Make time for it
A ten-minute break is enough to find a restroom. Twenty or thirty minutes is enough to start a conversation. If you need one change, make it this: fewer sessions, longer breaks. Put food and coffee where people will linger, not in a corridor with no room to stop.
Break up the groups who came together
Teams that traveled together will stay together unless something changes that. Topic tables at lunch help. So does giving people a reason to split up, like a reception activity that sends people off on their own.
Don’t rely on the event app
Many conference apps have an attendee matching feature, and in many events only a small part of the room ever opens it. If you want it to work, make it the thing people do at a particular moment, in a particular place, with a host telling them to do it now. Don’t leave it as a tab in a menu.
Plan for the shy and the first-timers
- Hold a first-timers’ meetup in the first hour, with a host.
- Make badges readable from a few feet away, with first names large. Add a line about interests.
- Set up small, themed groups in the evening, where a stranger can join without a big entrance.
Use your reception
The opening reception is the highest-value networking moment you have. Everyone’s there, nobody’s tired yet, and you’re paying for it anyway. It’s also where a simple matching tool does the most good.
With Flare, a QR code at the door gets attendees in with no account, and a few questions drawn from your agenda (“What would you most like to learn this week?”) do the rest. Two phones light up, and two people who should talk go and find each other. It suits one room at a time, up to 250 people. It’s not built for a whole multi-day conference, or for scheduling one-to-one meetings.
What to measure
Ask attendees afterward whether they met someone useful, and whether they’d come back. If you use Flare, you’ll also get totals like introductions offered and meetings reported to include in your post-event report. Flare won’t give you lead lists, since it doesn’t hold any attendee data.