The tangible intangibles of sustainability events

Ask anyone who runs or regularly attends sustainability conferences why they keep doing it, and you’ll get an answer that sounds soft: connection, community, energy in the room — and, of course, professional development. Ask them what it costs, and the answer is anything but soft — money, time, jet lag, time away from family, a never-empty inbox.

That gap — between what events promise and the price they exact — was the subject of this week’s “Two Steps Forward” podcast. And the more my co-host Solitaire Townsend and I talked it through, the clearer it became that the intangible stuff isn’t a soft add-on to the business case for events. In many respects, it is the business case.

Consider a recent report from Encore and Boldpush that concluded with four key findings that all point to the same thing: People rank peer connection as the top driver of event value, ahead of content, keynotes — almost everything on which programming teams spend their time and budgets. Participatory formats beat panels. Trust gets built face-to-face, not through slide presentations and talking heads.

People want to connect with other people. Full stop. That’s a key to success.

More places, less time

None of that is a particularly new insight, but it’s a useful corrective for an industry that still spends most of its money on presenting panels.

Sustainability events haven’t changed much to reflect this. The calendar that used to spread across a dozen annual conferences — GreenBiz, BSR, Ceres, Sustainable Brands and events produced by Fortune, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and other business media — has compressed into a handful of concentrated weeks, such as COPs and Climate Weeks, and expanded geographically at the same time, with sustainable business programming growing across India, Asia, Latin America and, to a lesser extent, Africa.

More places to be and less time in each, which makes the intangible nuggets harder to mine, let alone value.

The United Nations COP conferences — this year’s, COP31, is in Antalya, Turkey, in November — is the extreme version. The list of its challenges is long — insane logistics; hard to access food and water; crowd navigation; even personal safety (part of the venue caught fire at last year’s COP30) — and the tangible benefits are often scarce, especially if you’re part of the international climate negotiations.

But the intangibles make it all worthwhile: waiting in a snaking line for a bathroom or security checkpoint and forming an alliance — or at least a friendship — with a stranger from Colombia or Cambodia or Cote D’Ivoire; showing up at a breakout to find someone who can finally help you through a vexing challenge; being directed to the best local eatery by a random passer-by.

None of that is on any agenda or to-do list. It’s also, for many attendees, the entire point.

Intimacy at scale

We’ve learned this at Trellis and have worked hard to implement “intimacy at scale,” as we call it. Building great programming is obviously important but creating the conditions for collisions and letting attendees find “their people” is what keeps them coming back — the aforementioned challenges be damned.

Of course, everyone has their own calculus: what they want and need to get out of an event — networking, innovative ideas, a next job, or simply a reality check. At any given event, it’s usually a combination of these and other factors.

The tangible costs of these events are real and worth interrogating every season. But the intangibles — the connections that turn into enduring business and personal relationships — are just as real, even if they never show up on an expense report.

Two Steps Forward is available wherever you get podcasts, including on Trellis.net. Find past episodes at twostepsforwardpodcast.com.