How to Treat Empty Room Syndrome
You have assembled a fantastic business conference. You’ve booked a great venue, recruited top-shelf speakers, and crafted an on-point agenda. The attendance numbers are also good. There are plenty of people with badges to fill the meeting hall.
Yet your morning keynote speaker is about to go on. And the meeting hall is close to empty.
So where is everyone?
To make things worse, this speaker required some convincing to agree to fly in at their own expense and prepare a 30-minute thought-leading talk. They could be doing something else. But you convinced them this was worth their valuable time.
Yet instead of sitting in the meeting room, most of your attendees are either in their hotel room or Airbnb on a video meeting (or nursing a hangover). Or they are in the lobby networking with other AWOL delegates or giving demos on their laptops. Or they are talking to someone back at the home office.
Where they are not is where you need them to be right now – filling chairs in the meeting hall.
You are mortified. But what can you do?
Unfortunately, the toolbox to solve the immediate situation is pretty close to empty. You can delay the start by a few minutes and dispatch your team to cajole (beg?) attendees to file into the hall. This is worth doing as it might help a little. But it rarely fills the room.
Back in the day, someone would wander through the hallway and exhibit room chiming on a mini xylophone to signal it’s time for the on-stage festivities to start. I have often missed that xylophone.
Yet the conference train must run on time. So at some point very soon, you will have to bite the bullet and send the A-list keynoter out to address a room full of mostly empty chairs.
Many of us who do conferences for a living have been in this situation. I have. It’s not fun.
This is a hard problem. And it is common at events where the attendee list is heavy on business development and sales pros who (hangovers notwithstanding) are there to take meetings and do deals. They were not sent there to take notes during keynote addresses. So don’t blame the empty room on them. They’re just doing their jobs. And when their jobs go well at your event, they will come back and recommend it to others.
The Treatment Plan
There are some things you can do (or avoid doing) in advance to tackle empty room syndrome. As a conference pro, you need to anticipate this problem and do what you can to head it off.
One common way to mitigate this issue is to manage the room size. If you are running a multi-day event, gradually reduce the number of chairs – by day or day part – so that the room size is more in line with the audience you anticipate. And this will likely change from Day One to Day Three.
This doesn’t solve the empty room problem. It does help if you naturally bleed audience throughout a longer event. People have planes to catch.
If you are running a single-day event, then generally speaking the room is the room, though you may have an opportunity to cull the herd of chairs over lunch. In my experience, it’s easier to hold a consistent audience in the room for a single-day event than across a multi-day event.
You also have leeway to mix up the room setup.
Theater style (chairs, no tables) maximizes capacity but makes matters worse when the BD crowd chooses meetings over keynotes. And they always do. Classroom style (tables and chairs) will make the room seem more full. Using round tables eats up the most space. But conference vets usually know what's up when they walk into the meeting hall and see round tables.
I like to go with classroom-style seating in the front and theater-style in the back. This gives you leeway to remove the chairs in the back when the crowd thins out. Or add more if you have the opposite issues. Having more people than chairs is the rare problem that puts a smile on my face.
Also, avoid tactics that threaten to make this problem worse. For example, live streaming the event to other parts of the venue (the hallways, exhibits room) may seem like a good, modern practice. It also creates a permission structure to skip the keynote. In my view, this practice makes sense when it is SRO in the meeting hall. If your keynoter is Mark Cuban, switch on the live stream. Probably skip it if your top speaker is the CRO of a middling SaaS company.
Finally, if you have a videographer recording the event (which I strongly recommend), you can use this to manage the speaker’s expectations. Tell them that you acknowledge the audience is a little small this morning, but we are capturing it on video. Then tell the speaker you will share the full video with them, post it on YouTube, chunk it out on the socials, whatever the plan is.
Use the videographer as an audience force multiplier.
In the end, you also have to look inward and ask if you were fully on your game. Was this the right speaker for this time slot? Was the speaker and topic compelling enough to convince a BD pro to skip a meeting and fill a seat? I’ll admit the latter is a particularly hard one.
Finally, when this situation happens, I wouldn’t apologize to the speaker. Better to calmly explain the situation and how you are managing it. If you do feel compelled to apologize please avoid over-apologizing. This makes everyone uncomfortable, most of all the person receiving the apology.
