By Nettie Owens, CPO-CD · The Sappari Group

Originally explored on Wake Up Women Leaders — Episode 15

You have been to both. You know the difference the moment you walk in — or log on. One feels like you are showing up and checking the boxes. The other feels like something is happening for you.

The first kind has an agenda, a start time, and a room. The second kind has intention behind every decision — the space, the sound, the sequence, the moment people walk in the door to the moment they leave. The difference between the two is not budget. It is design.

In Episode 15 of Wake Up Women Leaders, Victoria Whitfield and I talked about what it actually takes to move from running events to designing experiences — why it matters, what it requires, and how any leader can do it regardless of venue or budget. This conversation is for anyone who gathers people — for any reason, in any format, in person or online.

Why Bother?

If you are going to take the time to invite people, plan the programming, invest the money, and do the follow-up then designing something worth all of that effort is a no brainer. An event that runs on time but leaves people feeling nothing is not a success. It is a missed opportunity with money on the table.

“If you are aiming to design an experience, your own experience in that event is going to be better — because you will be included in the equation as opposed to, oh, what’s the agenda so I can make sure we cram all this stuff in.”

Most event planning is organized around delivery: what are we covering, in what order, within what time limit. The leader is essentially a logistics manager. Designing an experience starts from a different place entirely. It starts with: how do I want people to feel when they walk out? And then works backwards from there.

Maya Angelou said it plainly, and Victoria quoted her during the episode: people do not remember what you said. They do not remember what you did. They remember how you made them feel.

If you have ever attended an event that you still reference years later, it was not because the agenda was efficient. It was because something in that room shifted how you thought, or who you connected with, or how you saw what was possible. That is an experience. That is what designing events as experiences produces — and it is entirely learnable.

It Does Not Require a Five-Star Budget

One of the most persistent misconceptions about designing events as experiences is that it requires an expensive venue or a large production budget. It does not.

“I think there is a misconception that in order to do this it has to be the world class spa or the five star hotel. Some of the best spaces that I’ve come across have been highly unexpected.”

Over the years I have delivered workshops in a garden, at a museum with windows overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, and at an arboretum where attendees could walk trails between sessions. None of those were luxury venues. All of them were experiences.

Victoria described transforming a corporate conference room at AT&T headquarters — the classic drab space, no windows, sad carpet, fluorescent lighting — into what attendees described as an incredible and unexpected experience. What she changed: the lights, the music, the background color on her slides, and a single salt lamp at the front of the room.

“People thought it was the most incredible, relaxing, stupendous, surprising experience. Oh my gosh, I wasn’t expecting that.”

That is the key phrase. They were not expecting it. The gap between what people expect and what they actually receive is where the experience lives. And you close that gap with intention — not with a bigger budget.

A few practical notes on space: when you are looking for venues, consider public or nonprofit spaces rather than defaulting to hotels and conference centers. These spaces are often designed with accessibility in mind, which matters. The best experience in the world falls short if a portion of your audience cannot fully participate in it.

The Sensory Foundation

Designing events as experiences begins before anyone opens their mouth to speak. It begins the moment a person walks into the space — and the signals they receive in that first moment set the tone for everything that follows.

Victoria introduced a concept you have probably never considered: nesting. “We nest like the birds and the bees. Create the nest around you that supports people feeling relaxed, open, and ready to engage with you, your content, themselves, and each other.”

The practical application of this is simpler than it sounds. Create the environment that would allow you to show up and deliver at your highest level — and that environment will likely serve your attendees the same way. The lights, the sound, the temperature, the arrangement of the room, the presence of natural elements where possible, the quality of the materials you hand out. These are not decoration. They are function.

Victoria made a point about over-delivering I want to call out because it gets misunderstood. “Over deliver doesn’t mean overwhelm your people. It means add some lovely sprinkles on top that will surprise people that they weren’t expecting to get.”

Fresh flowers on the table. A bonus Q&A. A handout that is genuinely useful rather than a printout of your slides. One small thing that signals you thought about them before they arrived. That is the difference between an event that was fine and one that people remember.

The Three Things Every Experience Needs

Beyond the sensory design, designing events as experiences requires three structural elements that most event agendas skip or under develop.

1. Connection. People need to interact with each other — not just receive content from the person at the front of the room. Whether you are running an in-person event or a digital one, build in moments for people to engage with themselves and with each other. Turn to a neighbor. Respond in the chat. Reflect on a question and share. Victoria put it directly: “You could be the greatest speaker of all time, but if you don’t get that person to talk to themselves as you’re speaking, they’re not going to have a valuable experience.”
   
   Connection is not a nice-to-have feature of a good event. It is what makes the content land. People learn through engagement, not just through listening.
   
   
   
2. Transformation. This word gets used a lot and often means nothing specific. Let me make it concrete. Transformation is change. A person arrives holding one perspective, one level of awareness, one way of seeing their situation. They leave holding something different. That change can be small — a single reframe, a skill learned, a decision made. But it should be intentional, designed, and trackable.
   
   The scientific process is the clearest framework I know for this. You have a hypothesis about what is possible for your attendees. You design a process — a sequence of steps — to move them from where they are to where you want them to be. You test it, refine it, and when it works, you repeat it exactly.
   
   “Once you have a hypothesis that you can prove creates a certain result, the process ensures that every time you deliver these steps in this way, you will get the same outcome.”
   
   Victoria added the gap analysis framing: get clear on where people are coming from and where you want them to go. That from-to is the transformation you are designing toward. And one of the most powerful things you can do is ask attendees to name it themselves — where are you starting from, and where do you want to go? Self-reflection builds perceived value in a way that even the best speaker cannot produce alone.
   
   
   
3. A clear next step. People who feel moved and have nowhere to go lose the moment. If the experience has done its work — if someone leaves feeling transformed, connected, and clear — they need to know what to do with that. Design the next step before the event starts, and communicate it clearly before people leave the room.
   
   
   

Where AI Fits — and Where It Does Not

“AI can plan an event, but we need YOU to design an experience.”

This is not an anti-AI argument. I use AI regularly and find it genuinely useful for research, logistics, outlines, and drafts. But designing events as experiences is not a logistics problem — it is a human problem. It requires knowing your specific audience, your own energy and strengths, what transformation you are capable of facilitating, and what the people in that room actually need. AI cannot answer those questions.

“You cannot rely on AI to design your event. This is where you get to be creative, where you get to put on your play hat, where you get to tap into yourself and think about what feels wonderful to you. AI cannot tell you that.”

There is also a subtler point worth making. AI conversations do not close. They expand indefinitely. Designing events as experiences requires closure — knowing when you have what you need and stopping. The anxiety that comes from an open-ended AI conversation pulling you in twelve directions is the opposite of the clarity you need to design something worth attending.

Use AI for what it does well. Use your own intelligence — and the people around you — for the rest.

The Boredom Trap

One more thing worth naming before we close, because it is a real and specific risk for creative leaders.

Once you find a process that works — a sequence that reliably produces the transformation you are designing for — do not change it just because you are bored with it.

“We as the leaders, we are also creative in nature. And so we will get bored with our own success — that was a great event, so I’m going to do a whole new thing next time. Whereas your people came in, they paid for that, they were like, that was great.”

Your attendees are not bored. They experienced it once. To them, it was new, it was meaningful, and they would come back for it again. The temptation to redesign a working process because you as the facilitator want a new creative challenge is real — and it is worth resisting. When you find the recipe, use the recipe.

Three Things to Do Before Your Next Event

1. Write one sentence describing how you want people to feel when they leave. Design everything backward from that sentence — the space, the sequence, the sensory elements, the close.
   
   
2. Build in at least one moment of genuine connection. Not networking. Not a structured icebreaker. A real human moment where people engage with themselves or each other around something that matters.
   
   
3. Define the from-to for your attendees. Where are they starting, and where are you taking them? Make that gap explicit — in your planning, in how you open the event, and in how you close it.
   
   

What’s Coming Next

In Episode 16, Victoria and I are talking about what happens when the budget blows up — because it does, and having a plan before it happens is the difference between a setback and a crisis. Join us Wednesday at 3:30pm ET.

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Nettie Owens, CPO-CD · The Sappari Group · sapparigroup.com · © 2026