Possibly this experiment alone is too little to completely revolutionise networking at your events.
Yet there are learnings we can apply straight ahead:
- Engaging with attendees before the event, learning more about their skills and connection to other attendees is key. This is often facilitated by networking apps and platforms.
- Identifying unconventional ways of matching attendees, stimulates the audience to actually engage. The use of speed dating and the lack of common skills where instrumental in driving satisfaction rates up.
- Keeping those that know each other apart. Mixing the room as much as possible helped to avoid that ‘I meet always the same people’ feeling
- Matching experts with juniors makes sense. In a scientific environment the result could be collaborations, in a business environment it could be more business deals or more project opportunities.
- Leverage technology better. Several networking applications and platforms do offer most of the functionality to understand skills and degrees of separation. Talk to your app provider and ask how they can help to implement unconventional networking environments.