The first time I saw graphic recordings I could understand, I was blown away. As a university student who had attended many different conferences, I had seen these cute recordings around the conference room. But I never understood it.
Not until I went to the conference with MM, who was the graphic recorder for the Mac-Nels Conference.
The Mac-Nels Conference was an annual conference that brought together partners and associates from their NVOCC (non vessel operating common carrier) business. Different countries would share their annual reports and how they had done for the year.
I was hopelessly lost amidst all the discussions on shipping containers, and abbreviations like LCL (less than container load), FCL (full container load).
The graphic recorder for the day, MM (the shortened version of her name), came to my rescue. The work was valuable, and I wondered how much she was paid for it.
Later, during our conversation, she shared how much she was charging for it.
That was when I finally saw how grossly undervalued her work was.
If you’re reading this article today, you might be wondering what’s the market rate for a graphic recorder, and whether it’s worth the money.
Bear in mind, these are rates in more developed Asian economies like South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore.
The TLDR (too long didn’t read) version
| Option | Rates | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live graphic recording on paper, as shown below | Starts from S$2200 per day for less experienced graphic recorders, and up to $3000 per day for more experienced ones | Participants are often very engaged with such a process, and would look at the graphic recorder doing it on the side, whilst the conference proceedings are continuing. | It might be hard to share after the conference, beyond having the participants taking pictures of them |
| Virtual graphic recording (done remotely, and not on site) | Starts from S$1600 per day and goes up to S$1800 per day | Allows for the visuals to be shared after the event and for people to continuously learn even after the event | Participants may not be able to see the live process and the emcee has to continuously bring the visuals up in between breaks, which can be disruptive to the flow |
| Mix of both virtual and live graphic recording | Starts from S$3500 per day | It allows for a good mix of live engagement with participants looking at the recording happening on the side, whilst the key visuals are recorded and shared after virtually | Two recorders are needed to do this well, and thus the cost is increased |
What are you paying for?
You might look at those rates and think,
Wow. Those are high rates! What exactly am I paying for?
That’s a good question, and it was what I had at the back of my mind when MM initially told me her rates.
How could it be so much?
Here are three perspectives to take towards this idea of determining whether it’s worth paying that much for the graphic recorder’s fees.
The value of clear insights
Let me ask you a question.
| Item | Cost | Subtotal |
|---|---|---|
| Coffee, lunch and tea break for conference delegates | $50 per delegate, multiplied by 200 delegates | – $10,000 |
| 3 conference speakers, with fees averaging $3000 per talk | $3000 x 3 speakers | – $9000 |
| Â | Total costs | – $19,000 |
| Conference delegate fee ($250 per delegate) | $250 x 200 | +$50,000 |
| Â | Profit | +$31,000 |
If you were paying $50 per conference delegate for their lunch, coffee, and tea break, and you had 200 delegates, that would sum up to $10,000.
You might pay the conference speakers another $3000 each. Say you have 3 big speakers.
You have already spent $19,000.
Your conference delegates are going to judge the worthiness of your conference by how much insights they gain. Hold a boring conference where they don’t feel they have any actionable insights, and you would be dead. They will never come back.
Would it be too much to pay $2,200 for a graphic recorder to sharpen the insights shared?
During any conference, there will be a big number of insights. Especially if the keynote speaker is good.
You will have a big number of insightful points that listeners might be scrambling to take down and remember. If you’ve ever gone for a conference and thought at the end of it,
what exactly did I take away?
You have crystallised the problem of conferences. The fact that there’s too much information, and not enough done to collate and crystallise the insights, for clear action after.
Of course, some point out that you could just get an AI tool to summarise what was heard during the conference. Whilst AI can collect the information and summarise it, only humans can reshape it into something visionary and insightful.
This is what speaker Michael Port calls the Visionary Quest Matrix. Google and AI can definitely collect all the information better than humans. But only humans can shift that information from how-to, to how-to-think.
It is the thinking that humans are great at.
For example, at the Mac-Nels conference, the CEO Nicholas Er said a great number of things.
But what was most important was how he wanted to focus the conference on building strategy, and solving challenges. Highlighting this as the intent of the conference made it clearer for participants what they should look out for.
Whilst there was a great many things they could focus on over the 2 days, he directed the 150 attendees to focus on the twin pillars of building strategy and solving challenges. For example, amidst the falling rates of sea freight, they could have chosen to focus on how to raise rates. But they didn’t.
That is insight.
The value of engagement
I remembered sitting at one conference, wondering why I was wasting my time there. The speaker was going on and on about an esoteric part of technical Search Engine Optimisation, that felt like it had been ripped off a YouTube video.
I could read this on my own at home.
I saw other conference participants whipping out their phones, and beginning the doom scroll of boredom.
But if you look at a graphic recorder like MM above, you would quickly see that there are often many people that refer to the drawing of MM when there’s a lull in proceedings.
When the energy drops in the conference room, especially after lunch, that’s where a graphic recorder’s work can come into great effect.
It ensures that participants have somewhere else to focus their attention, rather than using it on the phone.
This is vital, especially for learning.
As humans, we have a cognitive bias called the primacy effect that leads us to overweight first impressions. That’s why if you have a poor first set of 3 opening speakers, you might end up destroying your conference.
It’s also why graphic recorders like MM can help to provide a useful uplift to an initial poor experience. Graphic recorders can listen out for the most important points, highlighting it so that listeners go,
ah, so that’s what I missed.
Some speakers can deliver badly, especially if they are not well trained.
Secondly, graphic recorders can also sustain continued engagement, even during the breaks.
During the Mac-Nels conference, I was surprised by how much engagement there was, even during the teabreak. These were times where participants could go outside to grab good tea and cake, but they just stood beside MM, closely admiring her work.
Building deeper discussions
As participants milled about the recordings, they also started to discuss them. They talked about the performance of their own individual countries, and the recording became a spark for greater insight.
During Mac-Nels’ conference, MM recorded the work of the Philipines, who were trialing an app and doing more work through social media. This was helping them to get an increased quality of leads, and this prompted other countries to think about how they could do that too.
Human wisdom never comes cheap
As we’ve done more and more of this work designing the insights of organisations and businesses, we’ve come to see that human wisdom doesn’t come cheap.
And in an age of artificial intelligence, some have come to the unfortunate conclusion that human wisdom is now a commodity that can be ‘created’ with a well-engineered prompt.
Sure, you definitely could. But bear in mind that ‘artificial intelligence’ is not a new thing.
We’ve had it since Google began auto-filling our search queries.
ChatGPT is now a more advanced version of an ‘auto-fill’, that can fill dozens of pages.
But thinking that it can give us new insights, is erroneous. ‘How to think’ is still the remit of humans.
And graphic recording continues to ensure that we are able to curate the best of human wisdom, and present it in a way that you can remember, and access for a long time, so that it continues to build a stream of actions you can use to drive your business forward.
That, is the true value of graphic recording.
