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A LeadsCon Connect participant attempts to complete his Networking Bingo game by doing an activity listed in one of the board’s squares: Meet a LeadsCon speaker.
Here’s another idea in our continuing series on networking sparked by responses from members of PCMA’s Catalyst Community when we asked them how they create more intentional networking at events. Watch for more ideas online and in our September-October print edition.
LeadsCon, held in Las Vegas annually since 2007, is one of the largest lead generation conferences in the world, hosting more than 3,000 attendees, including Fortune 1000 marketers, lead buyers, and procurement teams. Pre-COVID, Access Intelligence, which produces LeadsCon, also had hosted a smaller event, and recognized that it was time to rethink how to foster connections at this more intimate event.
“Prior to COVID, we held an East Coast fall show called Connect to Convert, which was very similar to LeadsCon, just on a smaller scale,” Jes Gignac, CMP, Access Intelligence’s senior director of event operations, told Convene. “Once COVID happened, we took the opportunity to reimagine what our community wanted in a second chance to connect with one another in the fall.”
Brainstorming resulted in the launch of LeadsCon Connect, a 550-attendee event, held last fall at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Illinois. “It was a strong launch event for us last year, with lots of room to grow,” Gignac said. Organizers reworked the show floor to make it “a truly meetup-focused event,” she said, incorporating activation areas and one-to-one meeting hubs to encourage mingling between attendees, many of whom were newcomers to LeadsCon. One social aspect of the event in particular was a hit with participants — a happy hour reception on the first night of the event that included Networking Bingo.
“We thought it would be really fun to incorporate unique [bingo] squares on a board,” Gignac said, with each square prompting a variety of interactive actions, including telling someone a joke, taking a selfie with a new friend, talking to someone with a mustache, and trying to use a Chicago accent — a nod to the event’s host city — in a conversation.
“It was really just about coming up with things that we’ve seen people talking about [at past networking events] and incorporating some fun elements,” Gignac said.
Each square on the Networking Bingo board prompted a different interactive action.
Beyond sparking entertaining conversations, the bingo board also required participants to engage with the event’s 52 exhibitors, with prompts that included picking up swag from a booth and letting an exhibitor scan their badge. Of the 400 attendees who attended the reception, approximately two-thirds played bingo, resulting in a lot of connections made between attendees and exhibitors that might not have otherwise happened.
“It drove a lot of traffic to booths,” Gignac said. “Exhibitors had a heads’ up as to exactly what was happening and that attendees would be coming to them as part of the experience. They were thrilled. A lot of them said they would be interested in doing it again.”
Participants who scored bingo were entered into a raffle to win six prizes, including Airpods and a VR headset, provided by the reception’s sponsors, advertising and tech company Taboola and web platform Monetize.com. “We didn’t want people rushing around and just checking off squares,” Gignac said. “So, we gave them the entire length of the happy hour to get it done and have that reminder to get out there and talk to different people.”
LeadsCon Connect 2024, Gignac said, did not repeat the same reception in favor of testing out new ideas. But after networking bingo’s success last year, she intends to find other ways to incorporate it into the program moving forward. “If it’s not during happy hour then maybe it’s during a break,” she said. “We’ve also considered incorporating it into first-timer programs at our larger events,” as it works well for “newer [attendees] and smaller groups of people.”
Casey Gale is managing editor of Convene.