Event networking experiences often revolve around the bar. Once those black-cloth topped carts roll out, it’s a signal to socialize and sip while doing it, often at the end of the day. For those who don’t drink alcohol, the bar cart can be triggering, and the timing of the networking, cumbersome.
It wasn’t until Laura Nelson was invited to speak at a women’s entrepreneurial conference on a wellness panel, that she realized she wasn’t alone in her perception of alcohol’s role in events. She casually asked the audience for a show of hands of people who consider themselves non-drinkers. A quarter of the attendees raised their hands in the room, though many raised theirs “hesitantly.”
“That was the first step in the direction of what I’m doing now, because I thought I was the only one who didn’t drink,” the sober advocate and professional organizational development expert says. “I stopped drinking and then went back on the road as a speaker, and I started to see what life was like on the other side as an attendee who doesn’t drink.”
Nelson went on to create Sober Life Rocks, a networking community of non-drinking professionals looking to connect with like-minded individuals, have access to resources and serve as ambassadors at the events they attend. To help kick off this movement, Nelson drew from her 15 years of experience as a professional speaker within the dental industry to pen the guide, “The Inclusive Event Planner: A Quick Start Guide to Planning Sober-friendly Conferences that Boost Attendance.”
The book is available free to download or purchase via Amazon. For Nelson, it’s all about starting the conversation among event planners, attendees and, most importantly, venues to rethink how we orient networking and food and beverage. And with sober-curious Gen Z rapidly influencing the landscape, it’s a timely topic. So, we sat down with Nelson to dig into the why, and the how, for event planners.
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Event Marketer: Tell us about your observations around alcohol in the events industry.
Laura Nelson: As a speaker, I go to events for connections, which often take place in the evenings with the black bars. After an hour, I found myself going back to my room because all we were really doing is standing around alcohol. I didn’t go back to my room necessarily because I was triggered. I went back to my room because there really wasn’t anything going on. The actual connections that I was making were kind of less than great because the alcohol was sort of fuzzing up the conversations, and it just wasn’t serving my need to be there, which was to connect with people. I’m an extrovert, I’m a speaker, I’m there to be involved in the meeting, be involved with the attendees, and I wasn’t doing it.
Having sticky, sweet mocktails or Coke and Sprite isn’t necessarily the solution. If you read the book from the beginning, you’ll see there’s only one chapter on the bar and one chapter on recovery and sobriety issues. The rest is about everything else that happens at the meeting because we use alcohol as a source of connection. And when you have a good percentage of people who don’t want the alcohol, what can we do to help people get connected and network better when they come to your event? Alcohol’s not going away, but maybe it doesn’t need to be the focal point.
What did you want to accomplish with the book?
You can choose what you do in your personal life and who you hang out with. But when you have to go to a conference, you don’t get a choice of who you’re hanging out with or what’s in front of you. And so, it can be very hard for some people. We are missing people who would be coming to your conference because they feel like it’s going to be so focused on alcohol. How do we set it up correctly so they feel safe before they come?
The second thing is, let’s look at the networking opportunities. Alcohol is used as a crutch. That’s why it’s become so normalized because it is awkward to walk in a room of a hundred people you don’t know. And everyone’s standing around and you think everyone’s drinking. There have been a lot of people who I’ve heard that started drinking again because they went to a conference, which is a shame. I think any meeting planner would be bummed out about that. What can we do for networking before or as they arrive? What can we do in the morning the first day? What can we do for meetups so that people feel connected?
In the guide, I tell examples of conferences I’ve been to this year where they tried but maybe fell a little short, situations that happened, and stories to give the meeting planner moments where they think, “I hadn’t thought of that.”
How about the role the venues play in this?
Many times, at conferences, the black bars that get pulled up at the events are run by food and beverage. The people behind the bar are not necessarily trained bartenders, and it’s a concern, because the idea of them potentially giving an alcoholic drink to somebody who is counting days and not realizing it is a risk, and then there is the risk and awkward nature in having to yell your non-alcoholic drink request over the bar with loud music playing.
We also have to wrestle with our venues to get more options than just hot coffee. You have to follow their minimums and formulas that have been in place for years, and the reason I think meeting planners have a role in this, is that we have enough planners who can raise their hand and say, we need better options.
Tell us more about the Sober Life Rocks Community.
The Sober Life Rocks community are folks who can help meeting planners execute some of these strategies or moments at their shows. We’re building it on LinkedIn. We have daily emails that go out, and we are trying to bring event and meeting planners, human resources, and sober professionals all together to have this discussion. For many people who have chosen not to drink for whatever reason, it’s not something that they advertise. But sobriety is one of the biggest accomplishments I’ve ever had in my life, and so I believe I should be proud of it and others should, too.
Photo credit: Emir Memedovski/iStock
