Dessert Events
What is a dessert event?
One of the key ways that philanthropists, grantmakers and charities exchange information is at events. This can be conferences, single day events or multi-day retreats. Events are a social way for the otherwise fairly geographically spread charity community to connect with others and learn about new ideas. A huge percentage of the philanthropic communities out there are built around events and have key conferences. However, recently I have noticed more and more of the highest value events are small ones bundled next to other events. An event the day before or the day after a conference, for example. I am going to term these "dessert events" in part because they often happen soon after and are uniquely good, but also because somehow people can always make a bit of extra room for them even when "full" from the main event. It also normalizes eating dessert before the main course, which I think is under-rated.
Why are dessert events more valuable than the main course? #
A big mystery is why these events are so valuable. They tend to be on a far smaller scale than the main event, with much smaller budgets and less organization. Ultimately they can only exist due to the big event bringing everyone together. Size? Part of it is size. Size is a blade that cuts both ways; narrowing the demographic of an event can make it more useful for each person who attends. For example, a funder-specific event connected to a larger, more general cause area event allows deeper conversations, less solicitation and a higher degree of shared context. The less public event also can be more narrow in its topic and people selection without pushback. You have no obligation to invite anyone in particular to a 10-person event the day after a conference. I think the smaller size can also be better culture-wise, with events with fewer than 30 people having a distinctively different vibe than those with 100+. Duration? I think part of what makes dessert events valuable is they can also be a more optimal length of time. A conference needs to be large and long enough to warrant people traveling sometimes internationally for many hours. On the other hand, a dessert event can be 2 hours long if the topic and group only warrants it, or a whole week. It does not have to worry as much about drawing people in and holding them throughout the whole time. Instead, it can be rightsized for the ideal outcome. In general, I really like shorter events that are not guaranteed to recur as it allows more experimentation and tests than, e.g., a yearly conference that has to work to build up its audience.
The recipe for an optimal dessert event
There have been a few characteristics of my top events recently that I think can start to suggest an ideal recipe for these sorts of events. They start with between 6 and 30 people and tend to have a tighter commonality in the group both career-wise and idea-wise. For example, if the main event is an animal event - funders in animals being the dessert event demographic. If it's a funder event, the dessert group could be the 10 largest funders in a specific sub-area space. It could also be non-funder related, e.g., 10 people all working in the recruiting department of different organizations within the same cause area. A good group gets combined with a specific topic and a bit of structure (maybe each group member shares the most important lesson they learned that year) or there is a 20-minute talk to open up the idea. But often the bulk of the event is more free-flowing, allowing topics to arise in small groups or one-on-one off the common group topic that established the event.
Concrete examples of dessert events
Founders and funders event - This event happened adjacent to the Skoll World Forum. Skoll is a huge event that has really embraced co-run and side events into its core. One of the side events I went to was called founders and funders and it was networking, dinner and a group conversation between the two groups. Simple questions like "what do funders wish that founders knew and what do founders know that they wish funders knew" helped kick the night off. And conversations were naturally narrower and more useful to those two demographics (It certainly helped that these are two of my favorite demographics and both groups I identify with).
Animal curious funders event - This event happened around EAG and focused on people who have been donating minorly to animals or might want to donate to animal areas in the future. It also focused a lot on cross-cutting charities that fit under multiple impact buckets (Good Food Institute, for example, having both positive climate and animal effects). There were opening remarks that lasted about 15 minutes, but otherwise it was open social conversations between people sharing a common interest.
Pre-AVA meditation and strategy retreat - This happened the same week as AVA and was a group of animal leaders who had a meditation and then open strategy retreat. It was held over a few days in a shared Airbnb and resulted in multiple unstructured conversations that both went deeper and changed my mind more often than the conference it was built around.
Although these events were all radically different from each other, they shared the common dessert event features of 1) being enabled by a larger event 2) having a smaller and more specific attendee list 3) providing a lot of value per time.
Dessert events I want to make happen in the future
Two demographic connections: Similar to the event above, I think connection between two groups that normally do not talk as much as they should, e.g., funders and beneficiaries or new charities and established actors, researchers and research implementers. This could create a lot of value and will often already have both groups mixed into a broader event. This could also be applicable for two cause areas that have lots of overlaps (e.g., animal and climate overlap or mental health and income).
Skill training events: I think there could be a dessert event aimed specifically at training a skill for a sub-demographic of the conference. E.g., getting a group together that wants to improve their hiring across multiple organizations, or doing a site visit with a group of philanthropists who are new to doing site visits.
Effective grantmaking events: I think there is a small group of grantmakers who care a lot about cost effectiveness and the effectiveness of their charities. These folks tend to bounce around broad philanthropist conferences and cause area specific events. I think after both, a funder focused on effective grantmaking in cause area X dinner would be extremely valuable and allow coordination in the space.
Founders and entrepreneurs event: I think getting together a cohort of folks who are all running recently founded NGOs and enabling bulk cross-applicable lesson sharing. Lots of NGOs at the same size bump into similar challenges. We run an event like this around EAG London, but I think something like it would be valuable after a ton of different conferences.
Grantmaker peer teaching event: I think an event where one grantmaker teaches a skill they are uniquely good at (e.g., how to be more transparent or how to get your grants funded later by government actors). Grantmakers are often keen to learn but are too time-poor for a full course like the one that AIM runs. An after-event like this could go a long way to more formal lesson sharing between funders (which is sadly pretty rare).
In conclusion
More people should run dessert events, it's an efficient way to create extra value out of a conference/larger event. Particularly in the charity and philanthropy space it seems like there is lots of opportunity for high value events utilizing the centralization that occurs from these larger events but then capitalising on the benefits of smaller scale, optimal duration and more specific audiences.