Effective event: Top tips for getting the most out of 2025’s Biba Conference

1. Dedicate time for yourself

Conferences often have a carefully curated content agenda that is set up for attendee learning, so it is up to you to make the most of planned sessions for your own educational and personal gain.

Therefore, it is well worth carving out time and blocking out your calendar to ensure you can get to all the sessions you want to, leaving time for additional meetings around the conference’s timetable – you can move a meeting, but you cannot move the conference content.

2. Utilise downtime

It may be a cliché, but there’s a reason why so many deals get made on the proverbial golf course.

Why not schedule a lunch meeting, with an honest intention to eat together and see where the conversation leads? Or arrange a catch up over a coffee break, to make the most of time that would otherwise be spent alone.

Personally, I like to use downtime to get some fresh air and go for a walk – often inviting someone else along to engage in a catch up conversation too.

3. Diarise everything

This really helps when you have a jam-packed itinerary.

If you are planning an ad-hoc wander around the venue, then put it in the diary as exactly that. If you know you will need a coffee break to top up your caffeine levels, then putting it in your calendar makes you much more likely to actually get one.

Using your calendar in this way shows you have respect for your time and dedication to arranging your schedule, but also enables flexibility if something urgent does come up.

4. Bring a ‘survival kit’

Think mints, throat soothers, blister plasters, vitamins and business cards, for example.

We put our bodies through a lot at these events, so I find it very useful to have a conference tool kit to help me push through a busy agenda.

Often, my meetings and events take me into an evening meal or beyond and I’ve reached an age where a pack of heartburn tablets has become the number one essential.

5. Answer surveys

Hearing feedback on events is extremely helpful to the organiser and you would be surprised how much credence is given to discussing this feedback in debriefs and planning for subsequent events.

Ultimately, it comes down to this – if you are planning to attend the event again in the future, why not let the organiser know how to make it better suited to your needs?