Finding Your Niche

We recently came across this article on how the Philadelphia Flower show grew (pun intended) its audience by creating smaller events within the large multi-day show. This got us thinking about how we can use that same niche marketing tactic in the federal event space.[Tweet "Using niche marketing tactics in the federal event space. #GovEventsBlog"]

As we're all well aware, budgets and time for attending conferences, trade shows, and training are dwindling. We've written here about breaking your large events into smaller, more intimate meet-ups. When going small with your event is not an option, how do you capture the attention and resources of an increasingly diverse federal workforce?

• Create a service opportunity - as part of your event pick a charity that resonates with your audience and have attendees give some of their time to doing something active for that organization.[Tweet "As part of your event pick a charity that resonates with the audience. #GovEventsBlog"] Whether it is stuffing care packages for deployed soldiers, contributing coding work on a computer program to be used in schools, or an open data challenge that can help secure our national infrastructure - these types of activities speak to the service-mindedness of federal employees and create new and interesting networking opportunities.

• Demographic events - create a happy hour for attendees under 30, a women leaders panel, a retired military transition seminar. Each of these speak to important sub-audiences within the federal workforce. Timing these events as to not segregate the attendee population and lose valuable inter-group networking can get tricky, but it is worth making the effort to show the event has something for everyone.

• Celebrate the acronyms - hold sessions specific to the needs of individual agencies. For a cybersecurity event have sessions on cyber in defense, cyber in education, cyber in commerce, cyber in infrastructure, and so on. These very specific sessions combined with bigger picture talks of cybersecurity across the whole of public sector will give attendees a well-rounded and actionable view of the topic.

We'd love to hear your experience with niche events. What would you like to see more of at events to make the experience more personal?

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