News

ThinkGeoEnergy Event Survey – What do attendees look for in events?

ThinkGeoEnergy Event Survey – What do attendees look for in events? 6th International Geothermal Conference 2010, Freiburg/ Germany (source: Enerchange)
Alexander Richter 10 Dec 2012

The key element conference participants are looking for in geothermal events are networking opportunities, sufficient time in breaks and an overview on either geographical markets or industry segments.

Following up on the ThinkGeoEnergy 2013 Geothermal Event Survey, we continue to release results of the survey. Today we are targeting the question that asked what attendees are looking for in an event in order to attend.

The clear wants of people for events are “networking opportunities and sufficient time in breaks and an overview on either geographical market or industry segments”.

People are primarily looking at networking opportunities and access to people. This allows attendees to meet with industry players while the event and maybe beside the event as well. The second most important element for people is to get to know a market and players both through content of the presentation, as well as the people attending.

Presentations per se don’t seem to be as important.

The message should be very clear to conference organizers. People want to get access to a wide variety of people and companies within the industry and they want ample time to meet and network. While this is not always as easy for organizers to accommodate, it should still indicate that there should be sufficient “off-time”, namely networking breaks, long enough lunch break, or week-day timing.

While there seems to be some slight preference for technical presentations, in general presentations are not seen as primary elements within a conference for most of the survey participants. More details and commentary regarding presentations and their content has been provided by survey participants for later questions and will be covered here later.

From an organizational perspective, providing information about off-venue meeting/ dinner locations and accessibility to use time sufficiently should be welcome additions.