What’s In Your Shoebox?

I still have a shoebox wrapped in soccer ball wrapping paper because at the time the plan was to grow up and be a professional soccer player (I was a dreamer). Inside are my varsity letters, a Melissa necklace, a Girl Scout pin, the birth certificate for the stuffed cow I made at Build-A-Bear, newspaper clippings from my glory days in sports, a jacks game, ticket stubs, photos, and a pile of other little things that wouldn't mean much to anyone else. To anyone else it's a box of random stuff I should have thrown out three moves ago (and I've moved a lot), but to me it's proof that experiences don't end when the event does…artifacts...aka something that carries meaning because of the experience attached to it.

The Shift Away from Screens

I spend a lot of time reading about consumer/human behavior and right now everything I'm reading keeps pointing in the same direction, logging off. WGSN has a trend they're calling Digital Privilege, where "logging off is the new luxury logo," and they talk about trips people are booking specifically because there's no cell service to the run clubs that have taken over every city. Pinterest Predicts is seeing the same shift from a different angle, with handwritten letters and snail mail coming back around. When everything you receive disappears into an inbox or a text thread, people start reaching for something they can actually hold onto.

What Does That Mean for Events?

If you plan events or are in charge of bringing people together, these trends (I prefer to call them behaviors) are worth paying attention to.

Think about what that looks like at an event. A handwritten note waiting in someone's hotel room is different from an app notification welcoming them. What if you had attendees write a postcard to their future selves you could mail to them six months later around the time they probably forgot they even wrote it. People would rather walk out of an event with something they made or personalized than one more giveaway they'll never think about again.

Every one of these trends could be an event brief if you want it to be. A no-phone hour becomes the best part of the day instead of a rule you're enforcing if you market it that way and white space in the agenda will do more for people than six keynotes stacked end to end ever could.

WGSN even has a trend prediction called Tiny Things, Massive Joy, which is exactly what it sounds like, measuring the Return on Joy of small tangible moments.

The Questions That Changed How I Plan

One of the best bosses I've had asked questions…and I used to think it was an unreasonable number of questions. I'd jump on a call with her with what I thought was a final plan I was proud of and leave with a list of things I hadn't thought about yet. I hated it at first because I wanted her to tell me it was great and I could move forward, but instead she'd ask why we were doing this and who it was really for and what problem I thought it was going to solve. She wasn't poking holes in my work, she was making it better and I still hear her every single time I sit down to plan an event or any project for that matter.

Most planning meetings start with, "Let's pull out last year's agenda." Before long, you're making the same decisions you made last year. I think she'd interrupt the conversation with a different question: When this event is over, what will people want to hang onto?

The Artifacts We Keep

Nobody keeps something because it was expensive or because it had a logo on it. They keep it because every time they come across it, it takes them back to a moment. Maybe it's a keychain they stamped themselves or a name badge covered in notes from people they met. It might not be anything you handed out at all…it could be the story they tell about the conversation that changed the direction of their career.

Artifacts don't preserve objects, they preserve experiences.

So if you're planning an event right now, don't start with what's going in the attendee bag. Start with this question instead…What artifact will remind someone they were there? Because fifteen years from now they might find it in a shoebox or bring it up in a conversation and for about four seconds they'll be right back there.