The most innovative and valuable conferences amplify new voices from across fields that your attendees might not expect. Inviting and featuring speakers from outside of your usual target sector welcomes a diversity of perspectives, giving your attendees a more well-rounded and unique experience. Cross-sector partnerships also help your conference gain widespread recognition, encouraging sign-ups and strengthening your brand identity.

In this guide, we’ll explore how to create a successful conference experience powered by participants from across for-profit and nonprofit sectors in multiple phases. As we explore these ideas, consider the assets your conferences already have and how you can leverage them to build cross-sector partnerships. 

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How to Identify and Facilitate Ideal Partnerships

Bringing organizations together for your conference is most effective when they already align on values, interests, industry, or offerings. You can identify and engage potential partners by following these easy steps: 

1. Use standard matching criteria. It can be challenging to find the exact right fit for each organization given the variety of traits and motivations that can shape the partnership. However, by using standard matching criteria, you can objectively score and find the right matches without making it a guessing game. Gauge elements such as:some text
   • Topic interests 
   • Values
   • Competitors
   • Desired outcomes of the partnership
   • Resource contribution
   • Schedule
   • Audience overlap
   • Commitment to the collaboration
2. Score the potential partners. Once you’ve determined the matching criteria, create a survey and send it to potential partners. For some questions, include a scale of one to five so you can easily calculate which responses were closer to each other. For more detailed information, ask them to write short answer responses — you can read and match these manually.
3. Set up touchpoints between the organizations and businesses. Match partners according to your survey results and release the results to your participants. Act as the mediator for setting up touchpoints between new partners, especially if they don’t know each other already. For instance, you could organize a coffee chat for the partners to get to know each other and discuss their ideas for the conference.

Keep in mind that using a standard scoring system can provide a good foundation for your partnership strategy, but you might need to collect more information before making a firm decision. You can thoroughly match partners by conducting interviews, allowing them to expand upon their survey results, or discuss topics that weren’t covered in the survey. 

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How to Engage Partners in Conference Planning

Once you’ve forged logical partnerships, it’s time to start planning your cross-sector events. It’s important to make the planning process as easy and engaging as possible for partners — otherwise, you run the risk of mismanaged events or losing your conference contributors before the big day. 

These tactics can help you shape the planning process with cross-sector partners in mind:

• Create collaborative event briefs. This format simplifies event planning, laying out exactly what you hope to achieve and how you’ll achieve it. Create a standard event brief for your partners based on the type of event they’d like to run together, whether that be a webinar or a keynote speech. Then, facilitate collaboration by setting deadlines for points of contact from each team to complete it together so everyone’s on the same page. 
• Allow partners to decide on roles and responsibilities. Remember, your speakers and panelists are busy with their own organizations and personal lives, meaning they have varying commitment levels for external events. Allow them to take the lead in assigning roles and responsibilities for the collaboration and offer your help wherever needed. This ensures that everyone has enough on their plate to feel motivated without getting overwhelmed. 
• Set regular check-ins. Even if you don’t take the lead creatively, you’re still the event organizer, so you should be looped into the planning process. Establish a regular check-in cadence leading up to the conference so you can answer any questions, approve any changes, and keep the creative process on track. In the months leading up to the conference, you might meet once a month, but in the weeks leading up to it, you might ramp it up to weekly check-ins.

As you help partners shape their contributions to your conference, remember to highlight the cross-sector dynamic. After all, it’s a marketable element of your event that can help you draw more attendees for their unique perspectives. 

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Example of a Cross-Sector Partnership

Let’s put all of this information together to create a hypothetical cross-sector partnership so you can see these tactics in action. For example, let’s say you’re hosting a conference about making corporations more environmentally sustainable. 

A natural way to facilitate a cross-sector partnership for this event’s focus is by creating discourse about corporate social responsibility (CSR). Sustainability efforts are a popular and important CSR focus, making it a great potential topic for your events. 

After you’ve scored and matched participants from across sectors, you might ask corporate leaders who are committed to reducing their companies’ carbon footprints to speak on a panel with environmental nonprofits. This event provides a unique blend of perspectives from environmental experts and those who want to improve their sustainability efforts, drawing a diverse audience.

Even after your event is finished, your work isn’t over! Reach back out to the participating organizations and businesses and ask them what they thought of the entire experience, from filling out the matching survey to planning the event to executing it on the big day. 

Ask questions gauging how well your organization supported both parties and request advice on how to improve going forward. Also, inquire about how accurate and effective your matching criteria were so you can add, keep, or remove items for future use. These insights can help you continually level up your conferences and provide truly memorable and meaningful experiences for your attendees and cross-sector partners.