Many people, including me, were disappointed with the special event at SolidWorks World this year. It just seemed ‘less’ than years past. So, to satisfy my curiosity about the ‘why’, I reached out to Kerri Dunne. For those of you who don’t know who Kerri is, she’s the brains behind SolidWorks World. If you want to know more about her, you can read the interview I did with her last year.
I sent her some questions, and she kindly responded. Below is the email that will hopefully answer some of the why:
1. I already know that you pick the venues years ahead, due to the amount of planning involved, but how far ahead do you plan the where and what of the events?
We are booked until 2014, so at least 3-4 years in advance. We look at venues to see if they can accommodate the amount of people we expect, the amount of technical sessions we need, with room to grow. This year we added another Hands-on room, which allowed us to add 11 more hands-on sessions, which we know people want, We also scope out places for events like CSWP and the Special Event during the selection phase for venues.2. Why was the special event so “scaled down” this year?
If you were in General Session on Day 1, you heard Jeff Ray say that we are still in a recession and at SolidWorks we had to make difficult decisions in order to not have any layoffs. With that being said, some areas of SolidWorks World were affected. Some not so apparent, but others, like the Special Event were a little more clear. To set the story straight, I’ve read some of the comments on the blogs about what we were going to do ect… we were not going to hire Santana for one. We were considering Disney or Knott’s Berry Farm, but due to having to scale back, we chose to do something onsite. This did save money in terms of not having to transport thousands of people.
Now, I know there were comments on the layout of the event and when planning something from scratch you have to visual how people will move about the event. You are also limited to what the event hall can do as well, like the lighting for instance. Lights are set up in sections, not each individual light, so you have to pick and choose areas. Since we didn’t want to do full lights up as that would be like walking though any hall, we did our best to do low lighting. What we could have done better was the lighting on the buffets, which I agree and mentioned during the event to add light. Unfortunately there was nothing we could do at this point and the convention center would not allow candles on the buffets due to fire hazard. In regards to the layout, we choose to place the cars in the back so we could do full lighting for people to see and also to move people through the venue. If we placed them cars in the front nobody would have walked through the hall and we would have had bottlenecking issues. For the band we wanted them in the middle for the sound to travel throughout the venue.3. With regard to this year’s special event, how was the decision reached to have a live rock band play versus some other form of entertainment (comedian for instance)?
From previous communications with the community, we know the group likes music and Aerosmith was a band that was repeatedly named. Now, I did look into getting Aerosmith for real, but at a cost of $1MIL++ – obviously way beyond my budget AND with the band broken up it wasn’t a possibility. As for other forms of entrainment, a band is a good choice to go with, with a group this size as it provides background music or if you want to be entertained you can watch the band. There were people crowding the stage at the end of the night. They even made the band come out to do one more song. As for having other types of entertainment, to have something like a comedian would be difficult for a group our size.4. In years past, there has been a much wider variety of food to choose from, why not this year?
The range of food wasn’t too different than previous years. It just may have seemed more obvious due to the fact that everything was closer together.5. Without stating hard numbers, can you estimate what percentage of the overall cost of hosting SolidWorks World is offset by attendee and vendor fees, as well as corporate sponsorships? This relates to how some feel “ripped off”.
I know I feel bad that some said they felt like they were “ripped off”. Without getting into specifics, I can say attendee fees and sponsorships cover less than half the cost of the event. Therefore, SolidWorks does take on a lot of the cost in order for this event to be held. This year we also wanted to be sensitive to the fact that we did have the special event onsite this year, so we reduce the guest fee for the special event to $50. It was difficult trying to find the areas to cut some items that were up for discussion were the giveaways like t-shirts and backpacks, or eliminated beer and wine, but knew that would be a huge issue. Therefore we had to cut elsewhere.6. How big of an effect did the recession have on this year’s SolidWorks World?
Although our total numbers were great, we did have a lot more people opting for the “Expo Only” pass (cost $199), which allows an individual to get into General Session and the Partner Pavilion only, versus the full conference pass which allows attendees access to everything- technical training sessions, meals, partner pavilion, general sessions, special event.7. While I don’t expect specifics, can we expect similar changes for SWW’11 in San Antonio?
We will see. It all depends on the economy. We appreciate everyone’s feedback and will do our best in 2011 to make up for the areas that people felt were scaled back this year. Please let everyone know to fill out the post conference survey, which will go out this week to attendees, to provide us with more feedback. We want the feedback—good or bad! This is the SolidWorks community’s event and we want to make it the best event for everyone as possible. Everyone at SolidWorks, including the Executive team, read this information and want to have the best event possible for the community.On a side note, there are a lot of people who work on this event and as crazy as the event is everyone loves the event and pours their heart and soul into it to make it the best for the community. SolidWorks World is very special to all of us who work on it as we want to make it the best possible for the community. I can’t stress that enough. It makes me sad when it is over as it seems to go so fast. We all love meeting up with the customers, resellers, members of the press, our partners and other colleagues. You put it best, it is like Christmas being over when it is done—all that planning for what feels like 1 hour of unwrapping and eating- then done!!
Thanks again for letting me share my thoughts.
Best regards,
Kerri
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