From ‘bums on seats’ to driving real dialogue

The value of post-event insight

Earlier this week I read an article by Lucy Schiller, a professor of nonfiction writing at Texas Tech, published in the Columbia Journalism Review. The piece, titled The Final Flight of the Airline Magazine, explores the demise of inflight magazines.

It hit close to home. When I desperately needed a visa to legally remain in the UK, I was offered a job (with a visa) by the very same company she references. Over six years, until I qualified for a passport, I edited and contributed to a handful of inflight magazines, some of which Schiller mentions.

Now what, you may ask, does this have to do with event, and post-event, content? The answer is in the phrase “bums on seats”, which she uses in her article with a sprinkle of sarcasm. Our advertising teams used the same phrase ad nauseam to convince potential advertisers that these magazines reached a captive audience of (make up a large number). These ‘bums’ were engaged with the magazine by the mere fact that they were trapped in a flying tin can, seated, with few distractions. This started to change as Wi-Fi and personal devices made it into the tin can. And then Covid 19 came in for the kill.

The opposite happened with events. We have willing bums on seats, and even more so after the pandemic. But when the post-conference drinks are done, those bums go home, and for the event folks, it becomes slightly more complicated to engage.

That’s where post-event reports come in. Like a well-curated inflight magazine, a good post-event report is not just a replay of what happened but identifies key themes that spark ongoing conversation. I have written about this in greater detail in a previous Substack, Ditch the Recap and Dive Deep: How to Turn Your Post-Event Report into a Must-Read. 

Putting theory into practice, ‘that coalition’ had the privilege to recently collaborate with the UK Public Affairs, and Public Relations and Communications Association, during and after their first combined conference in London to compile a post-conference report. It is out and available for download here.

And as a bonus, here’s a very short highlight reel of some of the bits we did not use in the report.