We've recently sold our 200th ticket to FeverBee's SPRINT.
If you still want to come, you can sign up here.
We're proud of this. It reflects a social-science driven approach to promoting the event.
This aims to answer the two big questions prospective attendees face:
- Who's going?
- What will I tell my boss?
Who's Going?
People primarily go to events where people they admire and their peers will be in attendance.
For SPRINT, we began by ensuring every top VIP in the community space will be there. We individually reached out to Google, airbnb, Twitter, Amazon, Wikipedia, Fitbit, Facebook, Community Roundtable, Lithium, Discourse etc...
Then we tried to ensure that the friends of attendees would also be in attendance. This often meant individually reaching out to people and helping them sign up. You get more value (and enjoy the event more) if your friends are there.
This is true of any type of event. Before you announce the event, be sure you have a big list of popular attendees signed up. You can use this with your friendship groups too.
What Will I Tell My Boss?
The second challenge, for offline events, is what will the participant tell their boss.
Your boss doesn't care about you socializing. They have a limited budget and have one question to answer
Is this the cheapest way to make this employee better at solving the challenges we face?
This means the event has to directly resolve the challenges the attendee faces and do so in a unique way.
For SPRINT, we achieved this in two ways. First by hosting a guided workshop with the top experts dedicated specifically to solving the challenges attendees bring to us.
Second, we make the event unique by working with speakers to focus on new ideas. We want disjointed, non-narrative, talks that tell people specifically what to do to improve their community (by improve, that typically means increase the size or level of activity in the community). We reject anything that smells of high level theory and allow only specific tactics.
Events are big, risky, scary things. We hope that we've worked hard enough to provide you with all the value you need to attend. If you want to learn who will be at SPRINT, click here.
