Your Event Starts Before Anyone Walks In

Before any campaign goes live, marketers go through the same set of questions. Who are we talking to? What do they care about? Where are they in their decision? We build personas, define segments, map the audience. It's standard practice, and for good reason. You can't communicate well with people you don't understand.

Events work from the same starting point. Know your audience, design for them, then execute. The difference is that at some point before an event, the audience stops being hypothetical. Registration trickles in. Tickets sell. Confirmations arrive. The model you built becomes a list of actual people with actual names who have committed to showing up.

Most event organizers treat that moment as a logistics milestone. The best ones treat it as a design trigger.

In a recent With Wunder webinar, I sat down with Kimberly Chan and Linda Cajuste, the co-founders of My Creative Break. They've built something worth paying attention to: an events and team-building company that takes a room full of strangers and sends them home feeling like they've known each other for years.

What struck me in our conversation wasn't the activities, the themes, or even the improv exercises at the core of what they do. It was something Linda said almost in passing: "Even before you step into the event, we make sure we know who's going to be there."

At Some Point, the Audience Stops Being Hypothetical

Every marketer works from a model of their audience. You build a persona, study the segment, analyze past behavior, and make your best call about who you're designing for. It's educated work. But it's still a model, a best approximation of a real person, and it stays that way through most of a campaign's life.

Events have a moment when that changes. It doesn't always happen early. Sometimes you don't know the full room until a few days out. Open events sell tickets late. Invite-based events get confirmations in waves. But eventually, the list becomes real. You have names. You know who said yes. You have people who told you something about themselves when they registered.

What you do with that information is the question.

Kim and Linda start using it immediately. Before anyone arrives, they already know why each person is coming, what they're hoping to get out of it, and enough about who they are to make deliberate decisions about the experience. Who gets introduced to whom. Which moments need more structure for the quieter attendees. Where the energy will need a nudge.

The registration form, in their hands, is the first act of hospitality. Someone signs up and instead of receiving a confirmation number and a calendar invite, they're asked: what brings you here, and what do you want to walk away with? That question, asked before the event begins, tells the attendee something important about what they're walking into. This experience was built with you in mind.

Knowing Who's Coming Lets You Design for Them

There's a version of event planning that treats logistics as the whole job. Get people in the door, hand them a name tag, point them toward the drinks table, and let the night sort itself out. The registration form collects names and emails, and then it disappears into a spreadsheet.

Kim and Linda use intake as research. And the research informs everything downstream.

Linda described the approach directly: "How can we make them engage even before? How can we connect with them so they feel welcome and at ease?" The answer to that question shapes the structure of the event before the first person walks in.

"People really want to feel like the event was created with them in mind."
— Kimberly Chan, My Creative Break

The same principle applies to digital work. Your landing page is a registration form. Your first email is pre-event communication. Your onboarding flow is the moment someone walks through the door. Each of these is a design decision, whether you approach it that way or not.

Most campaigns start from the inside. Here's the offer, here's the message, here's the creative. The audience gets considered, but late, and usually in aggregate. A persona doing the work that a specific human being should be doing. What Kim and Linda do is move the audience conversation to the point where the information is real and there's still time to act on it. The discipline is the same whether you're planning a 30-person gathering in Montreal or launching a campaign to 30,000.

People Come Back to Events for the Connection

In-person events are back. The people showing up now are not the same people who showed up in 2019.

Several years of pandemic-driven isolation, followed by a wave of rushed "we're-back" events that tried to recapture something without updating the format, has left people with a finer filter. They know the difference between an event designed for them and one designed for optics. They're more willing to say so.

Linda was clear about this: people aren't just craving connection anymore. They want to go deeper. Not just "throw people together in a room." They want topics, formats, and interactions that let them connect around something real.

The traditional format, a keynote, a break, and a room full of people gravitating toward the same three faces they already know, isn't struggling because expectations got higher. It's struggling because people stopped pretending it was enough.

Kim made a point about smaller events worth carrying into any format: "The smaller the event is, the safer people feel." Intimacy is a design choice, not a consolation prize for low attendance. A small event forces you to think about individuals. You can't fall back on aggregate data when you've read why each person in the room signed up. You have to design for them specifically, and when you do, the gap between a well-designed experience and a generic one becomes obvious to everyone in the room.

The same filter is being applied to digital experiences. A generic drip sequence, a templated webinar, a landing page that leads with features without naming the problem: these are the digital equivalents of the name tag table. People walk in, look around, and feel like a number.

Running a campaign at scale doesn't mean abandoning the audience work. It means carrying it into every touchpoint. Whether you're designing for 25 people or 25,000, the question is the same: does this feel like it was made for the person receiving it?

The Experience Clock Starts Earlier Than You Think

There's no neutral moment before the experience begins. It begins at the first touchpoint.

The moment someone lands on your registration page, opens your first email, or hits your product sign-up form, they're already inside the experience. How you receive them in that moment tells them what's coming. A form that asks nothing says we don't need to know who you are. A form that asks the right question says we built this for people like you.

Kim and Linda have built a community that keeps growing because the people who attend don't just feel like they had a good evening. They feel like the experience was made for them. Those two outcomes produce different things. One produces a nice memory. The other produces word of mouth, repeat attendance, and a group that brings new people in without being asked.

"Thinking about what happens after your event is key to growing a community."
— Linda Cajuste, My Creative Break

The same holds in digital work. When a campaign or product experience makes someone feel genuinely understood, they don't just convert. They come back, they tell others, and they give you the benefit of the doubt when something isn't perfect, because they trust the intent behind it.

That trust gets built or lost before the event. Before the campaign lands. Before anyone walks in the door.

Final Thoughts

The most common mistake in event planning and in marketing isn't a weak idea or a poor offer. It's starting the design too late.

We put enormous effort into the experience itself and almost none into the moment before it. The invite. The intake. The first question we ask before anyone has committed to showing up. These aren't logistics details. They're where the foundation of trust either gets laid or gets skipped.

Kim and Linda didn't set out to give me a framework for digital marketing. They set out to build events where strangers feel safe enough to connect. But the principle travels. Know who's coming. Ask before they arrive. Let that answer shape everything that follows.