Seating

Keep ‘em Close

It’s a common and easy to make mistake. Seating your participants too far from you. Or worse, putting something between them and you. Thus, I can think of no reason to use a podium. If you need something to hold your notes, use an unobtrusive music stand. And if you do that, keep that as low as possible so that it does not become a barrier between yourself and your audience.

The primary seating challenge that has resulted in problems for so many producers and presenters has more to do with the venue than with their choices. Most venues will set up chair so that the presentation area and presentation are on one of the short ends of a long room. Often that is where the in-ceiling screen is located, so they believe that they have no choice. That’s the way everyone else does their seating, so why shouldn’t you do it that way too?

You shouldn’t have that type of seating because you want your event to be far more successful than anything else that has been presented in that room. Accordingly, you need to keep your audience as close to you as possible. That means positioning the presentation area and the presenter in the middle of the long wall and positioning the chairs in arches around that area rather than in straight rows. This strategy puts as many people as possible as close to the presenter as possible, and intimacy is one of the primary components of creating a context of success and involvement.

Sure there are some people who will naturally want to sit in the back of the room. I sometimes prefer the back so that I can get a perspective on everything that is happening in the room. A great many people will, however, want to be as close to your presenter as possible. This is particularly true if the presenter is “famous” and / or has great charisma. Just imagine what woman would want to sit in the back of the room where Oprah was making a presentation. Sure, most of their husbands wouldn’t mind being in back, but the roles would probably be reversed if the presenter was Sylvester Stallone (Rocky) or Michael Jordan.

In either of those cases, a room set with rows of chair set perpendicular to the short wall will put many people seated far from the presenter. If, however, the room is set with the presenter in the center of one of the long walls with the chairs arching around, many more people will be seated much closer. They will also have a better view as well as a better sense of being involved. This type of seating may seem like a small matter, but it makes an amazing difference in the environment and the experience of the participants. Accordingly, more success and greater results.

And then there’s the whole issue of “classroom” itself. For most of us, the classroom has extremely negative connotations. We were forced to sit in nice straight rows of chairs and “learn.” Researchers have now discovered that such a setting is not the ideal environment for learning. In fact, it actually inhibits learning. And we are forced to sit in those straight rows of chairs, we mentally return to our childhood school experiences.

Essentially, what you’re doing when you force people into long straight rows of chairs is setting yourself and your event to be less successful than it could be. Most people subconsciously revert to their childhood. They move into “just another classroom” mode, even though the seldom if ever realize what is happening.

Very few of us have fond memories of school where we were forced to learn and parrot back facts and other information we considered useless. We also had to sit still and speak only when called on. It just was not fun and clearly not the best way for most people to learn.

And that’s where most of us go mentally when we are forced into rows of chairs, even if they don’t have desks or tables in front of them. Classroom style (with tables) exacerbates the situation even more. And in that mode, your audience is far less likely to fully participate much less take the actions that you want them to take (purchasing your CD’s, signing up for your next course, recommending your next course to their friends, etc.).

In addition to reminding us of our unpleasant childhood school days, tables are another thing that can come between the presenter and the participants. Setting a room classroom style also reduces the amount of participants you can fit in. So, you have to book larger rooms for the same number of people, and your expenses rise. That’s not to say that there aren’t times when classroom style is necessary, but that happens far less often than is actually required. Most people love to sit behind the security of tables while creating their protective domain of cups, binders, books, briefcases, laptops, cell phones, PDA’s, etc. All of these items are distractions and suck energy and focus from your presentation. You will be much better off to set your room theatre style (just chairs with no tables), fit more people closer to your presenter and keep the distractions to a minimum.

Sure you’ll run into the participant who gets upset because he doesn’t have enough room for his laptop, coffee cup, binder and Blackberry on his lap, but most folks will quickly adjust to the way you have established your room’s environment. The majority of participants don’t want to draw attention to themselves, so they just go along with the way you have set things up.

This can be particularly obvious when they enter the room for the first time. At that point in your event schedule, you need to be sure that everything is in place, including the most advantageous seating. The room needs to appear impeccable regardless of what you’ve just tossed under the skirted tables. You also need to have your seating team stationed and ready.

If you have such a team, it is their job to shepherd the masses much as ushers do in churches. You want people to fill up ALL the seats in the front first, especially if your room is going to be really full. That way people coming in late do not disrupt the session climbing over folks to get to that one empty seat in the middle of the second row.

To keep them as close to the front as possible, I always set out about twenty-five percent fewer chairs than I expect to use. In other words, if I expect a crowd of 100, I initially set out 75 chairs. I keep the other 25 plus chairs stacked in the back of the room as hidden as possible for use once the majority of the front is filled. And if by some fate of bad luck, your audience is less than you expected, you don’t have a bunch of empty chairs in the front. You also don’t have to have your team do that most embarrassing ritual of taking chairs away. That maneuver subconsciously suggests failure whereas setting more chairs out says, “we’ve got more people than we expected, and we’re successful!”

And please don’t try using ribbons, string, tape or anything else like that to rope off the back sections for the same purpose. It just does not work. People will ignore your efforts, and your staff will get frustrated not wanting to chase people out of those chairs. In the end, that strategy produces the same result as setting up all the chairs. It doesn’t work.

One more time - seating is critical. You establish a major portion of your context with seating. The chairs can be comfortable or not (I don’t recommend too comfortable as people tend to relax a bit too much), but how they are arranged in relationship to your presenter is crucial. You always want as many people as close to your presenter as possible. You want to give them what they came for – a piece of the presenter’s wisdom, insight, charisma, etc.

Regardless of how it is labeled, they come for an experience of the presenter. That, too, is context. Certainly, they believe that the come for the content, but few recall anything about the content even months later. Years later, however, many people can tell you all kinds of information about the presenter, right down to what color shirt he was wearing that day. So the closer they can be to her or him, the happier they will be.

This intimate type of seating also lends itself much better to enrollment / sales. If your room is not filled to capacity (and I hope that it is) and you have laid out your chairs in arcs, the back corners will be perfect for your sales and registration tables because there will be extra room for large groups to gather. And the larger the group visible to your audience, the more they feel like they had better get back there before all the “good stuff” is gone. Again, the heard mentality can be put to use during your event.

Placing people where you want them to be is a very difficult task. In the case of an event with chairs, you have the upper hand because you can lay out the chair in any way you want. Perhaps a circle would work best for you, but I doubt it if you want your presenter to maintain control of the group. The arc seating system that I have described here, however, has been proven to produce extraordinary results.

So, as with everything else I recommend on this site, give it a try. If it works, continue to use it. If for some strange reason it doesn’t work for you, try something else (and write me to tell me what happened because I’m always learning). And, by the way, if your presenter(s) need to sit down make sure that you have a tall barstool for them and, better yet, that they are on an elevated platform. Nothing is more annoying to participants than having to strain to see the presentation.