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This season has been kindly sponsored by Visit Spokane. Go to VisitSpokane.com to learn more.
David Allison joins the Convene Podcast to discuss why relying on demographics leads event planners 90 percent astray — and how understanding attendees’ values instead can transform engagement, loyalty, and community. From defining Power Values like employment security and community, to designing experiences that speak to what people truly care about, David explains how planners can future-proof events by designing for who people truly are and what matters most to them.
Mentioned links:
Free Guide - How to Engage and Influence Event Attendees: https://www.davidallisoninc.com/eventguide
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What is PCMA Convene Podcast?
Since 1986, Convene has been delivering award-winning content that helps event professionals plan and execute innovative and successful events. Join the Convene editors as we dive into the latest topics of interest to — and some flying under the radar of — the business events community.
Convene Podcast Transcript
David Allison on Why Values Beat Demographics in Event Design
*Note: the transcript is AI generated, excuse typos and inaccuracies
Magdalina Atanassova: Welcome to Season Nine of the Convene Podcast, brought to you by Visit Spokane.
Throughout this season, our guests help us look ahead to 2026 — decoding what’s next for the business events industry and sharing insights to help you plan smarter, design with intention, and lead with confidence.
Today, we are talking about a big shift in event strategy,
moving beyond demographics to design for what people truly value.
I'm joined by author and speaker David Allison,
who's the leading authority on human values and CEO and founder of the Value Graphics project.
We'll look at why relying on demographics misses the mark about 90% of the time,
and how tapping into your audience's power, values can help you design smarter programs,
more authentic networking,
and sponsor messages that actually connect.
We start now.
David, welcome to the Convene Podcast. It's a great pleasure to have you.
David Allison: Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. I'm very excited to be here.
Magdalina Atanassova: Let's dive directly into the deep. So event professionals have traditionally planned everything from venue selection to programming based on demographic data.
So what's fundamentally wrong with this approach? And what are event planners missing when they rely on demographics?
David Allison: Right. Well, the best way to think about this is to think about yourself. If I said that because of your own demographics that you're a woman,
so that means you must love the color pink. And because you're. I'm going to say Gen Z,
that means I know stuff about you that's going to be true for you. Gen X. You're Gen X.
Magdalina Atanassova: No, millennial.
David Allison: Oh, millennial. Okay, so you look much younger than you are as a millennial. You know, you ate all the avocado toast on us. Do not have any of that.
So there's just all these silly stereotypes that come from looking at people based on demographic ideas. Right. An example I give when I'm speaking all the time is I usually start my keynotes by saying, listen, let me show you how this works in my world.
And I'll pull out an LGBTQ flag and say, listen, I'm a member of the LGBTQ community. Super proud to. You know, I'm married to the same most amazing man in the world for the last 30 years.
Very, very lucky. But every year during Pride,
the entire business community gangs up on us and thinks they know who we are and tries to send messages to extract money from our pockets.
And they try and convince me that my life is all about glitter and about dancing on a parade float with my shirt off and all kinds of really terrible stereotypes that they think are true.
And I'm here to tell you,
we live in a glitter free household. There is no glitter allowed in our house.
We get quite offended every year during Pride. Now, there's for people. There's some people for whom that's amazing. That's the glitter and the Pride parades and all of that kind of stuff.
That's great. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, but I'm saying what's wrong. Wrong is saying that a demographic description of people somehow tells you who they are,
and it doesn't. All it does is tell you what they are, which is still useful. We still need to know that, right? If you're planning an event for engineers, it's good to know that they're engineers and that maybe it's only senior engineers, so that's a good thing to know.
But then saying, well, they're engineers, so they're going to like this and they're senior engineers, so they're older and so they're going to respond to that. They. That's just using stereotypes that have no basis in truth.
And let me tell you why I know that for certain is because we have done now a million surveys around the world in 152 different languages to figure out who people really are and what makes them tick on the inside.
Forget the demographics. But we can look at these million survey respondents demographically and say, okay, so let's take a look at people who are in their senior parts of their career, who earn X number of dollars a year.
And I'm going to engineers, predominantly still male.
So what do we know about that group of people?
Well, I can tell you from the data,
hundreds of millions of data points, that people inside any one of those buckets, those demographic cohorts, they're only about,
on average, 10 and a half percent similar.
So that's not much at all.
It means if you're using demographics to understand people,
you're going to be 90% wrong.
That's a large percentage of being wrong.
And it's why, like, if anybody, you know, does any marketing and you send out, you know, an email to an email list, and if you get a 2% to 3% response rate, you think that's phenomenal,
because the best you could hope for is about 10.5% if you're using demographics to try and understand people.
So it's clear that demographics are flawed.
They're fundamentally flawed as a way to understand people.
But it's easy to run around and poke holes in things and say, you know, this is terrible, it doesn't work. Here's the proof. But what's also necessary in these conversations is to say, here's a better way, here's a different way to do it.
And that's what our research is all about.
Magdalina Atanassova: That's a great way to put it. And I I was hoping you'll give that example that I've seen on social media with the King of England.
David Allison: Yeah, I mean, it's a perfect example. Like the King of England versus Ozzy Osborne.
They're demographically almost identical. They're the same age, they're both rich, they're white guys, they're straight, they live in England, they both live in a castle. I mean, all of that stuff.
But can you possibly imagine the two of them responding to anything in the same way? Of course not. Of course not.
And you know what?
Rich people who live in castles and have are white and straight and of that age.
There's all kinds of other people all around the world who meet those same demographics. It's not just those two. And I'm going to tell you right now that if you put all of them in a room and said, what else can I tell about these people that they have in common?
The answer is nothing. You got about 10% in common. About 10%.
That's it. That's all we have.
Magdalina Atanassova: That's scary.
I looked at some of the research you've done,
so can you explain what are power values and how event planners can identify them and use them to serve their audiences better?
David Allison: Yeah. So the replacement system we've come up with for demographic profiles and trying to understand attendees and participants at events and everybody. By the way, this is what my keynote speaking is about.
Whoever I'm speaking to, I'm trying to help them understand the people that they need to inspire.
So our research allows us to look at groups of people and say, what do they have in common on the inside?
Forget about what they look like on the outside. You know, gay, straight, black, white, male, female, young, old, rich, poor, whatever, none of that really matters. It's only 10% helpful.
But who are they on the inside and what makes them tick and why do they do the things they do and what is going to get them excited about an event?
What's going to have them walking out of there going, that is the best event I have ever been to. It's like they were reading my diary.
They know all about me and they put this whole event together just for me.
So to do that, we need to understand a very simple thing. We need to understand what matters most to them. What are the most important things in their whole life?
Not just around events, but in their whole life? What do they wake up every morning going,
wow, I'd be having a really great day today if I could get more of this in my life. These are the things that matter most to me.
That's the way all of us make decisions about everything we do. When you think about it like the last decision you made,
like, I don't know, a car, you're buying a job, you said yes to a person, you're going to go and have lunch with, whatever you make decisions about. Two options based on this one lines up with what matters most to me and this one doesn't because this is the obvious.
Like you some, you know, we say things like, well, why are we even talking about this? This is obviously the one that's for me, right?
So what you're saying there is this thing matters more to me than this thing.
Now the best way to understand what matters most to people is to understand what they value.
Because our values, there's neurological processes, there's parts of our brain that reward us when we make decisions that are aligned with our values.
Because our values are what matters most to us.
And anything that gives us more of what we value, that's the thing that matters more to us. That's the thing we're going to say yes to. Right? So the secret is for event planners and strategists to think about and find out exactly what matters most to their event attendees,
what are their values, and then use that information to design the whole thing.
Everything from, you know, the very first moment of contact around, hey, you should come to our event this year, right through the entire event, who the speakers are, what networking looks like, what food you're serving, how do they arrive, what's that arrival process all about?
What about registration through the thing and then pass the back end and to, you know, how do we keep these community of people connected to each other all year round so it's not just a, a one hit wonder that lasts for three days and they don't think about you ever again.
So if we could figure out what their values are,
we'd know how to design all that. So that's what our research does. That's what my keynotes are about.
We call it value graphics. Instead of demographics and event planners,
you know, there's a handy dandy guide on my website@david allisoninc.com you can download for free on the resources page. And it's the results of a study we've done on event attendees.
And there's so much complex data behind this study,
but nobody wants to read through a hundred spreadsheets and look at all these charts and graphs. So we always boil it down to just three things.
We pick the three most powerful things and we call those the power values. And we say if you just do these three things, yes, there's a hundred other things you could be doing as well.
And if anybody downloads the report and they want to get into the other hundred things, call me and I'll happily walk you through the rest of the data. But just these three things that'll get people to start to see that.
Wow, you really thought about me when you designed this event.
And it's resonating for me. It's landing, it's. People are saying, of course I'm coming back here next year. That's a, that's a no brainer. Why are we even talking about it?
It's the best event I've ever been to.
So using values as a way to think about your people and your attendees is far more valuable and useful and efficient and effective. And it avoids all those stereotypes about demographics that people will find annoying.
I've seen and been to conferences where they've been planned based on age tracks. You know, here's the stuff for the older folks in the room and here's the stuff for the younger folks in the room.
And the older folks in the room, the boomers who are there,
they're like, I want to be at that stuff. And the Gen Z folks are in the rooms, like, why can't I be in the other? Like that works because age is like, people are feeling confined in the tracks you've put together for them because it doesn't, it's not who they really are.
Put tracks together based on what the values are of the group of people that you're working with.
You're going to find people are super excited because this track is what matters most to me. How did you know that?
Whereas this track those guys are on over there, I don't really care about that stuff. They can go do those things by themselves. I don't need to be part of that.
Magdalina Atanassova: And I'm reading what are the three values that you found are the most important ones.
David Allison: So for the power values for event attendees,
I've put them in the report that I've been talking about and compared them against planners because it's really interesting to see what matters most to you versus the people you're doing this for.
Right.
So the first one is employment security.
There's 56 values that could show up because that's how many we've mapped from talking to a million people from around the world.
And employment security is far more important to event attendees than it is to event planners.
I think Event planners are sort of used to, you know, well, I'm working on this now and then I'm going to work on that. And you know, many event planners are sort of freelance, self employed, have their own, their own consulting or advisory business.
So you know that security around the job isn't as important. It's not as much of what matters most to you. So event planners, you need to check yourselves at the door and make sure you're not doing this for you, you're doing it for your attendees.
So everything you can possibly think of that'll help them see that coming to this event and being engaged while they're at this event is going to help them with their employment security.
They're going to love that. So, you know, I see a lot of this at the events that I speak at. There's sometimes there's like a free headshot photographer, there's or there's somebody who's helping you with resume polishing tips.
That's cool. That's a nice, you know, little touch of that. What else could you do? How else can you help people polish their LinkedIn profiles? Can you teach them to be better storytellers and presenters when they have to put a deck together and get up in front of their colleagues and present?
Can you? Regardless of what, Even if the conference is about pet food manufacturing,
which is a conference I spoke at and really enjoyed, but why wouldn't the people who are coming to the pet food manufacturing conference, the pet food conference,
also be interested in their own employment security? It's a great lure to get people to go, you know, I'm going to go and learn all this stuff about the pet food industry because that's what my.
But they're also trying to help me make sure that my job is secure. And so I really appreciate that. And that's an added reason why I'm going to say yes and come back to this event over and over and over again.
Magdalina Atanassova: I have a question here. Would education or certification fall into that bucket? Would you put it there?
David Allison: If you position it properly, yeah.
So certification programs that are offered by associations, things like this,
the trick is to talk about those in a way that relates it to these values.
So when you talk about it, it's not enough to say you should be certified because it's the industry standard for our profession and we've been doing this for 20 years and we have the best instructors.
And then you get to put this little thing beside your.
That's all cool as far as you're concerned. But what they want to hear is, this is going to make sure your job is secure.
This is something you can do for yourself,
that's going to make sure that folks that you're not going to end up being bumped around so much.
So talk about it in terms of that as a benefit and these other two values as well.
Now, we have separate studies that we've done if anybody's thinking about how to market and promote certification programs. I have data that I am happy to share if you reach out to me on people who are looking for certification through their associations.
So very specific. Now, that'll be a subset of the data we're looking at today for event attendees.
Different, slightly different group of people. Not everybody who's going to an event is interested in professional certification and accreditation.
So we have a separate set of data just for that, which I'll share. And if you want to talk about that in another podcast episode, we can do that.
Magdalina Atanassova: I can certainly link it in the show notes, so perfect. Okay, so go ahead with the other two.
David Allison: The other one. So the second value that event planners need to be paying attention to that's far more important to attendees than it is to planners, is community.
Now, community is an interesting value because it's one of a set of five values that show up in the research that we refer to as the togetherness values. It's just ways we want to feel together with other people.
So one of them is community. But there's also, you know, family,
relationships, friendship, and just the general sort of sense of belonging.
So those are all of them what we call the togetherness values. They all show up those values. At least one of them shows up in pretty much every profile we've ever done across every industry, from construction and trades to finance to tech bros to, you know, people who go to shopping malls,
to everything, everything we've ever studied. There's always at least one togetherness value because more than anything, humans want to be with each other, which is why the events industry is so important and why it should have so much have a higher profile inside all the organizations where all the folks listening today are working.
I don't understand why this industry isn't at the top of the pecking order inside every organization, particularly these days when we don't ever even get to be in the same room as each other half the time.
I know everybody's working on that, and I'm here to say Godspeed to you.
This is the secret sauce to making companies work better. And I'm not sure why it's not getting more attention and why budgets are being anyway, that's a whole other conversation.
The value of community is incredibly important to event attendees. So what can you do to make them feel like they're part of something larger than themselves? I have been to events where, you know, I'm always an outsider.
When I show up, because I'm the speaker, I come in, everybody's like, oh, you're really interesting. But we've all known each other for 27 years, so we're gonna, you know, so you.
Sometimes you get that feeling of community.
Other times I go to events and I feel like everybody's walking around as a straight. They're all like A. It's 10,000 strangers, and they don' really feel like they're connected, like maybe one or two people.
So I know that the smart people out there who are strategists and, and event planners have all kinds of ways of thinking about this,
but I just want to challenge you two things. First, one is to remember that it's so much more important to attendees than it is to you.
So whatever you think you've done to help them feel like they're part of a community,
double down and triple down on it, because you might think that's enough,
but for them, you're just getting started.
So really, really lean into this sense of community. So things like,
could you in advance help people meet each other online through your app or something so that they come. They've already got sort of like a pod of folks that they're looking forward to hanging out with when they get there, and then when they get there, are you just going to leave them to figure that out on their own?
That's awkward. Nobody wants to be that person. So can you put a system in place with all these fancy apps all have. For all of our events these days,
where you can figure out who your pod is going to be, and then there's a particular place and a time for them to meet.
And while they're there, there's a reason for them to be with each other, other than just meeting each other. So because now it looks like I'm just showing up because I don't have any friends, you need to make it a.
A place that I want to go regardless of whether or not these folks are with me. And the bonus is that I'm going to end up feeling like I'm part of a community by virtue of having been there.
So I'll make up a crazy idea here just to. To. To make a point. But what if you Know, lots of events are thinking about legacy.
What can we do when we come into a place to leave that place better than before we were there? You know, the existential threat the entire events industry is facing right now around what are we doing moving all these people around on airplanes to go to things.
And like, we need to start proving that we are leaving places better because of having been there. And so some groups are all over this already.
So let's say it's just be silly. It's a food bank thing that you're going to try and do something with. So put your pods together and assign them the time that it's their turn to be at the food bank, to pack hampers and to do whatever it is they're going to do in order to leave a footprint.
So now that there's an activity to go to with a purpose behind it, a thing that's important to get done, it's part of your commitment to being at the event.
You're going to learn some stuff and,
and you're going to end up with a pod of people that you all have some relationship with now and you got a sense of community starting to go. So that's just a really silly example.
You know, I'm already hearing, I'm feeling it through the, through the, through the Internet, the vibes from the listeners going, david, come on, we can't all do that. So cool.
So that's fine. You're allowed to say that. You're allowed to say that's a really dumb idea. But what I want you to say is that's a really dumb idea.
But I see where you're going with that. And here's what we could do instead,
right?
Because I'm not a planner, that would be very courageous of me to stand up and say, here's what you need to do. Just like trying to give you a thought starter here on how you can start to see these values come to life.
Third value. So we've got employment, security, community.
Third value. Which is the biggest difference between you and event attendees is loyalty.
Now, loyalty is a fascinating value. It shows up in all kinds of really interesting ways. We hear the word as people and we tend to think about it in terms of loyalty to a person.
But there's loyalty to brands, to experiences.
You know what, there's even loyalty to product categories.
We call people who have intense loyalty to a product category, we call them collectors.
Someone who collects sneakers is a loyal to the sneaker category or to, you know, ball caps or event.
Event attendee. Lanyards so people who are all about loyalty, they like things to be repeated. They don't really necessarily want to try something new every time they wake up. They will be loyal to, for example, in their personal lives, people who over index on loyalty, they'll have a favorite restaurant that they like to go to and going to a different restaurant,
like why? Okay, fine, but why? I mean, I know I'm going to love this restaurant. Why would I go to that one over there that I'm 50, 50 chance I'm going to hate my lunch.
So let's stick to the one where it's 100% chance I'm going to love my lunch. And then further in that restaurant, they probably have a favorite chair and they probably have a favorite thing on the menu and a favorite waiter or waitress who comes to look after them.
And if any of that stuff gets messed with, they're like,
okay, but it's not my routine,
right? They're loyal to how they go to work. They have a particular route, they have a small group of friends that they're very loyal to. They probably collect something because that's a trait that we see in everybody who over indexes on loyalty.
So now that you know all those things about someone who's a loyalist loyalty, who over indexes on the value of loyalty, how do you put that into place in a, in a, in an event?
Well,
don't change it up too much year to year.
If people are used to the opening night event as this,
and this is how it goes, and this is what I need to wear, and here's how the program did kind of leave that in place. If you're going to make some changes, make them small little changes.
If big changes are happening. Here's the thing about loyalists, loyalty. People will not feel comfortable. They'll be out of alignment with their values if big changes are a surprise.
So if you're going to make changes, make them small and let them know in advance this is a little bit of a change from last year.
Just simply communicating that something that they've been loyal to is going to be a little bit different. Now I'll tell you a quick story. Years and years and years ago, I used to work in an advertising agency.
This was like 40 years ago, back when we still called them ad agencies.
And one of our clients was a national newspaper.
And this newspaper was going through some design changes. So the insides of the page, like where the things is not on page five anymore, it's on page seven and all this kind of stuff,
some of them we made a big deal about is their ad agency. And we said, hey, we got a whole new front page and that's cool,
you're going to notice it tomorrow morning when you pick up your paper. This is back when we actually had printed newspapers too, right? It's that long ago.
But the phones would ring off the hook whenever we change something without warning people.
Even just a simple thing like the horoscopes are now on the back of this section instead of in the middle of the people would call. They're all on their horoscopes aren't where they belong.
Like they were just really upset about things being changed unless we had told them in advance that it was going to change. And then they're like, okay, I was expecting this, it's all good.
So I mean,
seemingly unrelated, but lots of loyalists around the daily newspaper and the daily ritual of reading the paper in exactly the same way and really upset when that got disrupted. So those are the sorts of people you're dealing with when you're putting together an event.
Now, quick disclaimer and then I'll shut up for a moment. I've been talking non stop here, but remember that the data we're looking at here is for all events across all of Europe and Canada and the United States and into Mexico.
And there's some data in here from other parts of the world as well. But those are the majority of the ones that are represented in this particular report.
Now that's like saying here's a report on I don't know why I've got pets on the brain, maybe because I met your beagle. But it's like saying here's a report on what matters most to pets.
Cool. But you know, what matters most to beagles versus goldfish are two very different things. It's accurate to talk about pets. It's still accurate, but there's going to be lots of differences from inside that, from one industry to another, from one part of the world to another.
So how can planners take that and use it?
Well, the first thing they could do is call me. Love to do some work together. If you're working on a big event, it would be fantastic to profile the specific people who are coming and then be able to give you a roadmap to make it values aligned throughout the entire process.
In fact, we just did this recently with the International Sign Association,
a big, big association in, in the United States and they have a massive trade show every year with I think, don't quote me, Laurie Anderson if you're listening. I may have this wrong.
It's 20,000 people who come to their trade show. So we profiled all the people who go to their trade show, and we also profiled people who don't go to their trade show, but should because they're in the industry.
And then we worked with the board of directors and a steering committee, and we said, all right, now that we know exactly what are the buttons we need to push in order to get these folks feeling like this is the trade show designed for them?
How are we going to change up this part of it? And how are we going to change up this? And what are we going to do about this?
So by the time we finished having a day together, we kind of went through the whole thing, and we were able to build a sort of realignment process so that over the course of the next couple of years, they can gradually make these changes to make their event even more rooted in what people care about.
And it also gives them permission to ignore some of the stuff that people don't care about.
So it's not always about adding. It's also about subtracting.
It's really about focusing. Right? Let's just focus on the stuff that matters. We all know the 8020 rule, right?
What's the stuff we really need to be doing well in order to get that 80% response from the 20% effort.
But if you don't want to do that, you don't have the money, you don't have the time, you don't like the sound of my voice, whatever it is,
here's some things you can do to just give yourself a little bit more information around what the values of are the folks who are coming to your event.
There's a series of three questions that we call the three telltale Questions.
And if you can figure out we're all polling our people, our event attendees, after they leave, we send out the survey and we get, you know, some percentage of the folks who respond.
So you can include these as survey questions.
The other thing you can do is train everybody who's going to be on the floor,
who's going to actually interact with people,
train them to ask these questions as if they're just kind of like part of the conversation. Just some small talk, you know, when you're at the networking event, get your whole senior team to be kind of going, hey, hi.
Oh, yeah, hi. I work with this, and I've got a crazy question for you, for you, and just kind of collect it anecdotally like that.
If you listen to enough people over the course of a year or two, answer these three questions, you'll start to see patterns in the way they respond.
And those patterns,
those signals and the noise,
those are their values coming to the surface.
Okay, so here's the three questions. The first one,
why do you go to work?
People will say things like, well,
I feel like I'm making a difference.
I just want my family to be better provided for than when I was growing up.
It's my creative outlet. I love my job. It's how I, you know, even on the weekends, I do work because it's just what I love doing. And I feel like I'm making a difference in the world.
My friends are all there. It's where I, I, I like being with all my pals. I really hate being, you know, working from home. I want to be with everybody in the office.
They're all going to have a different way of answering. And those are all people saying to you, here's why I do this thing. And you remember when we first started talking, people only do things that align with their values.
So if you can get them to tell you why they're doing a thing,
it's a clue to what their values are, right?
So that's the first question. Second question,
if you,
not if, let's say, let's say it this way.
You've just won the lottery.
Why would you give away half?
Now people will want to tell you who they'd like to give half to, and that's fine. You got to probe a little deeper, though, and go, why? Why would you do that?
We're trying to figure out why this monumental decision was made.
Because values are what drives all of our decisions. So if you ask enough people why they would make a monumental decision like that, you'll hear patterns, and those are their values coming to the surface.
Third one is my favorite and maybe the easiest one to implement.
This one is really great with your friends. Like, get them over for. Pour a couple of drinks down them, and then ask this. And you'll learn a lot about your friends.
Why?
Let's phrase it this way.
You get to say one thing to yourself from 10 years ago.
What would that one thing be?
And again, people will be making a decision and say, okay, the most important thing I want me to know 10 years ago is this. And if you listen, you'll hear they'll start to be patterns.
And you'll hear people admitting that things that are. Is it about making more money?
Is it about spending more time with your family? Is it about being a better person and remembering to recycle.
What is it that is the one thing you would like your past self to know?
So those three questions are called the three telltale questions. We've tested them all over the world with everybody from hedge fund managers to shopping mall retailers, to pet food buyers, to the different kinds of people we've spoken to for all the keynotes that I deliver.
And they inevitably will get people to start talking about their values.
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Magdalina Atanassova: I like the, the path that you took us on because it was,
it was very connected. It made sense.
If that's the starting point for planners to.
Let's say they'll ask the questions, they'll figure out the patterns.
Hopefully they can just call it to get the research properly done.
Now they are understanding all these values. What are the touch points they should rethink first on that journey?
And also another thing that when you talked, kind of came up to mind was speaking about the loyalists.
What if you engage them in that process while you change things, you change them with them, with their knowledge and with their expectations. So would that help help points and loyalists?
David Allison: That would be amazing. I mean, think about those loyalists and how that would not only impact their sense of loyalty, because you're,
you're not even just warning them that things are changing. You're asking them what things should change.
And now you're also giving them that sense of community.
You're getting a double header with that. You get two, two values going at the same time. That's a really great idea. Done.
Touch points.
Every single touch point should be seen through the lens of what matters most to people.
You know, when you start marketing, right the very first time, you drop anything that says, hey, sign up for a conference.
Why wouldn't you say that in a way that makes people go, wow, that matters to me?
Of course, you, you, why wouldn't you? Right?
So cool. So now somebody has come along and said, great, I'm ready to register. I saw those,
that campaign you did. I saw the email that came out, whatever it is, and you're talking my language. This sounds like an obvious thing. So now it's time to register.
Cool. I'm on the registration page. What's the most important thing at the top of the registration page? Shouldn't it be about what matters most to the registrant,
not what matters most to you as an event planner or the organization? What matters most to them?
Put that right up at the top. And the way that you figure that out is by going to the next touch point and that's where you're planning what's going to happen while you're at the event.
Some of those things are going to be like, ding, ding, ding. We're hitting values hard here.
This is stuff that's going to get people super excited. So that's the stuff should be at top of the registration form.
So as soon as they open it, they're like, that's happening. Oh my gosh, that's amazing. That's exactly what I would have done if it was me planning this event.
And then they get through the registration process and then what happens? Then they get an email that says, thanks for registering.
Well, what should that email include?
It should include the stuff that matters most to them.
Forget about the other stuff. They don't care about that. They care about the stuff that matters most to them.
And now they're showing up, it's time to arrive.
Well, what does that arrival process look like?
Well, why don't you find a way to make it as much as you can in a way that happens to just ring those bells that the things that are most important to them and then so on and so on and so on.
I mean, I joke sometimes about, you can even make, make, find ways to make the food about what matters most to people, right? You've got community.
Let's, let's, let's play the game. If you've got community as a value that's super important to your event attendees, how can you make sure that meal breaks and snack breaks reinforce that sense of community?
Can you put people in little pods to have their breaks at every, every time during the entire event so they see the same people when they're out there? What did you think of that Speak?
I don't know if I like that. What was going on? Did you understand the ce? Oh, no, he sounded like he was, he was, had too much caffeine. Like there, there's, there's, there's,
Give them a chance to get a little hit at community while they're out there having their, their food and then the food itself.
Community is a big deal. Why not make sure all the food is locally sourced and reflects the place you're in? You're in New Mexico. It should all be Tex Mex Fusion food.
And if you're in Berlin, it should be.
I don't know anybody from Berlin is going to hate me for saying this, but sausages and sauerkraut, I mean, just like reflect the communities that your event is in.
And so now we go through that process. Now the Networking events. Of course, networking, I mean, networking is probably the primary reason many people come to events. And whenever we poll we find that that's so much more important than the education or anything else that's happening.
And yet what do we do? We rent a big giant room,
we put a couple of bars in there and have some music and we go, okay, everybody go network, go do your networking.
And I'm being silly to make a point, but there's, there's so many more things that you could do that help people weave networking through the entire event instead of it just being that moment when you're awkwardly standing in the middle of a room with a cocktail and you don't know who to talk to because you're not very good at small talk.
Give people ways to lean into their values around that and so on and so on and so on and so on. I hard pressed to come up with any touch point,
any point on that customer journey at a participant journey where it shouldn't be aligned to what matters most to them.
Like why wouldn't you,
why would you do anything that has nothing to do with what they care about?
It's like it doesn't make any sense, right?
Magdalina Atanassova: And yet here comes sponsored messages and obligations and you know, sponsored messages and publications.
David Allison: Can you work with your sponsors and say, listen, I know what you're going to do. You're going to get up and say this,
but guess what? They don't care.
Here's what they care about. Why don't you make your message about this?
Once you have this data, you could run a little sponsor webinar in advance and say you really want to get your money's worth out of this sponsorship? You need to understand what people are listening for.
So let us tell you,
here's what they want to hear from you. Connect your product, your service, your brand, whatever it is you're trying to sell to these things and they're going to think you are the obvious choice.
So use it as a way to train your sponsors.
Magdalina Atanassova: Yeah, I think we're, I mean it's almost 20, 26. Sponsored messages are needed but can be well aligned with the core message of the event.
David Allison: Yeah, absolutely.
I don't know how popular it is, but there's a, there's a niche magazine called Monocle Magazine has nothing to do with the events industry.
But what admire about Monaco magazine is that the founders editor in chief is named Tyler Brulee and he saw the mismatch between his magazine and the advertisers who were putting ads in his magazine.
And he was upset because he curating this beautiful magazine and then these ugly ads that had nothing to do with what he wanted his brand to be. He was realizing these ads are impacting his brand and it's not feeling good.
So he launched an advertising consulting firm to help his sponsors create ads that actually fit into the way the rest of the magazine was going to feel.
And it was brilliant because, you know, you've got people who the reason they're giving you money to be a sponsor is they want to impact people and get them to go, wow, this sounds great.
Why not teach them how to do that? Show them how to do that.
I think there's a huge, huge, huge potential there.
Magdalina Atanassova: I love that. I hope more planners hear it because yes,
there is a huge potential there and we can definitely do it.
Sometimes also, sponsors need a little bit of help how creating value graphics instead of demographics differs from creating those Personas that marketing people love so very much.
David Allison: Yeah,
great question. And it's almost like I asked you to ask me that because we've just launched a Persona product.
I hate Personas because they're so make believe.
You know, do we just make up stuff based on what? Demographic stereotypes?
So we look at our demographics and we go, wow, we've got a bunch of, you know,
engineer guys who are in their senior role. And so let's call one Bob and say, Bob's really focused on this.
It's, it's kind of nonsense. I mean, it's a handy device because it helps people to go, right, what are we doing for the Bobs? What are we doing for the Sallies?
What are we doing for the Tristans who are coming to our event?
So we, we call ours Persona 2.0.
We refer to them as actionable Personas because what we do is we take all of the data we know about, for example, event attendees coming to your particular event and we say, you know what, there's five kinds of people.
Now we're not making that up. We're using the data to tell us that there's five kinds of people. And the way we're determining that there's different kinds of people is based on what it takes to get them to say yes.
So I don't care about their demographics, I don't care about how senior they are or how junior they are. What I care about is for this group of people, you need to talk to them this way.
So that's going to be one of our Personas. And this group of people, you need to talk to them this entirely other way. And this is another Persona.
So we put Personas together. Yes, we give them names and we give them like. So it's easy to still talk about Bob and Sally and Tristan,
but they're based on segments of data that aren't demographically defined. They are value graphically defined, which isn't that. The point of a Persona is to know that these people need to be treated differently than these people.
So why not build the Personas based on what buttons you gotta push for this group versus that group?
So yeah, I think Personas done properly is a very powerful tool because the people in marketing love Personas and they like to get into the data and all that stuff behind them.
And that's great. But you're trying to get the CEO to remember that there's five kinds of people.
If you can say, Listen, Mr. CEO, Ms. CEO,
there's five kinds of people. We got some Sallys, some Bobs, some David, some Magdas and some Tristans.
Sally's. All they want to hear from you is this Bob's. All they want to hear from you is that now the CEO can walk away and repeat that story and understand I'm shaking someone's hand like, oh, I got a Bob here.
Okay, here's how I'm going to talk to Bob. So you, you make it into like a series of characters that the people who don't want the details, they can still get it and they still lock it in and anchor it in their heads.
So it's a very valuable thing from that perspective. It's just the way we've been doing them so far has been absolutely a waste of time.
So I like to think we've kind of broken them and fixed them.
Magdalina Atanassova: Awesome. Thank you for doing the work for all of us, because that's important.
And you mentioned that the report you are referring to, it's mostly global data, but more, you know, more focused on North America. North, South America, the Americas.
David Allison: Yeah. The report that's on for free on my website@davidallisoninc.com on the resources page page. It's called how to Engage and Influence Event Attendees.
So that's available for anybody who wants to download it.
That report is based on data we've collected as different groups have asked us to profile event attendees. So we have, we keep updating that pool of data. So there's a lot of stuff in there that's about Canada, the United States, Mexico.
There's a bunch of stuff in there that's about Europe. There's a Bunch of stuff in there, A little bit of stuff in there that's about Asia, but it's primarily Eurocentric and North American centric.
One of the interesting things is we see that there's not a whole lot of variation when we're talking about data sets from one part of the world to another,
particularly with something as precise as people who go to events regularly as part of their job.
So I'm not all that concerned about it being, you know, a little bit more heavy on the US and a little bit less on France.
It's still useful.
Magdalina Atanassova: Let's wrap up with this as we prepare for 2026 and beyond. What's the biggest opportunity for event professionals who embrace value based planning?
David Allison: Great question.
Two things to keep in mind. The first one,
values are hot. Right now.
Everybody's talking about the values of this group of people and the values of that group of people. Politicians are all saying, our values are this, our values are that. Companies are standing up and saying, these are our values.
And then sometimes that works for sometimes they get everybody ****** off because they chose the wrong ones because they weren't using data, they were just using, like, I think these are the ones we should use.
So it's a moment where leaning into values puts you right on trend with what people are starting to pay attention to and what they're listening for and what they want to hear.
They want to know that you're looking at values. It's become sort of almost a requirement.
The other thing for planners and strategists who are listening today is if you are the one bringing this into your organization,
you're the one who's standing up and saying, I'm a champion for this because it's a smarter way of doing things than the way we've been doing it so far.
Well, now you're looking like a rock star.
And I know all my planner and strategist friends are all trying to find ways to prove how valuable they are. Well, here's one way to do that is to say we've got data now, finally, for the first time ever,
on what people actually care about.
And I'm bringing it in in the events. But you know what? You folks over there in marketing should probably be looking at this stuff and the C suite you should be thinking of, these are our customers.
We're bringing them all together. Well, now you know what matters most to them,
so I can help you there too. And all thanks to me here in the events department who found this and is bringing it in and being the champion for this.
So I think there's an opportunity. It's lined up with what the world is looking for, what people are asking for right now. And it's not all that widespread yet. So you can be the one who leads the charge.
You can be the one who uses this as a way to show how on top of things you are and the inherent innovation and creativity that all my event planner and strategist friends have.
Magdalina Atanassova: Awesome. Was there anything we didn't mention? We definitely should before we wrap up?
David Allison: Yes. There's one thing I want to. I always try and end on this.
So using values as a way to understand people, I can give you all the math, but it's boring. Just trust me on this. It's true.
It's eight times more effective than using other ways to think about people and try and figure out what to do for them.
So it's really, really awesome and fantastic and powerful. But there's even a more important reason why we all need to shift our thinking.
Much more important.
And it. I kind of touched on it a little bit, but just to kind of bring it to a point and end on this.
The longer we keep using demographics to try and understand each other,
we are innocently,
we're not trying to be bad,
but we're propping up stereotypes because demographics lead you automatically to stereotypes.
And those stereotypes don't work because demographics are only 10 and a half percent correct.
But they're also kind of harmful and hurtful, and they can be quite offensive.
And so they're causing a lot of harm.
So they're not helping and they're causing a lot of harm.
And the harm they cause is even bigger than what we've talked about so far, because the longer we continue to prop up those stereotypes by innocently using demographics to understand people,
the longer we're fueling.
It's like the fire. The fires out there are being fueled by this ageism that's about thinking about people demographically and using stereotypes. Sexism,
same thing. Racism, homophobia, ableism, classism. All of these problems we're grappling with and trying to find ways to be more fair and inclusive and build belonging and all of these kinds of things.
They're all noble goals for us to be chasing.
And then we run around using demographic stereotypes to try and solve them.
So if we just shift our thinking to say, you know what? I'd rather think about people based on who they are on the inside and who they are in their hearts,
we're not only going to be doing better for our jobs and better for our companies and our events that we're trying to plan.
But we're going to be making things better for everybody in a much bigger, broader way by chipping away at some of those problems and ditching some of those stereotypes that just aren't true.
So,
you know, our values bring us together.
Demographics push us apart.
Values bring us together.
And right now,
isn't that what the world needs more of?
Things that bring us together?
Isn't that what events are all about?
Things that bring us together?
Here's an easy way to do that. It's just to start changing the way you think about people.
Not hard.
Magdalina Atanassova: Lovely way to end the podcast. Thank you so much, David, for your time and being a guest.
David Allison: Thank you for having me over and letting me talk. So much.
Magdalina Atanassova: Pleasure was all mine. Remember to subscribe to the Convene Podcast on your favorite listening platform to stay updated with our latest episodes. We want to thank our sponsor, Visit Spokane. Go to VisitSpokane.com to learn more. For further industry insights from the Convene team, head over to PCMA.org/convene. My name is Maggie. Stay inspired. Keep inspiring. And until next time.