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Women In Touch did a conference last week (my client and church initiative), which I was heavily involved in. The thing that I always hear people repeat about WIT, believe it or not, does not major on the two ‘selling points’ of most Christian conferences which are the teaching and the music.

What I hear people saying about WIT and the Touch Conference is this: ”it’s just the whole experience.”

A compelling experience is the original word of mouth. Go back 6,000 years of documented human history, and you’ll find that what we’ve been recording ever since isn’t the boring stuff. It’s the compelling stuff.

Everything about this conference – from the little touches of décor, to the excellent teaching, and from the rebranding of the cafe to the ‘pitstop’, to the photos that were taken and then given away – everything was carefully building the overall experience. This is important. Because if experience is the eye of the beholder, and you are banking on the décor to provide the experience, then what about the non-visual person who doesn’t even notice the décor?

Therefore “it’s just the whole experience” is a better compliment than “the décor was great” because you know that you have hit multiple senses. A multi-sensory experience therefore gives your advocate multiple words for mouth. When they are talking to one friend, it is the teaching. To their musician friend, it’s the music. To their hurting friend, it’s the emotional benefit they received. To the lonely friend, it’s the friendliness.

Now I’ve just rememberd that my friend Olivier Blanchard actually wrote about word of mouth yesterday, so I’m not going to go on and on – just pop to his site and read up there.

But before you go, let’s just note a few things about the nature of compelling:

  1. Compelling is never mediocre, unless something was so mediocre it got you determined to do better.
  2. Compelling means the experiences induces a decision, which rouses that most precious human resource.
  3. Compelling inspires you to action, and your first action is to talk about it.