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We stopped giving out free swag at our Denver conference and attendance went up 12%
Our team spent over $15,000 on branded water bottles and tote bags for a 2023 event. The problem was people grabbed the stuff and left early. This year, we announced there would be no free items at the door. Instead, we gave tickets for a high-end prize drawing to everyone who stayed for the final keynote. The room was packed at the end, and our post-event survey scores for speaker content jumped. Has anyone else tried cutting giveaways to fix a crowd flow issue?
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margaret_gonzalez2516d agoMost Upvoted
Our Austin meetup did something similar by putting the good coffee and pastries in the back... people actually mingled instead of grabbing and going.
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the_joel15d ago
Noticed this works in all sorts of places. Grocery stores put the milk in the back so you walk past everything else. IKEA makes you follow a path through the whole store. It is all about designing the flow of a space to create chance meetings. Forcing that little walk past other people is often all it takes to start a chat.
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morgan.logan16d ago
Putting the good stuff in the back is such a smart trick. Did you try anything else to get people talking, or was that the main thing that worked?
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