The Emamo Show: Event Planner Conversations

Amar Ghose is founder and CEO of ZenMaid, a software platform for maid businesses. He runs an annual event for his customers called Maid Summit. We chatted with Amar about how he launched a successful summit from his 2,500 person mailing list.

"We try to involve our community every step of the way so that people are really excited about it. We’ve actually found that it works a lot better to build in public than to be hush-hush about the event until you’re actually ready to go."

We go in-depth about how the community he built drives a lot of success for Maid Summit, experimenting with speaker formats to find the best fit for your audience, and how Maid Summit makes money from a totally free event.

Eli Stonberg is the cofounder of Hovercast, an interactive live streaming and event platform. With so many events choosing to go virtual, event organizers are looking for better ways to involve their audience. Hovercast is a tool that allows you to prompt meaningful audience participation, easily display questions or graphics, and authentically respond on your livestream.

"The reason we fell in love with livestream is because we have a chance to react and take participation into effect in the show. And that’s where things get really interesting."

Hovercast offers a variety of tools from political AMA's with the Bernie Sanders campaign to creating an interactive game for Old Spice. We dive into why everything they build helps serve one core value: getting your audience involved and transforming the experience using their four step feedback loop.

Michael O'Farrell has founded and produced events for over a decade. Now he's the Culture Events Producer at Shopify, a commerce platform that helps over 1 Million merchants across 175 countries.

This week we chat about his transition from producing events for the public to now local and global events for Shopify. He shares the challenges he and his team have overcome while producing an annual summit for over 5,000 employees distributed around the world.

The peak-end rule, something that happens at every event. Instead of judging an experience based on a whole, people tend to judge based on how they felt at its peak and at its end.

That's where Jen Gilhoi comes in. Event consultant and founder of Sparktrack, Jen has been helping event planners leave lasting impressions before their event has even started.

"If you’re an event planner coming off an event and haven’t thought about what you’re going to send out the next day, that’s a challenge. Set that immediacy. People are going to take more action than they would three to five days later."

We discuss the rewards of a recap such as creating meaningful connections, ROI for speakers and marketing to potential attendees.

Sarah Hatter is the founder of Elevate CX, an event series focused on helping and growing customer experience leaders. Sarah started her own conference because she couldn't find any resources for people wanting to break into careers as customer experience professionals.

What started as a peer-to-peer educational event for customer support has blossomed into a year-round community. Now that she's produced over 30 events around the world, Sarah shares how she creates her events with thoughtfulness as a core value.

Look at every other decision that you make through that lens of, "Is this thoughtful? Is it humanizing? Is it going to make them feel good?"

We chat about the creative solutions she's incorporated into her events like having an on-site concierge team, digital liaisons to answer attendee questions online and the speaker guidelines she issues to create a connected experience.

This week we sit down with Dave Mathias founder of NorthRupt Labs, an event experience firm, founder of Go Beyond The Data, helping you find the human side of the analytics, and board member of MinneAnalytics, a nonprofit org that brings together the tech community in Minnesota with free events. Dave shares why you should never be afraid to experiment with your audience, starting your own Meetup and knowing when the right time to transition into a conference.

This week we chat with Christopher Schmitt and Ari Stiles, the duo who has run dozens of web-based conferences. They’ve been in the event industry for over a decade, from advising and working with South by Southwest to starting their own conferences to working with Knowbility and Smashing Mag today. We dive deep into how they created a successful virtual conference series and the simple changes you can do to make your event more accessible and diversity-friendly.

This week we take a peek behind the camera and chat with Cooper from Administraitor Video. The Netherlands-based hacker and videographer spoke with us about his journey from starting as a traditional conference volunteer, to traveling all over Europe to record conference talks for free. We learn about Cooper's technical set up, and hear how he's scaling out his efforts so more people can record conference talks around the world.

Mélanie Pereira, Global Events Manager and DevBreak Producer at Talent.io, talks with us about the process of launching a brand new event series and how those lessons informed their second year. Mélanie shares how her clear vision for DevBreak helped book incredible speakers, a dream location, and grow a new community.

Dylan Schiemann, Founder and event organizer of HalfStack Conferences, talks with us about the importance of authenticity at their events. Dylan shares how HalfStack's thoughtful touches affect every aspect of their event from hand-lettered badges to booking local speakers for their event. We learn about how saying yes, and staying authentic has helped them grow the HalfStack Conference to 7 cities around the world while staying true to HalfStack's vision and community.