There's a moment in almost every summit where something doesn't go to plan. For Natayle Brown, it was watching her first, second, and third rounds of speakers commit to other summits happening at the same time as hers.
She thought about throwing in the towel, but decided to keep going and persisted to fill her speaker line up. It all ended up being worth it in the end when she hosted her first summit that brought in 6,000 registrants and over 1,200 all-access pass sales. In this episode, she's sharing what worked, what didn't, and what she'd do differently next time.
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Episode at a glance:
[01:37] Is a super-specific summit topic too specific?
When Natayle decided to host the Unstuck Literacy Conference, she didn't guess at her summit topic. She'd been watching teachers talk about student apathy, motivation, and reading gaps in the channels she's part of, then surveyed her email list and asked teachers to rank their top three classroom challenges. The pattern that stood out: 6th-12th grade ELA teachers who are experts in literature but struggling to feel successful with below grade level readers. Research gave her the confidence to go narrow.
Did I ever feel like it was too specific? Not really. I felt like it was just specific enough to stand out.
[05:37] Finding speakers when your dream list says no
Natayle noted that she waited a little too long to pitch, and her early rounds of speakers were already committed to other summits in her niche. Instead of moving her date (which is tough when your audience is on a school calendar), she got creative and kept going to find an alternative approach to finding speakers. She remembered an in-person conference she'd attended in February, and used the speakers from that event and other similar events as a starting point. She started searching published programs from other literacy conferences, looking for sessions that matched her topic, and tracking those presenters down online. With 13 or 14 speakers already committed, that gave her the last few yeses she needed to fill her speaker lineup.
I waited probably too long to pitch my first round of speakers, and by the time I started pitching, they were all committed to competing summits that were happening around the same time as mine.
[08:09] The upside (and the learning curve) of first-time speakers
Many of her newer speakers had never spoken at a summit and didn't have much of an audience. That meant leaning harder on her speakers with bigger audiences and on ads to promote her event. But in a season where attendees kept seeing the same faces at every event, those new voices made her summit feel fresh!
I do feel like bringing in those fresh faces, even though in this realm they were "inexperienced" and had small audiences, they brought in fresh perspectives and novelty.
[12:32] The results, and the pages that made the difference
Natayle's summit brought in 6,000 registrants with about a 50% conversion rate from page views to registrations, plus a little over 1,200 all-access pass sales (about a 20% conversion rate). A speaker who presented at another summit around the same time told her Natayle's event converted at a much higher rate. She said it came down to a focused transformation, plus a lot of time customizing her Summit in a Box® templates and rewriting her messaging using the exact words teachers used in a survey, Facebook groups, and social media. She wrote every section with two questions in mind: will the right person say yes, and is this the right person saying yes to me?
I really wanted them to land on that registration page and feel like, "Yes, this is me. This is exactly what I need."
[18:35] Running ads to a time-bound event
Natayle normally runs $10-$25 a day in ads. For her summit, she started at $200 a day after doing the math: at six all-access pass upgrades a day, she would break even. She got around 24 upgrades on day one and 30 the next! Her ad traffic converted at 36% from registration to all-access pass, and she didn't even have time to set up retargeting, which would have boosted her results even further. Her advice if you're nervous about ads: be patient, set them up deliberately, double check every step of the funnel, and track everything.
[23:19] What surprised her most
Prepping for the summit took more work than she expected (which she partly credits to her perfectionism). But after six years of working for herself, hosting brought back something she'd been missing: people. Chatting with attendees, answering questions, and working with her speakers lit her up in a way her business hadn't in a while.
Hosting the summit was the first time that I have felt lit up for a while!
Whether you're choosing a topic, filling out your speaker lineup, or deciding if ads belong in your plan, Natayle's first summit is a great reminder that a setback in the middle of planning doesn't have to decide how your event ends.
About Natayle Brown
Natayle Brown is a former elementary educator turned curriculum designer and founder of Hey Natayle, where she creates ELA resources used by over 100,000 teachers. After eight years in various classroom settings, she now spends her days writing curriculum for grades 4 through 8. This summer, she hosted her first virtual event, the Unstuck Literacy Conference, a three-day summit for secondary ELA teachers with struggling readers. When she's not writing English lessons or troubleshooting WordPress plugins at midnight, she's reading fiction and keeping up with her two kids in the Tampa area.
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