Event Curation: The Role of Empathy and Curiosity in Event Design
Gearing up to host your first large-scale event? Imagine creating an experience that leaves attendees raving about its thoughtful design and inclusivity. In this interview, we delve into the incredible mind of Rachel Coddington, a seasoned event producer with a wealth of experience from prestigious gatherings like Design Week Portland and the renowned XOXO festival.
Rachel has spent years meticulously curating attendee experiences that cater to diverse attendee needs. From the art of pre-planning to the magic of on-site adaptability, Rachel's shares a roadmap for aspiring community leaders who want to host next-level experiences for their audience.
Plus, emphasizing the power of empathy, inclusivity, and practicality, the intersection of event strategy, audience understanding, and the delicate balance between creativity and logistics.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell us a little about your experience working at Design Week Portland. Specifically, how do you approach the curatorial aspect of creating an experience for people?
Curation is such a funny word. I didn't consider myself a curator for many years because I wasn't curating the conference speakers or I wasn't curating specifics around the content. But in reality, curating an event experience is an absolute thing and I just didn't know the word for it.
I think it's two-pronged. The first thing that I became very focused on was making sure that the folks who were curating were not bogged down by other details. Andy Baio from XOXO, one of the best curators in the universe, when he was curating an event, I made sure he wasn't bogged down in the speaker hospitality side of things. Once he found a speaker he could hand them to me and I could handle all of the details, the billing, accommodations, all of that stuff so he could keep his mind focused on the actual curation process.
The other side is curating the rest of the event experience and 99.9% of curation is understanding your attendees and understanding what they want out of an event. The people who are attending a tech conference for two days that has five speaker tracks are very different people than someone who wants to go to four different design events in Portland, Oregon and is bringing their kids with them. Those are two distinct attendees.
A lot of the hard work that I had to do in these situations was to understand the attendees. The people who are curating content are frequently the ones who understand their attendees well. So it means being in lockstep with them, listening carefully about the content they're curating so you can understand why the attendees will like that content. Then you'll understand the attendees a little better. I was building close relationships with those higher-level curators to get all that info.
What are some of the tactics you use, particularly focusing on experiential design, to create inclusive and intentional spaces?
Creating a profile of an attendee in your mind and going beyond just understanding what they are interested in. Not just, what will they be excited about mentally? But, what do they want physically? Are these attendees introverts? Are these attendees folks with social anxiety? Are these attendees folks with mobility considerations? Are these folks with children? Would it be useful for them to have an experience that also caters to their children?
And then, beyond that, psychological safety. Are we communicating to them the security systems in place? Are we communicating who the other attendees will be and how they can engage with them? Are we communicating simple things like how to get into the space when they show up? All of that information is not going to be important to every attendee, but it'll be important to somebody.
Then, thinking through it all and trying to go even further. It's not enough to just say, lunch will be from 12 to 1. Some people will want to know how long it takes to walk to the nearest food place. They want to know if there will be food available on site. How much does it cost? What are the menus of the places available nearby? Again, this sounds like an overabundance of information, but the truth is, this is what makes people feel safe and this is what makes people be able to focus on the great experience you've curated.
So, the tactics go beyond just understanding who they are from a mental perspective, an interest perspective, or an industry perspective. Who are they as people? What do they need beyond that? And that's where you get to the good stuff. I think that that's when you get really meaningful responses from attendees. That's when people say, ‘I've never been to an event that was so thoughtful.’
The next level of this is on-site reactions to things. Half of event planning and production is planning. Half of it is the reaction when you're on-site, I have prided myself for years and years on this: if you can pivot on-site to someone's request, you are at the next level.
Let’s say you send a survey to attendees afterward and ask, ‘How was your experience?’ And someone says, ‘It was terrible, I use a mobility device and I couldn't get anywhere.’ Your response might be, ‘Oh, that's terrible, next time we'll do better.’ That's a different approach and it's a whole different experience for that person. But, say If that person was able to contact an event coordinator on site and say, ‘ I use a mobility device and bikes are blocking the entrance’, and then, within 20 minutes, someone goes and moves those bikes, that person's experience is completely different.
It's a single person, but now that you've moved those bikes anybody else who might need to go through there will be able to. You've created an experience that's then more accessible on many levels for many folks. So I truly believe that accessibility and inclusivity create a better experience for everyone.
Then there were other things, like one XOXO, there was a closing party happening, and right before the closing parties folks let us know they were going to the airport right after the closing party and they asked if there was any way they could leave their bag somewhere in the venue. We thought about it for a second and realized everyone could benefit from that. Within 45 minutes we had a perfectly working bag check system made with masking tape on the ground and Post-it notes on suitcases. It worked and we communicated it through the Slack channels and people were so grateful. It enhanced the experience for everybody.
For those who might not be familiar, can you explain what XOXO is and how big your team was for that event?
XOXO is an arts and technology festival. It's a four-day event where folks who primarily exist on the internet come together for a highly curated event. It started specifically and so it was focused more on online business. But then over time, it became a social justice conference and it talked a lot about the challenges of inclusivity and accessibility and it became a much deeper experience. But it's so much more than a conference.
The talks are very much one part of it, but they had tracks and tracks of incredible content happening. Folks could opt into just the festival side of it. They opened it up wider for folks who just wanted to attend for the food and the music and the games and they had live podcast recordings, that kind of stuff. So there were a couple of different ways you could attend. There's nothing quite like it. It's pretty incredible.
When I first joined, it was just two men with a ton of volunteers, Andy Bale and Andy McMillan. They brought me on for year four and they needed production support. I was a bright-eyed, bushy, tailed young event producer. I joined their team and I did everything. When I say I did everything, I mean I did everything from booking the venues to organizing speaker hospitality, all the way through to volunteer management and paying every last bill. I mean every single last thing I did. And it was so fun and so energizing.
As time went on, I insisted that we increase the team because they had a great budget and I thought it was silly for us to not have a more diverse team, a team that could handle all different pieces. So year over year we brought on more and more folks and by the end, we had a team of about 12 core producers and 150 plus volunteers who helped on site.
Let's discuss XOXO and its evolution towards social justice and inclusivity. One controversial incident involved inviting Anita Sarkeesian during the Gamergate controversy. Could you share how you, as event producers, managed her presence and maintained a safe environment?
I can talk to you about the systems that were developed the year prior and we continued forever. A lot of it has to do with really tight security and it was an inevitability that it had to be that way. The security team we worked with was incredible and they were able to present themselves as friendly parts of the team to the attendees, but they were also eagle eye razor sharp on who was coming in, what their credentials looked like, all of that. In addition, we had plain clothes security guards near the green room as well.
It was a multi-tiered approach. Essentially it taught me how to create a security plan. A lot of that had to do with identifying who the key members were, in this case, the noisiest members of Gamergate. Who were those people? What did they look like? Were any of them local? We had to print out photos of them and have the security team go through them. Then we went through the security plan in detail to see any weak spots where things might be weird or where things might fall apart. We went through it over and over, not just with security but with volunteers and with venue management, and letting them know it was a real situation.
The year before I joined the team one of the Gamergate folks showed up at the event. It wasn't violent, nothing happened but he showed up and so our plan was not for naught. This was an actual concern. In addition, we did a lot of monitoring on Twitter and a lot of monitoring around the channels that we knew Gamergate folks were active and we just paid attention to hashtags and kept folks on the lookout for us. We had teams of people paying attention to that and if anyone was mentioning that they were going to show up we noted who it was.
It took a lot of sleuthing and we continued that over the years to just pay attention, not just with Anita but with any other folks who were involved in any controversial areas. We just made sure we were paying attention to hashtags around those speakers as well and watched what was happening. Very luckily we never had any issues come through. But we were prepared.
We had a super clear plan. If something happens, here's what you do. You stay here and you call these people and they go there. We made sure folks understood what their roles were so that everyone wouldn’t get spun up in the same way and everyone was not running to a spot or action in a way that wasn’t helpful. Saying like, ‘Okay, if you're the person who received this information, you do this, then persons A and B do this.’ So you know that's being tended to and you don't have to worry about that anymore. Emergency plans were a huge part of what we did and they worked.
When I [Isaac] attended XOXO I was taken aback by how prepared the organizers were and the resources available to support attendees, especially around talks that included very heavy subject matter. How did XOXO prepare to address difficult topics such as assault and suicidal ideation during the conference and how did attendees respond?
Over the years that morphed from just having very particular Slack channels dedicated to certain things, and we had folks who were available to talk if someone needed it, or we just had smaller groups that were specific to past trauma and experiences. Folks would then post on those channels and say something like, ‘I just watched this talk and it was triggering to me because of X, Y, Z, is anyone available to talk about it?’ Then we were able to build community around those things, and we had a ton of people at XOXO that were well versed in trauma responses or trained in therapy or counseling.
I think that it just became a part of the culture to connect folks with other folks who are similar, and I mean, to this day, the Slack community for XOXO is still up and running and will forever be so. There are hundreds of Slack channels and thousands of people connecting across it. It's one of the most active Slack communities I've ever seen. That became a part of how we curated the experiences too.
Just the fact that we would respond to them on Slack was also a way that we met folks where they were, with triggering moments and that kind of thing. It became a part of the culture of that event to think of folks from a culturally humble perspective and to respond to them in a respectful and meaningful way and not just say we'll just chalk it up for next time, but to say this was a triggering experience for someone, we're going to address it. We're going to discuss it.
For example, say someone listened to a talk that hit them in a particular way, we took it upon ourselves to then look at the talks that were coming up, add more context to the website, and provide content warnings. We were always pretty tight about what the talks were really about, but we tried to work a little bit harder to give folks at least some context around content if we felt it would be triggering.
You were also part of the team of another large and successful event, Design Week Portland, how did you approach the production and curation?
What was interesting about Design Week was that we were not as focused on the attendee experience as much as we were focused on the event planner experience. We were essentially the hub to organize and promote all of these distributed events across the city. There were 300 events organized outside of our purview, but we still were the ones who brought everyone together, created the website, and helped promote and channel attendees. We were the ones who created the hubbub and the kind of vibe around the whole week.
With that being said, we still had to understand those people quite well and understand what they needed and what they were trying to get out of the experience. So the curatorial part of it still held. We did our level best to set up best practices across all of the events. We guided them on how to run a great open house, how to run a great event, and how to run a great workshop, those kinds of things. We brought in experts in all of those fields, hosted town halls, and made sure that people felt empowered to run the best events they could.
And then we were incredibly supportive of them as they went through the process. We held their hands through the basics so that they felt deeply supported.
We also trusted that they knew their attendees the best. We trusted that they had an audience in mind and they knew what they would like and what they would want. We were just Fred Flintstone’s feet running under the car and we made sure that people came. We advertised it, we marketed it for them, and we made sure that they were reaching the people they wanted to reach.
I think a lot of that was about understanding who they were and then giving them the best framework we could give them. I do the same thing for attendees, really understanding who they are, building a framework that works best for them, and then being available to support them when things are in flight.
I say this as if it’s so easy but it takes an extreme level of listening. It can't just be that you listen well, it has to be that you understand the reason why they're asking the question and the next five things they'll run into if they don't listen to your answer.
If someone asks if they should charge for drinks, they certainly can charge for drinks but if they do, they need a special permit to sell those drinks, they need to have someone who can run the bar, they need to understand the infrastructure they need to keep drinks cold and quickly serve them. There's a whole cascade of questions that come down from the first one.
You have to be able to listen, uncover what their actual needs are, and unpack the 95 questions that go along with the legality and logistical lift of selling drinks. It’s not as simple as someone dropping off kegs that you want to sell. That level of listening requires a ton of experience, knowledge, patience, and humility to listen properly and get the info that you know that you need to answer the question properly.
How do you integrate empathy into your work supporting the creative teams internally, and how do you make sure they feel recognized and valued at work?
A lot of it is one-to-one getting to know people, understanding their intentions, and understanding their needs from an accessibility or a cultural perspective. All of that rings very true, but the thing that I've run into recently in my work is also honesty.
I work for Instrument where 350 people do incredible digital work branding, campaigns, product development, apps, and all kinds of great stuff. The company is one of the most thoughtful I've ever seen in action and I've seen a lot because of Design Week Portland. I've seen a lot of agencies of this size and how they treat folks and it's very different from Instrument. I think they're the best in the biz as far as people are concerned.
I was independent for almost 10 years, ran my own stuff, and did my own thing. I was a terrible boss to myself. Everything was me, but some huge sacrifices came with that: steadiness of work, paying for my health insurance, and not having a great work-life balance because my work was everywhere and all the time, forever.
So when you work for a big company, those things change. You have a steady income. You have steady healthcare. You have someone paying attention to whether or not you're making enough money. Everything doesn't fall to you. So there are some major benefits.
We work for huge clients doing huge campaigns. It's so cool, it's very exciting, and I think sometimes making people feel seen and heard is the first step. But then you also have to be honest with them about the fact that this is a company. This is not a romantic relationship, this is not a family and when it comes down to it, this company has to make money. So it's not something where you can just give someone six months off any old time. That's not the way that it works.
There's this level of honesty that I think sometimes gets lost when you try to be brutally empathic. There's a balance. You want to understand someone's situation so beautifully that then you can explain to them in the context of reality what's possible. It is a disservice to tell someone, ‘I hear you and we will do whatever we can to meet you where you are’ because that's not always true. Because at the end of the day, we still have to be a company that makes money.
Sometimes that leads to a breaking of that relationship because that person needs something beyond what can be given. But if you're honest with them and you don't set unreasonable expectations, that's the kindest thing that you can do.
It's this constant balance of me being a major people pleaser and then also understanding that there's a structure in place that doesn't always support every single last request. Every day, every conversation is a balance of those things.
I don't have an endless supply of resources or energy that I can give to a situation, but, boy, when I can do something and when I can change someone's entire experience in their work because I'm able to put in the right effort and I have the right resources for it, it almost has a bigger feeling of satisfaction.