How to Make Summits and Events Neurodivergent Friendly

Why most summits fail neurodivergent attendees

Hi, this is Danielle, and this is Vae, and we have a summit coming February 19th through the 23rd, so we want to talk about how to make summits more neurodiverse friendly.

I’ve been to a lot of conferences in my adult life, as a teacher, as an administrator, as an ADHD coach, just things in the industry. And there’s lots of push to make things more neurodivergent inclusive, but I’m not seeing it practically applied. And there are some very easy things that people can do to make them more neurodiverse inclusive.

Part of why we’re doing this summit, and I’ve wanted to do it for a while, is because so many summits are aimed at psychiatrists and psychologists and therapists, or at parents. Just parents. There are very few summits that are informative, helpful, and cover everything for an ADHD adult. So many ADHD adults are finding themselves late diagnosed, and there just aren’t easy resources for them. Or they’re not affordable, because some of these conferences are massively expensive. I went to one last year that cost me, between the ticket and the travel, about $2,500.

And that’s just not accessible to most people. Even if you go to an online conference, where you can do a lot of accommodating for yourself, a lot of them are still really expensive, and you have to make your own accommodations, which means you’re missing things. You’re just not attending in a way that makes sense to you, or that you can process. So we decided, like most ADHDers, especially as AuDHD women: okay, let’s just do it ourselves.

Room access, streaming, and schedule gaps

Let’s talk about things you have seen at other conferences that could have easily been made neurodivergent friendly. One: being able to know for sure I can get into a training that I want to get into. You go to a training, the room gets full, you can’t get in. Or the room is so overly crowded that there is no being able to focus, no being able to overcome anxiety to be in the room, no room to move, no room to take notes.

From a teacher perspective, because teachers do a lot of trying to fit people into rooms and make it a better learning environment, from an organizational standpoint there needs to be accessibility to every single talk. If the rooms are small, can you stream them somewhere, so people can go find a comfortable spot and watch? Are they just chairs in a room, or are there chairs and a table or a desk, where people have something to lean on so they can take notes?

And then, time management wise, is there enough time to move from one lecture to another and make it there on time? I saw a lot of people leave lectures early only because they were trying to get to another lecture they really wanted, scheduled right up against it. So there’s anxiety because you’re going to leave early and people are going to look at you. And when you get to the next lecture, you’re probably going to be a little bit late, and people are going to look at you again. Those things can be very easily fixed with some simple scheduling and the possibility to stream.

And look at your rooms. I get it, you have all these lectures scheduled and you don’t know which ones are going to be the big attended ones. But that’s where your streaming option comes in. If you have 5,000 people in attendance, you need to plan for the worst case scenario, that everybody in the world is going to like one speaker.

Sound quality and buggy conference apps

In the same vein, make it auditory. There were so many rooms where, even though they had microphones, you could not hear well. The sound quality was terrible, the volume was terrible. And I’m a sound person: there is no excuse for that at all. For 50 bucks I can make the sound better in pretty much any room. And I don’t care what kind of conference I’ve been to, that’s been a problem at every single one.

Also, don’t have the goofy apps. So many conferences are using apps now that don’t actually work. I have been to so many conferences with these apps, and none of them have ever worked correctly. They’re super buggy. They’re trying to put a community aspect in, they’re trying to put all this stuff in, and I get what the overall goal is, but the vehicle they’re using to get you there is crap. As somebody who has a tech background: start a LinkedIn group for the conference so people can connect there. That’s your promo before the conference, your promo during, your promo after. There’s so much available right there, and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Audio-only recordings are not accessible

The other part of this: provide recordings. Video recordings. An audio recording, for neurodivergent people, is not enough. I need to be able to see somebody move. I’ve got to be able to see what is up on the screen. Even if I can’t see the slide fully on the video because of the angle, that’s why you have the slides available for download, so I can download the PDF. But having a good reference point, to see, oh, it’s this slide, I’m on track, I’m in the right place, helps so much.

Just having audio after a conference as follow-up? I’m never buying those again, because I’ve learned over time I’m just never going to listen to them. I’m not going to get anything out of them, so there’s no point.

You have to really think about what your goal is for putting on this conference. Are you trying to get information into people’s hands, or are you trying to make money? I think a lot of people can’t figure out which. And I’m all for people making a profit, but if you’re going to make a profit on me, I want stellar service. I want to be able to go to whatever lecture I want. I want the sound to be good. I want your vendor hall to be good. I want things to be convenient and well planned. For many neurodivergent people, we see when things are not as they should be. Everybody does, but it grates on us to a degree.

What a real low sensory room looks like

So think in your five senses. How does it look? How does it sound? How does it feel? What is the energy of the conference? Are there real places to go for low stimulation? If people are overstimulated, is there a low sensory room? Because I’ve been to conferences that say they’ve had a low sensory room, but it is just an empty room. There aren’t even chairs to sit in. A high school teacher could come in and make it so much better: put headphones and charging cords in there, and some tables, so people could sit and listen to music or color.

And have earplugs provided. Do you want to know how many of us forget to bring our earplugs? It happens. We’ve lost them in the luggage, we can’t find them. Having earplugs available, even the goofy little foam ones that from a sensory standpoint drive me insane, when I’m overstimulated, I’ll take it. Cold water to drink. A coffee pot. A table and a charging station. I’m somebody who has put on conferences: it’s not a big investment.

We also need a good literal map of where everything is, and the walking distance. If you’re in one of those big conference centers or hotels, what’s the average walking time between sections? There needs to be a map like that, and there needs to be an agenda. Come on, people. If I have to constantly dig through all this information, you’re going to trigger enough anxiety that by the second day I’m going to stop going to lectures and hang out in the hall. And there may be one that I really, really want to see, and against all odds I get myself there, and guess what? It was full, and I couldn’t go in. So again, I went in the hall and networked. That was great, but the information this conference was trying to put in people’s hands was not accessible.

Offer an online option, people need it

And unfortunately, most conferences afterward just give you the audio files, with all the background noise in them, not produced, and no transcriptions either. I know a lot of this comes down to dollars and cents. But tell people: these are the things we’re going to provide for you, and this is where the cost is. I’m telling you, people will pay for that.

Also have an online option. If you’re already doing high quality recordings, you should be able to allow people the online option. There are people that are sick. There are people that are immunocompromised. There are people that cannot handle crowds of that size. Danielle wasn’t supposed to go to the last one we went to, because she was immunocompromised, but she was stubborn and still went. If there had been an online option, I would have gotten to attend everything. And even if there wasn’t an online option, if I had the option to buy all of the videos, I would have paid almost the same amount again to get access to every single video. But like most conferences, they only provided audio files.

I don’t know that there is an industry out there that has figured this out. It’s a big undertaking, and they farm it out to event planners, and the people putting on these events are not doing it with the neurodivergent person in mind. It’s a great product, but it’s one-size-fits-all, and neurodivergent people don’t fit in that category.

How we built our summit differently

So what are some things we are doing for our conference to make it as neurodivergent friendly as possible? One: the women organizing it. There isn’t a person on my team who’s not neurodivergent. That is a big plus. Two: we created a form for every speaker to fill out with all of the information, asking the exact questions we wanted, and then gave them a scheduling link to book their time, to make it super easy. Not some randomized thing.

Then, every speaker is getting their recordings. When you speak as a speaker, you very rarely get that. That was disappointing at the last conference I attended: the person putting on the presentation paid for their own ticket, paid their own way, had all those expenses, and then didn’t get a recording of their own presentation. At the very least, they should have had that.

We’re new. This is our first year putting this on, and we couldn’t afford to pay our speakers, which bothers me, because I think every speaker is absolutely worth their value. So as the event provider, we’re providing the system, and we are splitting profits on the paid tickets. We have a free ticket and a paid ticket, and we’re splitting the profits 50/50 with every speaker, because we want to see the speakers get value out of it. Two, the speakers are all going to get access to the email list at the end of this conference. And three, they’re getting access to their videos. We are recording every speaker’s video, and we are giving them access to their own videos with a transcription and a summary.

We don’t think we’re going to do this insanely perfectly the first time, but we’re open to feedback, and we’ll fix it. If there’s something we didn’t do, or a technical glitch, we are actively trying to fix it and make it inclusive for everyone. Because guess what? We’re neurodivergent. We need certain accommodations ourselves, and if we need them, someone else needs them. Maybe if it gets bigger, we’ll tackle a centralized in-person location, and that will bring on a bunch of other things to consider. But we build it really well online first, and make it super accessible.

Pricing it so people can actually attend

Then the price. That’s the other problem. At some of these places, it’s almost as much to buy the recordings as it is to attend the conference. We tried to make even the free ticket as accessible as possible. And you’re like, but it’s free, of course it’s accessible. No. The free ticket is inside a Facebook group, we’re going live, and free attendees will have access to everything for seven days after the conference. Honestly, maybe a little longer, between when the neurodiverse girls who are exhausted after the conference eventually get around to pulling them down. And even the free attendees can grab the transcripts, so even though they won’t have the videos forever, they can keep the transcripts. Then we have a paid version, which is just $47 for lifetime access, with a few other bonuses, because we want to make it accessible.

Part of how we’re making this super accessible is that there isn’t a person speaking who isn’t neurodivergent themselves. Yes, we have a few therapists speaking. They are neurodivergent therapists who work with neurodivergent people. We went to experts, people you all know and trust, not random misinformation people, people who are actually good at what they do and very knowledgeable. Because we aren’t speaking at you. We are speaking to you, and showing you that it’s possible as an ND person to thrive with ADHD.

That’s the name: the Thrive with ADHD Summit. Because so many neurodivergent people have a tendency to sink into themselves. They become a silo, a lone person on an island. And there are so many of us that, if we would just look around and communicate a little bit more, or have someone organize things like this, we’d find other people, and go, “Oh gosh, I’m not alone.” That, for me, is worth so much.

Workplace accommodations, parenting, and coaching for your day job

We have people speaking on so many different things. We have speakers coming in about being neurodivergent in the corporate workplace, talking about interviewing techniques as an ND person, and somebody else on requesting workplace accommodations. We expect adults to come in who just need help in their day jobs, and we’ve got two people speaking on that, and they’re both fantastic. We’ve got Posha Marlo, who is amazing and talks about neurodiversity in the workplace and how to make things ND friendly, and Dr. Jessica Hicksted talking about how to request those accommodations. We have people talking about parenting an ND kid, and being an ND parent with ND kids.

And we’re going to be talking about how people working in the corporate world can benefit from having an ADHD coach. So many people look at ADHD coaching as this weird entrepreneurship side thing. But if you have a full-time job, having support for you as an ND person can help you with the things you need every day, whether you work in the corporate world, the small business world, or you’re a plumber working in the trades. Having a coach on your side can help you be more successful in your day job.

I tell people all the time: you come to a coach, we’re not going to unpack your emotional baggage about everything, because that’s what a therapist does. But if you need to know how to shoot a layup, I’m going to teach you how to shoot it, then we’re going to practice it, and then you’re going to put it in a game. So no, I’m not literally teaching layups. I’m going to teach you what kind of coping skill you need to work with your ADHD, then we’re going to practice it, then you’re going to put it into action in your life, and we’re going to talk about it. That’s why I think coaching honestly offers a lot of people more immediate relief on the things that are overwhelming us.

Our mission is to bring ADHD coaching and thriving-with-ADHD support down to a level that can be available to most everyone. The summit folds right into that: a free ticket, a $47 ticket, and making it possible for the speakers to earn money doing something they rarely get paid for. So many people look at ADHD coaching as this unreachable thing, and it doesn’t have to be.

You’re not alone, whatever is going on. Whether it’s the mountain of laundry that’s currently on my couch, and probably on yours, or the mile-long to-do list you can’t seem to tackle, we can help. Remembering to have breakfast. Remembering to send that email. Overcoming the anxiety and the RSD and the executive dysfunction to send that email. We understand, because we deal with it every single day. And in true neurodivergent fashion, we can fix other people’s problems. We can problem solve. We just have trouble fixing our own. That’s why sometimes I call Danielle and say, “Hey, coach me on this for five minutes.” It’s why I surround myself with coaches. I need them as much as they need me.

So I hope you join us. If you have questions, or if you would like to put on a summit and would love advice on how to do that for ND people, DM us. We can absolutely help. I have done very large tech conferences in the past, so I know how to do it, and a couple of the people speaking would be fantastic resources too. Ask a ton of questions and build a summit that is really open, diverse, and inclusive for everyone. That’s what it’s all about: making sure as many people can participate as want to, and as many people have access to the information as want it. It’s not all about having great speakers. What your conference is really about is the results the attendees get. We hope we can help you do better, have better, and expand what you’re able to do. And when you’re able to expand who you can include, you can make more money at it, so it does become a money thing in the end. You’ve just got to put in the effort.

We hope you attend the Thrive with ADHD Summit, February 19th through the 23rd. There’s a link below this video so you can get access. And if you have any questions, DM us. We’re always happy to answer. Have a good one, everybody.