For our Regenerative Design Education Anti-Conference to be a success we needed people to attend. For people to attend they needed to know about it. But we had a fair few challenges:
1. We are not an organisation – but a collection of people
2. Not everyone agrees or knows what regenerative design is
3. We are mostly engineers, but we wanted to open this up to a much wider audience
4. We don’t have a website, or an events page
5. We had never done this before and we were asking people to give up their time to attend (I was particularly aware of this one)
So we needed to share the event in a way that worked to our strengths. In our favour we all had a pretty good network on LinkedIn. We felt that our event was going to land well (people love an anti-conference after all, even if we don’t actually know what it is) and we had our secret weapon, Max Campbell from Engineers Without Borders, who happened to do incredible graphic design on the side.
Our strategy was simple:
We would come up with a series of posts. We would take it in turns to share them on LinkedIn. Engineers Without Borders would host the forms to gather participant applications and contact details so we could keep informing people of the event. And it would all look amazing (thanks to Max). The styling would adopt a punk ethos, taking cues from band flyer’s and posters, which spoke to the alternative approach of an anti-conference.
Post 1 would be a save the date – aimed at getting people excited about the event but also trying to capture what regenerative design is in a way that would appeal across the disciplines. It was styled on a 1980s ‘join my band’ flyer, where you list your influences.
Except rather than our influences being a list of bands, we listed a number of overlapping and directly adjacent areas which people may be working in who would find a lot of affinity with regenerative design. Our list included: Holistic * Complexity * System * Future * Connected * Non-binary / Distributed / Unknowing * Natures Contributions to People * Intersectional and Feminist approaches * Human-Nature Relationships * Plural and esp. Relational Values * Awakening Indigenous and Local Knowledge * globally responsible engineering * participatory approaches to design (co-design) * Nature based solutions * Nature positive * Decolonisation * Community based design * Indigenous design * Donut economics * Sustainable Systems * Rewilding * Ecological design * Nature recovery * Nature and humans thriving * Sustainable Futures * Just Transition * Bioregional design
To increase engagement we decided to make it an animation, we imagined our poster posted on walls across towns and countryside, calling people to join us. Carla-Leanne posted it[1], and then the rest of the organising committee reposted it. The response was fantastic with 45 comments and most importantly 30 primary reposts and 11 secondary reposts. Importantly this enabled the event to be shared far beyond our community and people from a diverse set of disciplines and from academia, industry and the 3rd sector started showing interest.
As interest in the event built, so did the questions people had, so a month after the first post we followed up with a FAQ post which confirmed the venue, tried to explain what an anti-conference is, and, possibly most importantly made it clear this was an in person only event. Following on our individuals posting strategy Cíaran Malik posted the second post[2] which blew up! We had 458 likes, 58 comments and 47 primary reposts with 9 secondary reposts. As a result of these two posts 150 people applied to attend, about 100 people confirmed they wanted to attend and about 70 people appeared on the day (with a large number of people emailing to say they were really disappointed not to make it – rather than just not show up).
We did a final post[3] 1 month before the event. By this point we didn’t want to attract too many more people, as we had already got more applicants than we had hoped for, but it was good to remind people of the event, especially those who had said they wanted to come but hadn’t yet filled in the final form to confirm attendance.
Now that we had an event and we had people coming we needed to actually create an anti-conference. Over the next two posts we will explain what happened on the day, but also what we did in the buildup which was different to normal conferences.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/carla-leanne-washbourne-13411924_apply-to-attend-the-regenerative-design-education-activity-7287812844014718976-3F9X?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAtF-rIBaTmt5Fv3dkJvqblNNV7rk486AO0
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ciaranmalik_regenerativedesign-activity-7300096945539235840-8FuB?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAtF-rIBaTmt5Fv3dkJvqblNNV7rk486AO0
[3] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/emma-f-crichton_join-the-regenerative-design-anti-conference-activity-7328052797843660801-6tsv?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAtF-rIBaTmt5Fv3dkJvqblNNV7rk486AO0
