Keeping Attendees Engaged Throughout Your Franchisee Conference

Franchisee conferences come in all shapes and sizes. There are on-site or off-site venues, with vendors or without, keynotes, roundtables or breakout sessions – the list is endless. However, no matter the purpose or the size, one thing is common: how franchisees remain engaged and perceive you can directly affect the outcome.

Months of planning, hard work and tremendous effort can go to waste if franchisees are disconnected from your content, your executive team and their peers. In the spirit of brevity and productivity, here are great ways to keep your franchisee conferences more efficient and effective while leaving a positive impression.

Define Your Objective

One problem that affects all poorly run meetings is an unclear objective. If your goal is not clearly defined and well positioned to attendees, mixed messages can ensue and you run the risk of loosing your audience’s attention. Spend twice as much time on the agenda as you normally would to reinforce the purpose of the meeting to participants.

Michael Mabry, chief operating officer at MOOYAH, Burgers, Fries and Shakes, spoke to 1851 Franchise about his brand’s recent conference and said this about having a well defined objective.

“The idea behind our conference is and will always be a celebration of our franchisees. All of our content is developed with that clear objective in mind,” said Mabry. “We’re fortunate that every year our attendance has grown because we’re hyper-focused on producing content that drives unit economics while celebrating our MOOYAH mission of Seriously Fun.”

Show Franchisees Why They Should Care

Passion is contagious. Franchisees joined your system for a reason, so take every opportunity you can to remind them of why they chose you over the competition. Your convention is the time to share new ideas, goals and projects. And be sure to demonstrate why those ideas are relevant, important and profitable. The most successful meetings focus on the big picture and do much more than relay facts and figures.

“There is a time and place to get granular and dig into the details,” added Mabry. “We typically do that during smaller breakout sessions, but on the main stage, we want to celebrate everything MOOYAH. Our focus during our convention was about where we are as a brand and where we are going, including the massive investment in technology we’ve made across the system.”

Know When You Need Help

At a certain point, you may not have enough time to manage the convention planning process completely in-house. Planning an effective meeting for a large or emerging franchise organization can take resources away from the corporate team and interrupt day-to-day operations for months at a time. For brands at that tipping point, it might be time to bring in some outside help.

“To plan an great meeting requires a lot time and resources that can be hard to allocate when you have a streamlined corporate staff whose primary focus is franchisee satisfaction and the health of the system,” said Mabry. “That’s why this year at MOOYAH we decided to bring in Campfire and employ their Persuasion Design methods into our planning process. The Campfire team was a huge asset and helped structure our event so our corporate team could remain focused on our most important asset – our franchisees.”

Always Plan Ahead

There is no time like the present to plan for your next event. In fact, as your franchise system becomes larger, annual convention planning will become a yearlong process. Between securing sponsorships, venues and speakers, to defining content, agendas and events – developing a successful franchisee conference starts as soon as your previous one ends.

“We’re only a few weeks removed from our annual franchisee conference and we’ve already started planning for next year,” added Mabry. “Next year we celebrate our 10-year anniversary and we’re looking to do something special in a unique venue. That kind of planning does not happen overnight. It starts now.”