A cold, sterile convention center crammed with anonymous faces wearing name tags on lanyards.

Row after row lined with identical booths peddling pens and stress balls.

Some banners with the conference theme: “Welcome to the Bahamas!” But you know you’re in Cleveland in November. Who are they trying to fool?

The President of the organization gets up to “say a few words” and you mentally prepare for 45 minutes of rambling nonsense interspersed with buzzwords and lame jokes you’re obligated to laugh at.

Later there’s a networking cocktail hour where overeager social climbers are going to hand out their business cards like there’s a prize at the end of the night.

And all you can think is…

“How long do I have to be here to make my boss happy?”

The Default

For all the moaning we’ve done since March 2020 about missing in-person events, there’s something to be said for the ease and comfort of virtual experiences.

Most of us never really enjoyed conferences, pre-pandemic. It’s only when they were taken away that we started pining for them, like the way you miss your partner after a break up, despite how badly they treated you.

As a professional speaker I attend a lot of conferences. Most aren’t great.

Sure, the individual people I meet are wonderful. The organization hosting the conference is often innovative and passionate.

But the event itself?

Meh.

Even world class event organizers fall prey to the same handful of tropes that, while exciting your first time – “Holy crap, look at the size of that screen!” – quickly become routine if you attend more than 1 conference per year.

Why do we keep throwing boring, run-of-the-mill conferences?

Two, because truly interesting, new ideas are hard to come by. Ask any speaker who uses Powerpoint if they like watching Powerpoint presentations, and they’ll say, “Goodness no. They’re awful.” So, why do they use one? Because using Powerpoint is easy and expected, while engaging an audience without one is difficult and scary.

Same goes for planning events. Hardly anyone enjoys the “networking cocktail hour” (apart from the open bar). So, why do we keep doing them? Because they’re easy and expected, while facilitating new connections without a networking cocktail hour or limitless alcohol is difficult and scary.

But once in a while I attend a conference that is so extraordinary, so out-of-the-box, so innovative, so much fun, that I can’t stop thinking about it. It happened 2 years ago in Australia, but for security reasons I can’t discuss that one.

And it happened again a few weeks ago in Austin, Texas.

In this article, I’m going to outline 2 major lessons I learned from the perspective of an attendee, and a host of insights from the organizing team itself about what makes this annual conference so special.

Willy Wonder and the Fundraising Factory

NextAfter is an organization that helps nonprofits grow their digital fundraising.

They’ve run nearly 3000 experiments spanning 280 million donor interactions and first-hand research analyzing over 1000 nonprofits in 9 countries.

If you’re a metrics geek, that sounds awesome. But to the average person, it’s just more data.

So how does NextAfter get nonprofit leaders from around the world excited about learning from their research and working with them?

They throw an annual conference called the NIO Summit: nonprofit innovation and optimization.

I was the closing keynote for Day 1 of this year’s event, which means I got a full-day attendee experience before getting on stage. And honestly, I’ve never had so much fun.

This year’s theme was Willy Wonka- er, sorry. Willy Wonder.

When the marketing materials went out months in advance I thought it was cute. I love Willy Wonka (who doesn’t?) and the theme made the website, newsletter, and social media promo vibrant and playful.

What I wasn’t expecting when I walked in the front door of the convention center was to enter Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

Lesson 1: Go All In

The biggest mistake conferences make is the “Mr. Miyagi Dilemma”:

“Walk right side, safe. 

Walk left side, safe. 

Walk middle? 

Sooner or later…

Squish. 

Just like grape.”

So many organizing teams have interesting, fun ideas for their event. But by the time the committee has its 10th meeting, the CEO weighs in, the budget gets factored and time pressure arises, they compromise.

The theme is all over the marketing, but barely makes it into the actual event. At most the theme’s colors will be used for banners, cheap giveaways, and slides. Maybe they’ll have a running giveaway coordinated with the theme, but that’s it.

If you didn’t already know what the theme was, you probably wouldn’t notice from attending.

At NIO Summit 2021, the organizing team of 30 from NextAfter literally assembled Willy Wonka’s factory. Every attendee’s jaw dropped upon entering, myself included. I literally came to a complete stop to take it all in (and take photos).

The opening video on the morning of Day 1 had clearly been produced in a proper film studio with scripts, directors, green screen operators – this wasn’t a haphazard home production. It was a fully realized 10 minute sketch designed to set the tone for the entire event.

As the video finished, Willy Wonder himself entered the stage as the emcee for the conference. He was portrayed by a brilliant NYC based burlesque actor, who committed fully to the role and never broke character even for a second.

Lesson 2: Connections and Collisions

For all the gorgeous aesthetics and commitment to theme, NIO Summit also avoided one of the worst sins a conference can commit: Focusing on content over connection.

Why do we go to conferences?

What purpose does spending 3 or 4 days away from the office and a fortune on flights and hotels serve?

It’s not for the content. The internet is literally swimming in content. There’s a never-ending stream of videos, articles, courses, blogs, trainings, podcasts – and most of it is free! You don’t need to travel halfway across the country (or the world) to see me talk for an hour. I’ve got 400 videos on my own YouTube channel!

The reason we go to conferences is to connect – engage with those on a similar journey as us – and collide – bump into new people and new ideas.

At the heart of NIO Summit was a clear commitment to bringing people together and giving attendees the permission and freedom to take action, rather than passively absorb content.

Every non-presentation activity was in service of interaction, and a lot of that came from not overwhelming the schedule with “activities” as such, but simply creating space for those interactions to occur.

How do they pull it off?

The morning of Day 1 I took the hotel elevator down to the lobby to find breakfast. I found a middle-aged woman sitting by herself, fiddling with her phone, and asked if I could sit. She smiled and gestured, so we began chatting.

I didn’t tell her who I was or that I was the closing keynote. Instead I pretended to be a first-time attendee and asked her what to expect. This is something I always do if I can fly in a day early. It’s my way of getting a pulse on the tone of an event before even stepping foot inside.

She lit up.

“I come every year. And honestly, I attend many nonprofit conferences. A lot of them are bigger in various ways, but there’s nothing like this event.”

“Really?” I asked. “What makes this one different?”

“There’s just something about it. You’ll see.”

And that was nearly the exact same conversation I had with multiple attendees over the next hour. Over and over I heard, there’s just something special about this conference.

Having since attended, I wanted to know how the organizing team from NextAfter pulls it off every year. So, I asked them this question:

What ONE thing makes the NIO Summit so special, unique, or captivating for its attendees?

Here is a selection of their responses:

Come As You Are

“I love that people come to NIO just as they are. You meet real people who want to make a difference in their organizations just like you do, and want to learn how. And you realize that you’re not alone, and there’s so much that can actually be done. So you learn together, build relationships, and leave with new actionable steps you can take to make an impact.”

-Zarina Sakai, CFOP

Journey With Others

“People come for the learnings and they stay for the community. I had a conversation this year with a “NIO friend.” He expressed to me that there are a handful of people he sees at NIO Summit each year that he feels he’s on a journey with. They’re people from different organizations and causes, but each year he can reconnect in a meaningful way, refuel his motivation for his work, and be equipped to go back to his team and be the best he can be.”

-Nathan Hill, Vice President of Marketing

The Conference We’d Want to Attend

“I think the one thing that makes us so different is that rather than a money-making mentality, we create the event that we as a team would LOVE to attend. Every decision always comes back to one thing: making the attendees’ experience as fun, engaging and valuable as possible. That’s why it’s so fun! We get to take all the crazy ideas from our team that we would have fun doing and actually make them happen!”

-Riley Landenberger, Senior Marketing Manager

Everyone Cares

“The short answer is that people actually CARE. The people who are there want to learn and make a difference, our team wants it to be amazing for them, the speakers are actually passionate about what they’re talking about . . . nobody is just there to just hawk a product, or to check a box, or to make a buck. And in so many ways NIO was born of our team’s experience of all those other things we hated seeing in the nonprofit space and wanting something more, something better for the community of folks we’re serving. And now that it exists, I think we feel a sort of responsibility to protect it from becoming like those other things.”

-Justin Beasley, Director of Data Services

Outside Perspectives

“Having attended hundreds of nonprofit conferences over the years, the thing that I’ve found to be missing are the insights, perspectives, and innovations that are being applied in the for-profit space.  That’s why we started the NIO Summit years ago– to bring those much needed ideas to our nonprofit community so that they can push the bounds of what’s possible.”

-Tim Kachuriak, Chief Innovation and Optimization Officer

Want to join the fun?

NIO Summit makes all recordings from every session of the entire conference available to anyone, for free.

You’ll find my 30-min keynote address here:

We’re Not In Kansas Anymore

Does this conference sound like something you’d want to attend? You can! Next year’s theme is The Wizard of Oz, and it’s being held September 20-22, 2022 in Kansas City, MO.

Plus, they’ve given me a personal discount code for $100 off your ticket, which you’ll get ON TOP of the current early bird sale.

Use code brianmiller100 at this link to grab your ticket(s) before the price goes up: NIO Summit 2022.