- Brother and sister John and Andrea Lyons speak at the opening of TEDx Chatham-Kent.
Organizers of the recent TEDx Chatham-Kent are already looking to 2015; this year’s was that good, they say.
John Lyons, who along with Brandon Houston, Fannie Vavoulis and Peter Martin, put on the inspirational speaking event, said the organizing group was confident it would be successful, but just didn’t realize to what extent.
“Just having the TED name really helps. We were pretty confident we’d come close to selling out,” Lyons said. “None of us could picture, however, how well the event would go over. The speakers were excellent.”
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He said organizers knew they’d put together a solid list of people for the event. But the unknown was how well they’d speak and perform in front of the 100 people in attendance.
“You don’t know until you hear them talk, the quality of the speakers,” Lyons said. “There is an element of risk. But all of them just frigging knocked it out of the park.”
TED – which stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design – is a non-profit concept devoted to ideas worth spreading. It hosts large-scale speaker conferences, but also allows its named to be used with smaller events, such as the one held in Chatham.
To use the TED name, organizers must follow TED criteria, Lyons said. One of those was to limit tickets to the event to 100. Lyons thinks they could have sold two or three times that number.
“Hopefully next year, that will be the case,” he said.
Lyons said the organizers worked hard putting together a strong speaker list for this year. They also feared that in doing so, it might be hard to match that level in the future. But Lyons said they’ve added the networks of all the 2014 speakers to their knowledge base, and have a deeper talent pool from which to draw for next year.
He now sees 2014 as a stepping stone, of sorts.
“It blew away expectations. I hope it was our worst year. I can’t imagine it being better, but I just think it will be,” he said.
