As part of the early stage preparation for the AR Forum 2014, Duncan and I reached out to a select group of renowned Analyst Relations professionals, to ask them to be part of the International Advisory Council (IAC) and to help Kea Company organise the annual Forum. On Wednesday, March 26th, we hosted the first call to discuss opportunities for organising a Forum which will offer in- house Analyst Relations professionals as much value as possible. The three major talking points were building pre-event momentum, maximising content value, and how to deliver that content in a way that the attendees will be able to implement the lessons learned into their AR programmes the next day.
- Pre-event momentum: In order to make sure that the Analyst Relations community is actively engaged with the AR Forum well before the actual event, and to deliver value during that period of time, the council advised us to facilitate enough opportunities for the potential attendees and the speakers for the Forum to interact. The base for this interaction will be the AR Forum LinkedIn group, where speakers will be given the opportunity to gain insight into the interests of the Forum attendees. The speakers will preview their sessions through a series of webinars, and IAC members will tell us how they’ve progressed in the profession, and what they are interested in discussing at the AR Forum through a series of Coffee Talks.
- Maximising content value: The IAC seemed unanimous about the fact that getting to know the analyst’s way of thinking would add incredible value to the Forum. A session where one or more analyst(s) could discuss a day in the life of an analyst gives attendees insight into the pain points in interacting with AR professionals from an analyst’s point of view.
- Another idea was to allow Forum attendees to submit anonymous case studies of more delicate situations which they’ve come across in their daily interaction with analysts. Those case studies would be discussed by a panel of analysts, to show how they would deal with the situation.
In order to make sure that the attendees would take as much actionable intelligence home as they could, the IAC recommended a reflection session at the end.
Many more things were discussed, and Duncan and I were extremely pleased with the input the IAC provided. During the next few weeks, we’ll shape the programme outline and start to search for suitable speakers. By the way, don’t forget to help decide what topics will be discussed at the Analyst Relations Forum via our survey.
