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How to attract attendees to your conference

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Most of us are lucky enough to be able to look back on our formative years with a degree of affection.

As an example, there is currently a fascination with the 1980s and music from the likes of Wham!, the Smiths, Adam and the Ants and events such as Live Aid, which are remembered fondly in some circles.

As an aside, I was living in London during Live Aid and there is a long story of how we ended up with George Michael’s sunglasses in our flat – the ones he’d been wearing while duetting with Elton John just a few hours earlier – but I won’t bore you with that.

We tend to airbrush high unemployment, strikes, riots, the reasons behind Live Aid and the extended shadow of the Cold War out of that rosy picture of those times. My school’s response to the perceived threat from the east in the 80s was to allow the clever children to learn Russian, the rationale being – I kid you not – that if we were invaded they would be able to converse with their captors. That left the rest of us, who were forced to learn technical drawing, at a distinct linguistic disadvantage and facing the prospect of having to take on our enemy with nothing more than a set square and shatter proof ruler.