By Marcos Dinnerstein, Editor of Digital.nyc
Back in NYC and my body’s clock is somewhere between Helsinki’s time zone and New York’s. This has forced my eyes open before dawn where I’m alone with my thoughts, reflecting on my days at the Slush startup event and what makes an event effective and satisfying. Here’s the recipe, or rule set, that works and where Slush very largely succeeded:
- User Experience (UX) is inseparable from content
- Good, mass transportation - Host the event where there is and/or provide it for your attendees
- Locating yourself in the event
- Build a useable app with a good map function
- Train your staff to guide people
- Label locations clearly, especially landmark locations
- Water, Water everywhere - make it easy to stay hydrated
- Ample seating distributed around your venue - provide a place to rest and I’ll pay attention all day
- Food - give me moderate priced, varied choices
- Make your environment interesting - production values matter. Multi-leveled layouts, good atmospheric lighting, energizing but not overbearing music, all give your event a unique sense of place.
- Content is King
- It’s about the startups, stupid.
- Draw companies from a broad geographic range
- Present a range of business types
- Book informed, experience speakers and moderators
Once you have the above elements in place, mix in a few great parties, shake and you’ll have a tech event that people will talk about for a good long time. And BTW, what are the 2017 dates?
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