Extra! Interview with Jay Smethurst of Illumination Galleries

The Meeting Planners podcast source for what’s new and exciting in meetings and events industry!

Today Mike interviews Jay Smethurst from Illumination Galleries Jay shares some exciting creative tools utilizing graphic facilitation to keep your attendees learning and collaborating though the whole event!!

Also check out Jays Blog for some great information.

Mike McAllen of Grass Shack Events & Media http://www.grassshackroad.com/
Transcripts are here!
Mike McAllen: Welcome back to the Meetings Podcast. This is Mike McAllen with Grass Shack Events and Media and today on the show we have Jay Smethurst. Hi Jay.

Jay Smethurst: Hi there. Thanks for having me.

Mike McAllen: Thank you very much. We had our technical difficulties trying to get this together but we finally overcame and here we are. You are the director and illustrator at Illumination Galleries. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into the crazy meetings business?

Jay Smethurst: Sure. I stumbled out of college with a French and History Degree which was incredibly useful and stumbled into a small consulting firm and where we were doing a lot of meetings facilitation. So helping groups solve really complex problems using sort of highly collaborative methods. Two of us left the small company, boy, 11 years ago and started our own company to do the same thing even smaller and we’ve been doing that for about 11 years now.

Mike McAllen: Oh great.

Jay Smethurst: And one of the tools we use in these creative problem-solving kinds of sessions is visualization, meaning while groups are talking, we will diagram out their vision for the future or potential solutions for their problem, that kind of thing. So we use bid mark reports to draw their problems and it really helps groups understand what it is they’re saying. It helps them understand – it gives them a memory of the conversation they’ve had. So about 5 years ago, some of our clients started telling us, “Look, we have big client conferences every year and we put them in a really dark room and we talk at them for a couple of days. Can you bring something a little bit more creative and interactive from your smaller sessions into our big meeting?” So that was the birth of Illumination Galleries. Our clients really dragged us into the big meetings industry to try to make their meetings more interactive.

Mike McAllen: That’s a great idea. It’s a fantastic idea. So tell me, you know, what illumination gallery is and your role. So tell me more about it about what you would do at a typical event for a large event to do this.

Jay Smethurst: Sure. Illumination gallery …

Mike McAllen: That was a very long question, I’m sorry.

Jay Smethurst: … but there is a very definite nugget in there that we can focus on.

Mike McAllen: Okay.

Jay Smethurst: So what we do for a big conference is we actually send a team of illustrators to the event and send them into all the keynote sessions, the breakout sessions, panel discussions, any sort of customer feedback sessions or discussions and our illustrators will live and in real time create illustrations to capture the big ideas from each session. So instead of having all of the ideas back in all the breakout rooms, we pull all those idea boards, that’s what we call the illustrations, into a central place, into a gallery in the center of the event and then we surround that gallery with collaboration lounges. So it’s comfortable furniture, it’s a mark of boards, it’s tools to help people have these great hallway conversations that more and more people are saying, you know, that’s the real value for this conference.

So we create a sort of Grand Central Station in your foyer or in the hallways that allow people to have great interaction. Since more and more content from conferences is available online, the traditional presentation actually translates really well into the online world, meaning with the webcast or a podcast like this. What people are finding is that having the face of, you know, what’s different about the face to face interaction and what people are telling us is that it’s the hallway conversation. It’s that peer to peer learning that they get to have outside of the formal program. So to get the people to come to face to face events, we need to make those interactions much more robust and much more powerful and so our focus is creating these great interactions, focus on the content to help people learn more, meet people, and get more out of the event.

Mike McAllen: That’s amazing. It’s such a great idea. I had a client – I have a client for HP that used a graphic facilitator every year to – and they do – it’s just amazing how much more the people get out of it. So they do it – we have a graphic facilitator facilitate the whole meeting and then they hand them out, the same thing kind of the thing that the actual pictures, the images and they get so much out of it and this is a great idea. I hadn’t heard of this to get everybody in one room to talk about it all too. Well I guess it’s a milling area. It’s a milling area, that’s not the right word. What do you call it?

Jay Smethurst: It’s a high traffic area. It’s a …

Mike McAllen: A high traffic area, yes.

Jay Smethurst: … yes.

Mike McAllen: That’s hard when we do these interviews so early in the morning for me. I’m sorry but this is really fantastic. So why would somebody want to do this?

Jay Smethurst: Well like we were saying a little bit earlier, you know, there’s a real pressure on the meetings industry right now, the face to face meetings industry to justify why do we find people to these events. Why are we paying for a face to face event when we can, you know, push content in a fairly traditional way in the broadcast file using webcast and podcast and things like that. So we need to make face to face events more meaningful, more engaging and we need to leverage the strength of the face to face experience and that strength is not sitting people in the ballroom and talking at them, it is creating great interaction.

So for people who are struggling to justify, you know, getting [Indiscernible] [00:06:17] helping them create a meaningful face to face experience is what we’re all about and we really are specialized in great interaction. So we’re always looking for innovative tools, new approaches, anything we can to get people to have better conversations together is what we’re looking for.

Mike McAllen: That’s great because I always say that to my clients too. Engage the audiences somehow too. You can’t just sit there and kill them with the PowerPoint, you got to have different things.

Jay Smethurst: Our clients said to us, how many bullets does it take to kill a presentation?

Mike McAllen: So I said that, you know, I used graphic facilitators in the past or graphic recording because it has been around a long time. How is this different than the way it’s always been done?

Jay Smethurst: A couple of different things. One is that we really are using graphics facilitation or graphic recording as one of the tools to stimulate a conversation. So it’s not an end in itself. A lot of times if you use a graphic recorder, you’ll end up with a great visual record of the event but a lot of times it is not folded into the program. It’s not folded into the conference experience and you end up with a great product afterwards but what we’re doing is using this idea board as a way to stimulate and facilitate interaction during the event. So you get the benefit of traditional graphic facilitation and that this is a great record of the event. We can post these things live and online, it’s a great tool to engage virtual attendees as well and of course serves as a wonderful speaker gift [Phonetic] [00:08:10] but we’re also using the graphic facilitation as one of the tools.

And so getting people to engage in this village green [Phonetic] [00:08:22] in the center of the conference. We really like thinking of it as a Grand Central Station as a way to place to make conversations happen and the idea board is obviously a one big draw. It really attracts people to something. It’s content-driven. It is bright, colorful fun, it’s created in real time so people are very surprised by the graphic facilitation side of it but we’re also doing projecting the Twitter channel, the Twitter feed, the discussion going the back channel. We’re projecting photos of the participants as they are experiencing the conference. We’re projecting surveys and that kind of thing. So any tool we can to bring people into the space and support the conversations that are happening. It’s much more robust service than just the graphic facilitation.

Mike McAllen: Wow. That just sounds like there’s so much visually going on. It’s a great way to brainstorm on anything too.

Jay Smethurst: Yes.

Mike McAllen: It’s a great place to get in there to start talking about whatever. That’s fantastic.

Jay Smethurst: And that’s the other piece of it is the sort of collaboration lounge, you know, how many times have you been at a conference where you’re padding your pockets for something to – I really need to write this idea down. We want to create a place for – we use marker boards and comfortable furniture to accord people to sit and talk and the marker boards allow these spontaneous brainstorming conversations to happen. People can be standing there looking at an idea board and saying, you know, I was at this session and I heard this great idea. Someone else can say I was at a different session, go look at this idea board, let’s pull those ideas onto this marker board and talk about how this applies back at the office. So you can get people working on actual solutions or actual, you know, applications of the content that’s being presented at the event.

Mike McAllen: Very cool. So we talked a little bit about – because I came across the social media sort of thing, I think when you were at the WC, MPI’s WC. You did your take on the event. It’s all coming back to me now. So – and then I went to your blogs and so you guys were very involved with social media nowadays. It seems like you tell a little bit about what you’re doing with that – you said a little bit about Twitter feed. That’s interesting because you’re all about collaborating. So that’s what social media is about so …

Jay Smethurst: Absolutely. So we are – we’ve been learning ourselves about social media and that’s probably the first lesson that anyone who’s interested in learning a little bit about social media is you got to go out there and try it.

Mike McAllen: Yes [00:11:14].

Jay Smethurst: It really is about connecting with people. So we started with our blog which is IlluminationGalleries.com/blog, exciting enough and there we post you know, basically topics we think will be interesting for people. A lot of what we’ve been posting there is if we’re attending a webinar, we actually have about a 20-foot marker board in our office and I’ll just – well, since I can’t help myself to doodle during – any for a presentation, [Indiscernible] [00:11:52] to put formally. So I’ll use our marker boards to take notes of the webinars or webcasts of, you know, whatever the topic is and then I’ll write up a quick summary of what I heard in the presentation. I’ll take a photograph of the marker board and I’ll post that on our blog.

Mike McAllen: That’s very, very cool. I really enjoy that, your blog. I wish you would write on it more but that’s everybody’s blog that I like.

Jay Smethurst: Well, that was my big fear of starting a blog was sticking with it.

Mike McAllen: Yes.

Jay Smethurst: And that really is that sort of discipline of sticking with it is one of the critical success factors. I was just on a vacation for a week and so my blog has sat forlorn and …

Mike McAllen: Yes but I think with these things too. You just do – you know, people understand that too, you know. I mean, it’s not like the nightly news. It’s more of a thing, you know, especially when it’s kind of a personal one like yours is which I think that makes it really good is because it’s – you could tell it comes out – your personality comes out in it. I’ve never talked to you before but after reading it and then talking to you, you’re just like your blog kind of very informative and interesting and I’m not [Indiscernible] [00:13:10] your ass. I’m just saying …

Jay Smethurst: [Indiscernible]

Mike McAllen: … yes anyway, so is this a fun job? Are you having a good time at all of this stuff?

Jay Smethurst: This is a great job. For me it is – the juice for me is learning. In fact we struggled really hard to come up with a serious mission statement that sounded you know, good and corporate and we gave up on that. What we ended up with is cool projects with cool people and learn as much as you can.

Mike McAllen: That’s great. That’s kind of like our company, the same thing because we were trying to be all select good stuff and then we decide it. What do we want to do? Well, we really want to you know, being a grass jack [Phonetic] [00:13:50] somewhere in Maui and that was our plan. After 5 years, we were going to move to Hawaii but then yet, it’s been almost 8 years now and we’re still in Oakland, California.

Jay Smethurst: You know, time lines split. You’re still in California which isn’t too bad.

Mike McAllen: Well, you’re in Florida, right?

Jay Smethurst: We’re in Florida. We’re based in Orlando. Of course we do hardly any work here. We end up traveling around the country and have done a fair amount of work in Europe, China, Australia, in Moscow once that was pretty interesting. So we’ve gone all over the place.

Mike McAllen: Wow. Yes, I do a lot of events there in Orlando area.

Jay Smethurst: Wow.

Mike McAllen: There in Vegas of course and different places, the usuals but so tell me a little bit more about your organization. About how many people …

Jay Smethurst: We have a grand total of three people formerly in the organization but we are a network organization and we approach our events kind of like a film studio would meaning that we assemble the right team for the particular needs of the events and the client. So we can pull together illustrators with the right style or with the right content background.

Mike McAllen: That’s great.

Jay Smethurst: Most of our illustrators are actually come from the business consulting world. We found it more difficult to train an artist how to do this kind of thing than it is to give someone who has some of the content knowledge, the artistic skills to do this kind of work. And then we can pull together the people to do the technology side and depending on what the client wants. Are they – if their audiences are really, you know, Twitter savvy group or will they be intimidated by audience response systems or whatever it is. So we don’t have all that stuff on staff and in on overhead but we can call on it because we’ve built a great network over our 10 years of being a consulting firm as well.

Mike McAllen: That’s great. Yes, that’s basically seems like how companies are doing it nowadays in our industry anyway.

Jay Smethurst: Yes.

Mike McAllen: It’s kind of silly to have all those people when you can just call on the best people.

Jay Smethurst: Absolutely and it helps us innovative our service because each time you know, one of our – our mission statement is to work with cool people. We’re always on the lookout for more, you know, an interesting person with an interesting new twist or new angle or new approach that can challenge us to push our service to the next level and that’s you know, that was the other fun part for me is that you know, every event is different. Every client is different, every industry is different and yet you know, my job as the illustrator is to stand in front of a room with you know, 20 to 2,000 people looking at my back and standing with a marker and a blank piece of paper and come up with something interesting.

So there’s an excitement of you know, the live performance side of it is pretty fun but then I also have to reflect the content that’s being presented and more often than not, we don’t have a preview of the content, you know, we’ve been doing this for 10 years now. We’ve done everything from nuclear power conferences to investment conferences to education conferences, a lot of medical and finance field and it’s you know, it’s really kind of exciting to stand up there, try to incorporate some content back to an audience in a way that isn’t playful for them.

Mike McAllen: Wow. Yes. It sounds like it – well, I hope we get to work together sometime because …

Jay Smethurst: I hope so too.

Mike McAllen: … that sounds good with – yes. It’s a lot of my clients too for a production company. So why don’t you tell me – give me your contact info so people can get a hold of you if they want to hire you or just talk to you or there’s probably several different ways.

Jay Smethurst: Sure. The first, you know, more information is on our website, IlluminationGalleries.com. My contact information is Jay@illuminationgalleries.com and on Twitter, I’m Jaysmet, j-a-y-s-m-e-t. @jaysmet

Mike McAllen: Great and I’ll put those links all on the website. So if anyone is listening and they want to go the Meetings Podcast site, they can just go in and click to go to your site or to your Twitter or to your whoever.

Jay Smethurst: That’s great.

Mike McAllen: All right, Jay. Well, thank you very much for talking with me and I hope that we can talk again some other time if you ever want to do this again, if we can get it altogether.

Jay Smethurst: Absolutely.

Mike McAllen: All right. So thanks a lot, Jay and I’ll talk to you soon.

Jay Smethurst: I appreciate it. Thanks a lot.

Mike McAllen: Bye-bye.

Jay Smethurst: Bye.

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