Contents
- The guest’s event begins with an invitation nobody on the team rereads
- The last kilometer to the venue belongs to the organizer
- A registration desk staffed yesterday sets the tone for the whole day
- Where does the guest’s day quietly go wrong?
- Speakers, sponsors and delegates walk separate paths through the same building
- The cloakroom queue is the last memory most guests take home
- The days after the event still belong to the journey
Open the run of show of almost any event and look at its first line. It is nearly always the same: doors open, registration begins. Everything before that line belongs, as far as the document is concerned, to nobody.
For the guest, that first line is already the middle of the story. By the time the doors open they have read an invitation, decided to come, worked out how to get there, sat in traffic, circled a car park and asked a stranger where the entrance is. They have formed an opinion, and the document that runs the whole day has no row for any of it. Marketing people would call this the customer journey, the path a person walks from first hearing about something to the moment they decide whether it was worth it. Applied to our work, the attendee journey is every step a guest takes from the first message to the days after the event, seen through their eyes rather than through the organizer’s timeline.
The guest’s event begins with an invitation nobody on the team rereads
If you ask me, the first room a guest enters is the invitation, and in our business it is often the least edited thing in the whole project.
Invitations to corporate events travel through many hands in almost every market, and congress invitations even more so. A corporate invitation may be designed by the agency, sent from the client’s assistant’s mailbox, forwarded by a regional manager and followed up by a phone call from someone in sales. A congress invitation passes through the association, the congress organizer and sometimes a pharmaceutical sponsor who registers doctors in groups. When it finally lands with the person who will actually attend, the date has survived the trip but the practical details usually have not.
Where exactly is it, is there parking, what time should I really arrive, will there be lunch, can I bring a colleague? These are dull questions, and they decide whether someone walks in relaxed or irritated. The invitation is the cheapest place in the entire event to answer them, and it is where they are answered least.
The last kilometer to the venue belongs to the organizer
Many beautiful venues are hard to reach, on any coast and in any big city. Congress hotels out on the ring road, resorts an hour from the nearest airport, historic buildings in old city centers where a taxi cannot get anywhere near the door, convention centers whose car parks are full well before the opening. The organizer chose the venue for good reasons; the guest only knows that the last kilometer took twenty minutes.
I am not arguing for easier venues. Sometimes the view, the building or the capacity is worth the effort of getting there. What changes the experience is accepting that the road is part of the event, rather than a line under logistics at the back of the proposal. A shuttle from the main hotels, a clear airport pickup point run by the DMC, a car park attendant who knows several hundred cars are coming and a person standing at the side gate where taxis actually stop cost very little next to the stage budget, and they set the guest’s mood before the stage is even visible. For international congresses the journey starts at arrivals, and a delegate who finds the transfer sign within a minute of landing already thinks better of the congress than one who spends half an hour on the phone, which is why the DMC deserves the full arrival list weeks ahead rather than the night before.
A registration desk staffed yesterday sets the tone for the whole day
Somewhere between the car park and the hall, the guest meets the first person who represents the event. Often that person joined the project the day before: a hostess sent by an agency, a student whose lecturer asked them to help out, a temporary team member who has not yet seen the program. The guest does not know this and would not care if they did. To them, that face is the event.
So the most valuable half hour of preparation is often the one spent with the people at the door before it opens. What is this event, who is it for, when does the main session start, where are the toilets and the prayer room, what happens when a name is missing from the list, who do we call when we don’t know the answer? A single page with the questions guests ask most, left on the desk, prevents more bad first impressions than anything spent on the foyer decor.
Fairness matters here too. Queues sometimes form whatever you do, because half the guests arrive on the same coach or the system slows down on the morning. Waiting is rarely what people hold against an event. What they remember is whether anyone seemed to notice they were waiting.
Where does the guest’s day quietly go wrong?
Once the program is running, organizers relax. From the control room, a full hall and speakers on time look like success.
The guest’s journey keeps going in places the control room cannot see. A coffee break meant for networking where everyone queues at one table because the second was set up in a corner nobody found. Parallel sessions in rooms with confusing names, so people walk into the wrong hall and walk out again. A lunch the hotel planned as a seated menu and the program planned as forty minutes. Phones dying with nowhere to charge them. A smoking area that sends people out through the main entrance and back through the security check every time.
None of these will appear in a report as a failure, because each one is small. Yet a guest who has collected four small frustrations by mid afternoon listens to the closing panel with half the attention they arrived with, and when a colleague asks how the event was, at least one of those frustrations will make it into the answer.
The journey is also very different for a guest who uses a wheelchair, walks with a stick or comes with a pushchair, and in a great many venues that difference is discovered on the morning itself. Historic buildings in old quarters have steps at nearly every door, hotel ballrooms sit one floor below the lobby with a service lift that only the banquet staff know about, and the temporary ramp ordered for the stage is frequently the only ramp on the site. I can imagine some planners thinking that such guests are few. They are, and that is exactly why nobody walks their route in advance, so a single walk through the building with that question in mind, a week before, tends to change more of the plan than anyone expects.
An attendee journey is not a map of your program; it is a map of the moments when a guest is alone with a small problem and nobody from your team is near.
Speakers, sponsors and delegates walk separate paths through the same building
Once you start drawing journeys while planning a conference, it becomes obvious that an event has several running at once. The speaker’s path starts weeks earlier with emails about slides and flights and, on the day, runs through a backstage corridor, a technical check and a green room. The sponsor’s path is about installation times, stand position and how its own guests are treated. The protocol guest arrives through a separate entrance with an escort and leaves early. The international delegate is managing a new city, a new currency and a language. The participant who registered online simply wants a seat and a coffee.
Each of them judges the event by their own path, and none of those paths is the ideal one drawn in the proposal. The useful journeys include the guest who arrives an hour late, the one who loses a badge, the one who needs a quiet room for a while, because those are the ordinary variations a team either has an answer for or improvises on the spot. A congress can run beautifully for participants while three speakers spend the morning hunting for someone who knows where to upload their presentation, and a launch can delight the press while the dealers who were meant to be the real audience sit in a side room. Rough drawings of each path, made separately and then laid over one another, show where they cross, and those crossings are where trouble usually starts, because two teams each believe the same moment belongs to the other.
Service designers have a well worn method for this, and the GOV.UK Service Manual’s guide to experience maps is one of the clearest short descriptions of it: follow what people do, think and feel over time, rather than what the organization’s departments do. For an event I keep it much simpler than a designer would, a single page per path, with a row for each moment and five things written next to it:
- what the guest is trying to do at that moment,
- where it happens (an email, a gate, a desk, a corridor),
- which team or supplier owns it,
- what information that team needs from the one before,
- how anyone would know it went well.
The fourth column is the one that earns its place. An access request typed into the registration form, for example, often stays in the registration system while the transfer company and the venue team never hear about it, so each supplier does its own job perfectly and the guest still arrives to find nothing arranged. A map that asks what information moves at every step finds that gap on paper, weeks before a guest finds it at the door. It also helps to walk through the finished page with the people who will actually work the day, since the hostess at the desk and the driver of the shuttle know questions the planning team has quietly assumed away.
The cloakroom queue is the last memory most guests take home
Exits are the least planned part of nearly every event I have seen, and some of my own projects belong on that list. Five hundred people stand up at the same moment, the cloakroom has one attendant, the car park needs half an hour to empty, there are no taxis, and the shuttle times were announced once, early in the morning, when nobody was listening.
That last half hour lands on top of everything the guest felt inside. It is not fair that three good hours can be coloured by thirty bad minutes, but it is how memory works, and arguing with it does not help. A second cloakroom attendant, a taxi point placed away from the main door, the shuttle schedule repeated on screen during the closing session: these are small fixes, and almost nobody thinks of them on the day because by then everyone is watching the stage.
The days after the event still belong to the journey
The guest’s path does not stop at the car park barrier. A short thank you message, the presentations that were promised, the certificate of attendance that many congress participants, doctors above all, actually need for their institutions, and a photo gallery that arrives within days rather than weeks are the final steps, and they tell the guest whether the organizer still thinks about them once the stage has been taken down.
These touchpoints are cheap and usually late, because by then the team is busy with the debrief and whatever comes next. Assigning them to a named person before the event, rather than to “whoever has time afterwards”, is the difference between a journey that ends cleanly and one that simply fades out. Most of what a journey map reveals is like this: small, inexpensive and easy to miss precisely because nobody is paying attention to small things.
An hour spent walking the guest’s route the evening before, without your team badge, will show you most of it.