least one chair's distance.

Now, what's best for attendees is a more crowded room. Most seats taken -- not all, and certainly not spilling onto the floor or standing room only, but a good crowd. You get to meet more people and make more connections this way, and as a meeting organizer, I want my attendees to have as many opportunities to make a meaningful connection with other attendees as possible -- that's what they will remember most from the meeting. Thoughts?

Scott B, I agree totally about the value of a crowded room. If you want to guarantee everyone gets a seat at the session they want, then you have to make every room really big. The result is a lot of sessions with half-filled rooms, and that has a dramatic impact on the energy in the room, and the learning. Higher energy gets you more focused, more into it. And if one room is so full that I have to go to another session, so be it. I'd rather have that problem than sitting in low-energy sessions with lots of empty space.

I attended two sessions with the split set of crescent rounds in front and theatre in the back. One session did not have us do any group work so the tables weren't necessary. The other had one 5-10 minute table conversation that easily could have been done with people clustering together in a theatre set.

Maybe the session form the presenters complete needs to be more explicit in gathering info about the session design. We've all fallen into the crescent round ritual, but if they aren't going to be put to use, they actually take up space unnecessarily.