DIVERSITY IN EVENTS: TIPS TO MAXIMISE DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION
In any event, the audience is the central part. Once you get the hang of your audience, every experience you create helps foster an ideal relationship with them. Event managers can make a jump start and turn event participants into loyal advocates just by understanding the role each type of audience plays in molding their own experience. In other words, they need to understand how a diverse group of individuals from a diverse background requires a diverse array of techniques in order to be engaged and leveraged.
For those in the events space, diversity means more opportunities. Of course, it’s much more than just a race or ethnicity. Diversity includes people of different ages, genders, physical abilities, educational background, and more. Luckily, every step of the event organisation process today provides more opportunities for diversity than ever.
Outlined below are some useful techniques you can use to help you achieve your diversity goals in events management.
1. Understand the demographics of your attendees. Knowing the age, gender, language, income level, and other demographic information of your attendees will help you make more informed planning.
2. Choose diverse speakers to connect with the audience. The speakers you select also need to be aware of your firm diversity mission statement to be able to act according to your platform’s code of conduct.
3. Help your attendees connect easily with people they do not know yet. There is no better audience than a diverse audience who are well connected at the same time.
4. Don’t just rely on run-of-the-mill traditional keynote set-up. Try to experiment with different formats and presentation styles. The more diverse and mixed up the format, the better.
5. Leverage social media and content sharing platforms on the internet. Use hashtags, create effective event snippets, capture the event takeaways, create social media groups, and share useful pieces of information to help evoke your audience’s interest.
6. Learn the areas where you feel your employees may have biases. It’s common to have unconscious biases and not all of them are necessarily negative. But being aware of what unconscious biases your employees and events managers hold is important.
Take this test designed by Harvard below to find out about your implicit biases.
