This month marks the advent of the 2016 edition of The Quirk’s Event (TQE), again at the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge. (We’ll be back there in March 2017 and will also stage a West Coast TQE a few weeks before that.) At our inaugural event last year, we were gratified and overwhelmed by the positive responses we heard over the two days. But as members of the organizing body we also heard our share of complaints. Most of them were minor and were easily addressed but it gave me a welcome perspective and a new appreciation for event organizers everywhere – the good ones, at least!
Food, finding the meeting rooms and the sophistication level of some of the sessions were the three types of complaints that I was most often privy to. On the food front, meals are one of the most expensive parts of staging an event like ours – the amount we spent on coffee alone last year boggles the mind. We’ve tried to do a better job this time around of setting attendee expectations and letting people know that meals are on your own. There will of course still be snacks and beverages in the expo hall throughout each day but there won’t be any sit-down luncheons, which helps us keep a lid on registration fees.
Maintaining low registration fees for client-side researchers was one of our top priorities, both because doing so is in keeping with our long tradition of making all of our resources (the magazine, the Web site, the e-newsletter, the Daily News Queue, etc.) free to corporate researchers (and vendors too!) and also because we heard from many client-side attendees that the low price-point made it possible for them and for others in their company to finally attend an MR industry event for the first time.
That brings me to the content of the sessions. The gripes I heard about the sessions – chiefly, that some were a bit on the basic side – were all from vendors who have been in the industry for several years. I generally disagreed with their assessments and tried to point out that the sessions weren’t really aimed at vendors anyway and were instead assembled and organized with corporate researchers in mind, the thinking being that many busy client-side researchers aren’t as immersed in daily discussions of method and technique as vendor-side researchers are and could therefore benefit from presentations on a range of methods from their peers on both sides of the industry.
We used the same guidelines again for this year’s iteration, trying to curate a mix of techniques, industries and sophistication levels to offer something for just about everyone, from the newly-minted researcher attending his or her first conference to the experienced veteran.
And we again have asked presenters to abide by the Quirk’s Q-Mandments, such as “Thou shalt be interesting” (explore new industry territory and present ideas you haven’t seen or shared before); “Thou shalt be effective” (tell a story; have a client present or use real client examples to illustrate your points); and “Thou shalt be relevant” (during no part of your presentation should you ever sell your company, services or products). Whether they do so or not is another story. We’ve drawn on our own experience in seeing the presenters speak at other conferences and also vetted them over the phone and by e-mail.
Like so many other aspects of staging an event, at a certain point things are out of your control and you just have to hope that your planning and preparation have put you in the best possible position to succeed. If you make it to Brooklyn this month, stop by and let us know how we’re doing this time around!