After-Cycle Cohort Connection: Continuing the Conversation

Professional conferences are built around some simple premises: bring people together from across an industry, share knowledge and insight, build career enhancing connections, and teach fundamental and emerging skills to link the next generation to careers and to keep those with experience up to date on the latest trend. Managing a conference, whether it’s a few thousand attendees, or it’s in the tens of thousands is a feat. There are tools which help us schedule and carry out conferences; but connecting attendees to one another is another question. Usually when the conferences end, so do the participants’ enthusiasm for the subject matter. Meanwhile, online forums can be high-commitment, low-return, which rarely lead to significant connections. As an attendee you watch the webinars, but walk away with little other than the speaker’s recommendation to buy their latest book or service.

When we at TurtleWise began brainstorming ways to positively impact the longevity of the connections built at conferences, we started by considering what attendees really want. It turns out it’s not all about mixers and schmoozing.

People long to make meaningful and lasting connections with others—to give and receive guidance, share ideas, and develop friendships that don’t get lost in the day to day grind after jobs are secured and client lists grown.

Imagine this scenario: at the time of registration participants are invited to join a closed network, only accessible to attendees. Leading up to the event, conference leaders are able to send out questions and thought prompts to attendees, collecting early information about why people are attending, what they are thinking and how they plan to engage at the conference. Likewise, attendees can reach out to the group, forming impromptu connections, planning informal meetups around topics of interest, and connecting with peers.

People can form cohorts through topics of interest by creating and following topical areas. By associating with a topic, attendees will stay in the loop, receiving the questions and conversation topics sent to that cohort. During sessions, presenters can create and use topical tags to solicit input from participants direct from their laptop or mobile device.

During a conference, the conversation is no longer from a speaker to an audience, but between the speaker and audience as co-creators of the experience. The experience is much more rich in this way, and participants can carry on the conversation well after an event has occurred. In fact, the event can morph and adapt as the conference evolves year after year.

Think of this after cycle engagement as a form of applied working group. Through this ongoing engagement, conference organizers have a direct line to your most interested participants as you ask questions or bring up new ideas and get back hundreds of responses. What’s more, you can use our technology to continually maintain the engagement of your base. Participation can become an established norm within your industry.

One challenge conferences face in meeting their networking goals: Human connection is spontaneous and organic, while life in our modern society is fast-paced and schedule-oriented. With TurtleWise, we’ve designed a way combine efficiency with authenticity, and put the ‘human’ back into human networks.

In TurtleWise, people ask questions or pose things to consider to the chosen group, or everyone in the cohort. Then, individually, you have the opportunity to respond to the prompt privately. This leads to ongoing conversations and, down the road, even mentor-mentee relationships. Of course, connections are not going to be formed with everybody. However, even a couple of real, one-on-one relationships are proven to be the best way to form a base and keep people engaged for years to come.

Here are some of the people we can help.

Educators:

Mentoring is never more important than in an academic setting. With TurtleWise, you can give students the opportunity to reach out for help and advice like never before. This isn’t about simply letting students send professors an email. This is about creating a network; connecting teachers with students, connecting students with their peers, connecting alumni with professors, etc. No single individual is ‘the leader,’ it’s just people asking questions and sharing ideas without pressure.

Industry Organizations and Nonprofits:

Whether you are in marketing, programming, retailing or construction there’s a professional organization set up as a non-profit to help advance the field. With TurtleWise you can have the important conversations in a space that isn’t cluttered by memes and vacation photos. TurtleWise works with nonprofits and member driven organizations to enhance member value through engaging your network.

Corporations:

We’re also great at helping corporations build teamwork, organization and trust. At TurtleWise, we know that trust is a two-way street. That’s why we make sure that your employees have just as much of a voice as employers so that everybody feels heard. You could simply make announcements to your workers, but announcements don’t bring people together, and social media fails to create personal connections between you and those you work with. TurtleWise turns problem-solving, constructive inquiry and teamwork into a morale boosting activity so you can watch both your business and your employees thrive.

Influencers:

Then there are influencers such as speakers, authors, artists, and other people who change the way we think and see the world. With TurtleWise, you can directly converse with your most dedicated followers, ask qualitative questions, gauge the feelings of your community, gain access to the larger TurtleWise network and connect with other influencers and their followers while fostering an uplifting environment for advancing ideas.

To find out how TurtleWise can bring your organization to the next level, visit us at https://nocateemarketing.com/ and schedule a free demo today.