When I first started in the business of producing specialized Life Science events for scientific researchers we established our niche by researching the cutting edge technologies and methodologies that were driving (or were going to drive) current research.   This makes our events unique and we assumed would also make them popular.  Our events have certainly been a success.  Our feedback from delegates and sponsoring companies is rarely negative and 99.9 % of our clients say they would return to another event and our glowing testimonials speak for themselves (many of these can be found at www.lifescienceevents.com).  However from the beginning we very rarely filled the lecture theatres with delegates or our exhibition halls with sponsors.  Some events were so difficult to fill that even when we offered fantastic incentives to attend we could not get more than 20 delegates.  Our success was in our great agendas and excellent speakers and chairs, but as a business we made losses.

Why was there such a big divide in the quality of our events and the profit that we were making?  By year two we were quite well known, we had thousands of scientists on our database, our marketing was worldwide, but we still couldn’t get the delegates.  Quite simply, a new technique or methodology takes time to become accepted.  In the early years of something novel we wouldn’t expect sponsors (who may be new themselves and therefore not know who we are) and the delegates will be few.  As soon as I realized this the company took a turn for the better.  Instead of always creating a large meeting we now cater for the novelty of a technique. 

This week we put on an event entitled Non-Mammalian Models for Systems Biology (agenda attached).  Right from the start we knew that this would not be a large event, we had no sponsors and 26 delegates.  We booked a very intimate room that would accommodate us and heard some very enthusiastic and well thought out talks.  The day after the event I was inundated with emails from both Euroscicon staff, speakers and delegates of the event saying how much they enjoyed our meeting, they had learnt so much and the intimate setting had made the meeting relaxed and enabled good flow of debate and easy networking.  We didn’t make a loss as we were not expecting a large event and we know that we have new people who will spread the word and come to more meetings.

This was quite different from our Analysing the Phenotype & Function of Regulatory T cells meeting earlier this year (agenda attached) which attracted 154 delegates and enough exhibitors to fill our exhibition hall.   Again the feedback was very positive and there was a lot of discussion and networking, but the lack of intimacy discouraged those who wouldn’t usually ask questions, from being forthcoming

We can now practically guarantee greater than 40 delegates where sponsors are interested in an event and in general get greater than 70 delegates, but a successful event is no longer judged on profit or attendance, but on the enthusiasm and positive feedback of the day’s participants