Give Me Some Space (part 2)
August 29, 2008 · Print This Article
Posted by Mark Bennardo
(Read “Part 1″ here)
My wife and I love movies. When we were newly married, we would occasionally do what we’d call a “movie marathon”. We’d see three movies in one Saturday—all in different theatres.
• We’d start with a late-morning matinee
• Then see a new release in another theatre during the afternoon
• Followed by a second-run movie that evening in the local “discount” theatre.
In the car on the way home, we would talk about the three movies we’d seen that day and invariably could only name two of them in the moment. Only after racking our brains and digging through our short-term memory for a few minutes would we eventually unearth the title of the third movie. We’d already forgotten.
Like I said, we LOVE movies, yet after over saturating ourselves in that environment, our ability to retain what we experienced became clouded.
The same is true for the people who come to our events. They need a little bit of time and space to process what they are taking in. If they don’t get it, their retention will suffer. We need to give them:
• Ample breaks
• Conversation time and
• Uninterrupted Space to process what they’re taking in
And I’m not just talking about “dinner on your own”.
The moral of the story is this: “Don’t over program. Don’t over schedule.” If you do, your audience will be hard-pressed to remember which “movies” they’ve seen that day. Allow adequate amounts of “process space” and your experience will reap far better results.
September 22nd, 2008 at 9:01 am
This is so true! I know this from my experince with Transperia. B.T. (Before Transperia) our organization would program attendees’ time from 7am to 9pm, for three days! Our sales meetings were dreaded because people left exhausted and unable to describe the main goal of the meeting. Mark convinced us that we needed time to process what we were experiencing. Based on the feedback from attendees and the boost in sales we enjoyed, we will always plan for time as Mark suggests.