Running matchmaking at a two-day expo

Matchmaking fails in predictable places, and almost none of them are the matching. It fails because the engine ran before anybody had said anything, or because the people who registered late were never in it, or because nobody told the room the suggestions existed.

Eight weeks out: ask the questions

Registration opens with the fewest fields you can live with. The interesting questions — direction, and the one specific thing they want — come later, framed as what decides who you put in front of them.

There is a whole guide on this: getting people to say what they came for.

Three weeks out: chase the quiet ones

You will have a third of the room who registered and said nothing. They are not disengaged — they are busy, and the form was not urgent when they filled it in.

One message, three weeks out, that says the people you get matched with are chosen from this, converts far better than any number of “complete your profile” reminders. Urgency comes from the date, not from your tone.

Two weeks out: run it, and run it again

This is the first moment most events get wrong. A slate generated once, early, is a slate that is wrong by the time anybody looks at it — half the room registered after it ran.

The engine should be rerun whenever the room changes, not once when the organiser remembers.

Two weeks out is when the list becomes useful enough to send people to. It is also far enough ahead that somebody can still book a flight around a meeting, which is the difference between a suggestion and a plan.

The week before: let people ask

Open meeting requests early enough that the good slots are still free. Everybody wants 11:00 on day one; nobody wants 16:40 on day two. Opening requests two days before the event means you have compressed a hundred negotiations into a window that cannot hold them.

Set a cap, and say what it is

A cap on meetings per person is not a limitation, it is a kindness. Eight twenty-minute meetings across two days is a full, good event. Twenty is a person who saw none of the programme and remembers nobody.

The morning of: the late arrivals

The second thing most events get wrong. Somewhere between five and fifteen per cent of your room registers in the last forty-eight hours, and at many events those people get no matchmaking at all — they arrive into a system that finished thinking about the room before they existed.

They are also, disproportionately, the people who decided to come because somebody told them it would be worth it. Failing them specifically is a bad trade.

• Rerun on the morning of day one, and again at the end of it.
• Make sure a late registrant's slate appears immediately rather than at the next scheduled run.
• Give the room a nudge on the morning of day two — the second-day slate is different, and almost nobody thinks to look.

On the floor: make the meeting easy to keep

• Somebody needs to know where to go. A meeting with no location is a meeting one of the two people misses.
• Both sides should be able to see the other's reason for meeting, not just their name.
• A thirty-second reminder of who this person is, read walking to the table, is worth more than a beautiful profile nobody opens.

The Monday after: ask while they remember

Ask both sides what came of each meeting, within about seventy-two hours. After that you get politeness rather than information, and politeness is worthless in a renewal conversation.

Two questions is the limit. Did it happen, and was it worth it. Anything longer gets abandoned, and an abandoned survey tells you nothing about the meeting and something depressing about your response rate.

What good looks like

• More than half the room has said something specific about why they came.
• Everybody has a slate, including the person who registered at 08:40 on the day.
• Most agreed meetings actually happen — and you know which did not, and why.
• Every exhibitor gets their own numbers, unprompted, in the week after.

B2Pair reruns the slate whenever the room changes, writes a briefing for each meeting to be read walking to the table, and asks both sides afterwards what came of it — which is what the post-event report is built from.

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