A good friend of mine gave me a copy of Bitch Magazine: A Feminist Response to Pop Culture.

Now, sometimes my reading gets a bit behind, so this issue is from 2004, but it had a great interview with Jennifer Abbot who co-directed The Corporation, a documentary critiquing corporate personhood.

The movie includes a discussion of how Ray Anderson, CEO of the world’s largest commercial carpet manufacturer, decided to focus his company on ecologically sustainable production.

To me, this shows the danger of the “don’t even talk to the bosses” approach of Jeffrey Shantz in We Are Everywhere.

We do need to talk to them. We do need to pressure them. Abbott tells us that “Anderson’s paradigm shift happened through pressure exerted by customers and employees–so the strategy of applying pressure on a corporation to be environmentally sustainable can have an effect. ”

It’s not the only strategy, but it’s a valuable one.

When you have an event, your energy and excitement peaks before the first guest walks in the door. By the time the event is over, you’re exhausted.

For your attendees, however, their energy peaks at and right after the event.

Here’s how it looks if you’re an organizer:

Your guests, however, have a different experience. It looks like this:

What does this mean?

First, it means that your attendees are most ready to take further action and to get more involved right after the event, right when your energy is at its lowest.

That means you need to plan your follow up before your event!

You have a golden opportunity to cement your attendees’ commitment to your cause immediately after it finishes. That’s when they will be most receptive to action alerts, fund appeals, or just a feel-good “thank you for attending” email.

So plan that follow up while your energy is high. Plan what you will do to keep in contact with your attendees. Create the infrastructure. Even draft the emails you will send out.

By the time you get back to the office after the event, exhausted as you are, you want to be ready just to do a very little bit of tweaking and data entry to get your follow-up to your attendees.

Follow-up is like gold for increasing commitment to your cause. Don’t lose that chance by neglecting to plan for what happens after your last guest goes home.