Associations have conferences, summits, and workshops all the time. These are great opportunities to increase the reach of your organization, raise a little money for your cause if you charge a fee for attending, and grow your partnership opportunities.
The information you provide isn’t all that valuable if it’s only shared once and then forgotten. In fact, just sharing information isn’t enough to encourage anyone to take action. Plus, once the conference is over, your association’s influence with others hasn’t been established. Only the attendees were able to see the presentations and benefit.
What if you could turn conferences, educational meetings, and workshops into content that reaches a wider audience and could even encourage more people to attend your organization’s events in the future?
Improved Outcomes When You Turn Your Conference into Content
At TVD Associates, we’ve been experimenting a bit with this concept. We’ve taken some of our clients’ educational meetings and turned them into content — and seen good results.
We put out recaps of workshops, roundtables, and discussions. These recaps serve a dual purpose:
They allow us to put out additional thought leadership content on behalf of our clients. Information can be distilled and disseminated online in an optimized way to attract visitors and to provide them with something to see when they visit the website.
Attract more attendees. The recaps include valuable information, but they don’t give away everything. Instead, they provide examples of the kind of content that non-attendees are missing out on — and it encourages a larger number of signups for the next event.
We also livestream events from client Facebook pages and offer short video recaps. With these types of content, it’s easy to get more people engaged with nonprofit associations and organizations. The impact isn’t always immediate, but we’ve seen results build as we are consistent in our efforts.
You have the chance to create an “out” group by turning your conference into content. And because people want to be perceived as part of the “in” group, your content could generate more participation in addition to helping you position your association as a thought leader.
How to Repurpose Your Conference Content
There are many different ways to repurpose your content once the conference is over. Here are a few ideas that can help you take a conference and turn it into content that attracts people to your association website, encourages them to sign up for the next event, or even use it to establish your authority in an area:
Blog posts: Create blog posts around concepts discussed at the conference. You can also include your recap on the blog. Pull out interesting quotes and use click-to-tweet tools to make it easy for visitors to share your posts on social media.
Video snippets: Take some of the most interesting moments from your conference and create a snippet. Share these videos on your website and social media channels. You don’t need to share the whole thing, but you can share moments that are especially poignant.
Audiograms: Turn some of the most compelling audio from your event into one-minute audiograms that can be easily shared on social media and in other places.
Facebook Live: Consider streaming sessions live from your page for others to watch. It’s true that they are getting the whole session, but it can be a value-add that encourages people to join your page and look for updates. Another tactic is to stream the video live, and then move it to a closed group or some other premium content area, driving participation in a community or boosting subscriptions.
SME interviews: Create features that highlight some of the subject matter experts featured at the conference. Do interviews with them and publish them on your website. These can be audio, video, or written. Not only do you provide insightful content, but the SMEs will likely promote anything that features them, widening your association’s reach.
Podcast: Turn audio into a podcast, and have interviews with SMEs, organization leaders, and others. When used as part of your podcasting schedule, conference content can be a powerful way to reach people.
There’s no reason to let conference content disappear into the night. With a little extra effort, you can take that information and turn it into a way to drive traffic, bolster your own reputation, and even make a little extra money.