The Senior Living Innovation Forum (SLIF) wrapped up a couple of weeks ago. It was an incredible 3 days out in Santa Barbara, California full of social gatherings, educational and informational sessions, and opportunities for collaboration across all fields in the senior living industry. This is part two of our SLIF recap (part one is here) and we’ll be talking a bit about how this conference was different from some of the others we’ve been to.
A Common Goal
With no booths, there wasn’t any incentive to talk to people other than to connect with them and to talk about how to better the senior living industry. Shared idea generation and innovative solutions to the problems that we all face were key points at the conference, as well as focusing in on the push from younger generations to help elevate the industry. We were excited to see an authentic interest from others in learning, collaborating, and in seeing how their organizations could help improve the lives of seniors and their caregivers.
Social Gatherings
In between the educational sessions and presentations was where a lot of the magic happened. There were plenty of opportunities between dinners, happy hours, and other social outings to meet new people from all different fields including tech, design, construction, and more. The laid back atmosphere of the whole conference contributed to great conversations and connections.
Booth Traffic
It’s a common practice at other trade shows to see a lot of push from attendees to drive foot traffic to their booths. Often times, trinkets, coupons, and other small goodies will be offered to pull people in to chat about the attendee’s goods or services. SLIF was different in this way compared to some of the other conferences we’ve been to; there were no booths, no offerings, and a ton of opportunities to connect with other people.
We recommend going to as many conferences as you can, especially some of the bigger ones, even if it’s just to see what’s happening in the industry. While the others are great to go to, this one is a must. SLIF was our first time attending a conference like this as a supplier and although we were hesitant at first to make the financial commitment, we kept hearing from industry leaders and from members of our board about how much we would benefit from going; it was well worth the investment. We will definitely be in attendance next year and we urge you to look into meeting us there!
“It’s a conference I would highly recommend. I really appreciated the collaboration and wish that more conferences took on this ideal of community and shared innovation.”
-David Sawyer, CEO, TSOLife